Having, out of friendship for the family, upon whose estate, praised be Heaven!  I and mine have lived rent-free time out of mind, voluntarily undertaken to publish the memoirs of the Rackrent family, I think it my duty to say a few words, in the first place, concerning myself.  My real name is Thady Quirk, though in the family I have always been known by no other than ‘Honest Thady,’ afterward, in the time of Sir Murtagh, deceased, I remember to hear them calling me ‘Old.  Thady,’ and now I’ve come to ‘Poor Thady’; for I wear a long greatcoat winter and summer, which is very handy, as I never put my arms into the sleeves; they are as good as new, though come Holantide next I’ve had it these seven years:  it holds on by a single button round my neck, cloak fashion.

[The cloak, or mantle, as described by Thady, is of high antiquity.  Spenser, in his view of the state of Ireland, proves that it is not, as some have imagined, peculiarly derived from the Scythians, but that ’most nations of the world anciently used the mantle; for the Jews used it, as you may read of Elias’s mantle, etc.; the Chaldees also used it, as you may read in Diodorus; the Egyptians likewise used it, as you may read in Herodotus, and may be gathered by the description of Berenice in the Greek Commentary upon Callimachus; the Greeks also used it anciently, as appeared by Venus’s mantle lined with stars, though afterward they changed the form thereof into their cloaks, called Pallai, as some of the Irish also use; and the ancient Latins and Romans used it, as you may read in Virgil, who was a great antiquary, that Evander, when AEneas came to him at his feast, did entertain and feast him sitting on the ground, and lying on mantles:  insomuch that he useth the very word mantile for a mantle—­

“Humi mantilia sternunt:” 

so that it seemeth that the mantle was a general habit to most nations, and not proper to the Scythians only.

Spenser knew the convenience of the said mantle, as housing, bedding, and clothing:  ’IREN.  Because the commodity doth not countervail the discommodity; for the inconveniences which thereby do arise are much more many; for it is a fit house for an outlaw, a meet bed for a rebel, and an apt cloak for a thief.  First, the outlaw being, for his many crimes and villanies, banished from the towns and houses of honest men, and wandering in waste places, far from danger of law, maketh his mantle his house, and under it covereth himself from the wrath of Heaven, from the offence of the earth, and from the sight of men.  When it raineth, it is his penthouse; when it bloweth, it is his tent; when it freezeth, it is his tabernacle.  In summer he can wear it loose; in winter he can wrap it close; at all times he can use it; never heavy, never cumbersome.  Likewise for a rebel it is as serviceable; for in this war that he maketh (if at least it deserves the name of war), when he still flieth from his foe, and lurketh in the thick woods (this should be black bogs) and straight passages, waiting for advantages, it is his bed, yea, and almost his household stuff.’]