Letter 2992

Hutchinson thanks Sloane for his last letter. He hopes his mission in Ireland ‘will help them better in judging religion’. He does not understand what happened to the Irish, for ‘Historians do say [it] was once rather forwarder than others in Learning’. He heard that Mr Lhuyd published a second volume of his dictionary. Francis Hutchinson was the Perpetual Curate of St James’s Church in Bury St Edmunds. In 1720 he became the Bishop of Down and Connor in Ireland. He was a historian and wrote ‘Defence of the Antient Historians’, published in 1734 (Toby Barnard, “Hutchinson, Francis (1660-1739):, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, Jan 2008 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/14282, accessed 13 June 2011]).