Description: Narcissus Marsh (1638-1713) was an English clergyman who spent his later life in Ireland, initially as Provost of Trinity College, Dublin, and ultimately as Archbishop of Armagh. Despised by Jonathan Swift for his pietism and timidity, his achievements as churchman and scholar were impressive. Marsh's recollections, begun in 1690 and continued in diary form up to 1696, are by no means the pious platitudes of a conventional seventeenth-century clergyman. With sometimes startling candor, he recounts dreams and anecdotes revealing his struggle against worldly temptations, his resolute rejection of prospective wives, and his preoccupation with science, music, and the defense of learning in the anarchic context of Williamite revolution. The religious and political contexts are meticulously reconstructed in the editor's introduction.

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