Reports of cases argued and determined in the High Court of Chancery, during the time of the late Chancellor King. (Redmond Barry’s copy)

/ Collected by William Mosely, Esq., late Barrister at Law. Published with notes, and many thousand references, and two tables; one of the names of cases; the other of the principal matters. Dublin : printed for William Jones, no. 86, Dame-street, and Henry Watts, no. 3, Christ Church-lane, 1793. Octavo (215 x 140 mm), rebound in later calf, from the library of Victorian Supreme Court judge and cultural patron Sir Redmond Barry, his armorial bookplate preserved on the new front pastedown; original front free-endpaper with extensive ms. notes in a nineteenth-century hand (not that of Redmond Barry), pp. [vi], 449; contents with occasional light foxing, but generally very crisp and clean.

Irish-born Sir Redmond Barry (1813-1880) arrived in New South Wales in 1837 and was admitted to the New South Wales bar. After two years in legal practice in Sydney he relocated to the newly established Port Phillip settlement, arriving in Melbourne at the end of 1839. He went on to become the first Solicitor General (1851) and first Supreme Court Judge (1852) of the Colony of Victoria. He was also instrumental in the foundation of the Royal Melbourne Hospital (1848), the University of Melbourne (1853), for which he served as the first chancellor until his death, and the Melbourne Public Library (State Library of Victoria) (1854).

‘Sir Redmond Barry was a great bibliophile and believed strongly in the Victorian-era ideal of self-improvement through the gaining of knowledge. From the early 1840s he opened the small personal library in his home for use by working men and … was instrumental in the founding of the Melbourne Public Library. As a trustee he was to take a very active role in the library’s administration, including the selection of books … Barry was also the driving force behind the founding of the Supreme Court Library and the Victorian Parliamentary Library. On Barry’s death his substantial personal library was dispersed across various public and private collections. Today a number of these books can be found in the collections of the University of Melbourne Library, easily identified by Barry’s distinctive bookplate bearing his crest….’ (Jason Benjamin, Finding Redmond Barry, pp. 3-10 in University of Melbourne Collections, issue 13, December 2013)