Archbishop Narcissus Marsh was the founder, in 1701, of the first public library in Ireland. He financed the building entirely from his own resources and donated his own scholarly collection to the library. Marsh also purchased Bishop Edward Stillingfleet's collection of ten thousand volumes for the library.

Marsh was born on St. Thomas's Eve, 20 December 1638, in the village of Hannington, near Highworth in the northern Wiltshire, to William and Grace Marsh, née Colburn. He had two older brothers--Epaphroditus and Onesiphorus--and two older sisters. The unusual names of the boys in the family seem to have come from the Epistles of St. Paul.

Marsh went to five local schools, "in all which schools I never was so much as once whipt or beaten," he later wrote proudly in the diary that he kept from 1690 to 1696. At sixteen he was entered as a commoner at Magdalen Hall, Oxford. In...