Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900/O'Brien, Henry
O'BRIEN, HENRY (1808–1835), antiquary, born in 1808, was a native of co. Kerry. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, where he graduated B.A. in 1831. In 1832 he wrote a dissertation on the ‘Round Towers of Ireland’ for the prize offered by the Royal Irish Academy. He did not gain the prize, but was awarded a small gratuity. In 1833 he published a translation of Villanueva's ‘Phœnician Ireland’ (8vo), with an introduction and notes, which were ridiculed as fanciful in the ‘Gentleman's Magazine,’ 1833 (pt. ii. pp. 340 f.), In 1834 he published ‘The Round Towers of Ireland; or the Mysteries of Freemasonry, of Sabaism, and of Budhism [sic] for the first time Unveiled,’ London, 8vo. The object of this work (which was the prize essay enlarged) was to show that the round towers are Buddhistic remains. The book was condemned as wild and extravagant in the ‘Gentleman's Magazine’ for March 1834 (p. 299; cf. ib. October, pp. 365 f.), and in the ‘Edinburgh Review’ for April 1834 (vol. lix. pp. 146 ff.). The Edinburgh reviewer was Tom Moore (Moore, Diary, vii. 31). O'Brien, in a correspondence, accused Moore of appropriating his discoveries in his ‘History of Ireland.’ Father Prout, a warm friend and reckless admirer of O'Brien's ingenuity, also retaliated on Moore in his ‘Reliques.’
O'Brien was at one time tutor in the family of the master of the rolls, and was for some years a regular reader at the British Museum. He was a man of excitable temperament, who imagined himself the author of profound discoveries. He talked of compiling in six months a dictionary of Celtic, a subject of which he then knew nothing. He announced, but never published, ‘The Pyramids of Egypt for the first time unveiled.’ He died on 28 June 1835, aged 27, being found dead in his bed in the house of a friend, The Hermitage, at Hanwell, Middlesex. He was buried in Hanwell churchyard. A fanciful sketch of him lying on his death-bed (by Maclise) appears in Father Prout's ‘Reliques.’
[Gent. Mag. 1835 pt. ii. p. 553; Father Prout's Reliques, 1859.]