Quarto. [8], 152pp. The first leaf is blank except for signature-mark 'A' in a woodcut. Recent red half-morocco, red cloth boards, lettered in gilt to spine. Minor shelf-wear. Marbled endpapers, internally clean and crisp.

The first edition of a controversial polemic by civil lawyer Sir Thomas Ryves (d. 1652) supporting the claims of the Irish clergy to tithes. A former judge of faculties in the prerogative court of Ireland, Ryves sought to redress the 'miserable plight our poor Church of Ireland stand [in] at present'. The bulk of the pamphlet is concerned with a disquisition on the rights of bishops to sue impropriators for a decent maintenance for incumbent clerks. In addition to this exhibition of legal knowledge, Ryves neatly (if not bleakly) summarises a substantive point in the continuing contemporary discourse, that legal strategies and solutions are nothing without effectual application of them: 'If this course be legal, and may be taken for the better maintenance of the poor clergy in this miserable kingdom, well and good. If not, God grant some other may; for if none be, farewell religion: and what can then ensue but the abomination of desolation in the highest places of this kingdom? Which God forbid'.