ADVERTISEMENT.[1]
THE Reader is desired to take notice, That by Letterees[2], are meant persons restored to Land by virtue of the Letters of King Charles the Second; and by Nominees, such persons are intended, as were restored to their Lands by being named in the Act of Settlement; and Papists per Proviso, were such as had Provisoes in that Act for their Lands: And by the 49 Officers, are meant such Commission-Officers under the King, who served in Ireland before the year of our Lord, 1649.
The following Treatise of Sir William Petty's Political Anatomy of Ireland, is Printed after a Copy Transcribed from the Original, writ by the Author's own hand[3]; and all
- ↑ The Advertisement is not in S, and only the first paragraph of it is in the ed. of 1719.
- ↑ The term 'letterees' is sometimes confined to those Irish who obtained the King's letters of restitution in the early months after his Restoration and were put out again by the Act of Settlement. Such Irish as were restored at the King's first return, by letters patent of which 'mero-motu' was a phrase were called 'mero-motu men'. Their patents, if obtained before the Declaration of Settlement, 30 Nov., 1660, were confirmed by the Act of Settlement; if obtained after that date, they were voidable. Russell and Prendergast, The Carte MSS. in the Bodleian Library, 193.
- ↑ It is probable that Southwell brought about the printing of the Political Anatomy in 1691, and it is not impossible that the book was then printed from his MS. ('S'). S is, beyond question, 'a copy transcribed from the original writ by the author's own hand." Moreover the footings of columns of figures in S are reproduced at two points in the 1691 edition (see note 3, p. 143, and note 4, p. 145) where no editor acting independently of S would have thought to insert them, while, on the other hand, the differences between S and that edition may be sufficiently accounted for as the slips of a not over-careful printer. S, however, is still very clean. If from this circumstance we infer that it never lay upon a printer's case, we shall be forced to assume an original holograph, now lost, from which one copy, S, was made for Southwell, and another copy, likewise lost, was made for the printer. Even upon this supposition the Southwell MS. must be held to be of authority, since it bears Petty's autograph corrections.
