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cottier, who gave me potatoes and milk, and to whom I gave a hundred
guineas after, when I came to visit Ireland in my days of greatness.
I wish I had the money now. But what's the use of regret? I have had
many a harder bed than that I shall sleep on to-night, and many a
scantier meal than honest Phil Murphy gave me on the evening I ran
away from school. So six weeks' was all the schooling I ever got.
And I say this to let parents know the value of it; for though I
have met more learned book-worms in the world, especially a great
hulking, clumsy, blear-eyed old doctor, whom they called Johnson,
and who lived in a court off Fleet Street, in London, yet I pretty
soon silenced him in an argument (at 'Button's Coffeehouse'); and in
that, and in poetry, and what I call natural philosophy, or the
science of life, and in riding, music, leaping, the small-sword, the
knowledge of a horse, or a main of cocks, and the manners of an
accomplished gentleman and a man of fashion, I may say for myself
that Redmond Barry has seldom found his equal. 'Sir,' said I to Mr.
Johnson, on the occasion I allude to--he was accompanied by a Mr.
Buswell of Scotland, and I was presented to the club by a Mr.
Goldsmith, a countryman of my own--'Sir,' said I, in reply to the
schoolmaster's great thundering quotation in Greek, 'you fancy you
know a great deal more than me, because you quote your Aristotle and
your Pluto; but can you tell me which horse will win at Epsom Downs
next week?--Can you run six miles without breathing?--Can you shoot
the ace of spades ten times without missing? If so, talk about
Aristotle and Pluto to me.'

'D'ye knaw who ye're speaking to?' roared out the Scotch gentleman,
Mr. Boswell, at this.

'Hold your tongue, Mr. Boswell,' said the old schoolmaster. 'I had
no right to brag of my Greek to the gentleman, and he has answered
me very well.'

'Doctor,' says I, looking waggishly at him, 'do you know ever a
rhyme for ArisTOTLE?'

'Port, if you plaise,' says Mr. Goldsmith, laughing. And we had SIX
RHYMES FOR ARISTOTLE before we left the coffee-house that evening.
It became a regular joke afterwards when I told the story, and at
'White's' or the 'Cocoa-tree' you would hear the wags say, 'Waiter,
bring me one of Captain Barry's rhymes for Aristotle.' Once, when I
was in liquor at the latter place, young Dick Sheridan called me a
great Staggerite, a joke which I could never understand. But I am
wandering from my story, and must get back to home, and dear old
Ireland again.

I have made acquaintance with the best in the land since, and my
manners are such, I have said, as to make me the equal of them all;
and, perhaps, you will wonder how a country boy, as I was, educated
amongst Irish squires, and their dependants of the stable and farm,
should arrive at possessing such elegant manners as I was
indisputably allowed to have. I had, the fact is, a very valuable
instructor in the person of an old gamekeeper, who had served the

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