Life
fl.1689; author of The Irish Hudibras, or Fingallian Prince (1689),
a satire on the Irish described by John Colgan as ‘this deservedly
scarce work’ and quoted by him with expunged lines; first edn. held
in National Library of Ireland. PI.
Works
Virgilius Maro Publius [pseud. James Farewell], The Irish Hudibras
or Fingallian Prince, Taken from the Sixth Book of Virgil’s Aenæids,
and adapted to the Present Times (London: R. Baldwin 1689), 156pp.,
8o.
Criticism
Russell Alspach, Irish Poetry from the English Invasion to 1798
(1959), pp.39-42.
Alannah Hopkin, The Living Legend of St Patrick (NY: St. Martin’s Press 1989), pp. 116-17.
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Seamus Deane, gen. ed., Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, (Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol., 1, p.439 [The Irish Hudibras or Fingallian Prince, Taken from the Sixth Book of Virgil’s Aenaeids, and adapted to the Present Times (London 1689), 3rd version of a 17th c. poem (elsewhere called ‘The Fingallian Burlesque’) which parodies Bk. VI of Virgil’s Aeneid in an Irish setting; belongs to Williamite period; set in Fine Gall [Finis Galliae], Fingal, north of Dublin, it adapts the story of Aeneas’s descent into the underworld to an Irish context and depicted an English sense of Ireland and appeals to English expectations of Irish custom and behaviour; FDA ed. Bryan Coleborne further remarks that the poem creates characters and events equivalent to the original and hence explores the use of parody as a form of satire on the native Irish. Extract at FDA1, 439-40.
National Library of Ireland holds a first edition copy of The Irish Hudibras; or, Fingallian Prince (1689).
Farewell’s poem is not to be confused with "The Irish Hudibras",
recte, Hesperi-Neso-Graphia, or a description of the Western Isle (Dublin 1724), by Moffett, or by Jones [RX].
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)