"Attamen audendum est, et veritas investiganda, quam si non omnino VOL. I. DUBLIN: PRINTED BY GRAISBERRY AND CAMPBELL, FOR JOHN CUMMING, AND NEARY MAHON, DUBLIN ; LONGMAN, HURST, TO THE RIGHT HON. ROBERT PEEL, CHIEF SECRETARY OF THE LORD LIEUTENANT, &c. &c. &c. SIR, ON laying before you the first volume of the Statistical Account of Ireland, permit me to take the opportunity of expressing my grateful acknowledgments for the liberal and zealous encouragement, with which you have honored me in the prosecution of this work. However sensible I might have been of the great advantages to be derived from a compilation containing accurate and authentic details of the present state of Ireland, I could not but be equally impressed with a consciousness, that such an undertaking was a task too weighty for the exertions, however well intended, of an |