by the learned throughout Europe, and Reeves was elected an honorary member of the Societies of Antiquaries of Scotland and of Zurich, but in his own university he failed to obtain the professorship of ecclesiastical history, for which he applied. Dr. James Henthorn Todd [q. v.], a fellow student in Irish ecclesiastical history, thereupon presented him to the vicarage of Lusk, co. Dublin, worth 170l. a year, and he went into residence there 30 Dec. 1857. On 19 Dec. 1861, Lord J. G. Beresford, then archbishop of Armagh, nominated him librarian of Armagh, a post of greater emolument than his vicarage, and tenable with it. He went to reside in the librarian's house at Armagh, and was allowed by Archbishop Whately to keep a curate at Lusk, where he continued to preach on Sundays. In November 1865 he was presented to the rectory of Tynan, near Armagh, and resigned Lusk, but remained librarian of Armagh. In 1869 he was a candidate for the librarianship of Trinity College, Dublin, but was not elected. In 1871 the university conferred on him the honorary degree of LL.D. He was already D.D., but never proceeded beyond the degree of bachelor of medicine. The King's and Queen's College of Physicians in Dublin elected him a fellow in 1864. In 1875 he was made dean of Armagh, and on 18 March 1886 was elected by the clergy and laity of the diocese bishop of Armagh and Clogher. The archbishop of Armagh, under the regulations made after the disestablishment, was to be elected by the bishops, and the bishop of Armagh and Clogher, if not appointed archbishop, was to succeed immediately to the diocese made vacant by the appointment. The bishops in June 1886 elected Dr. Knox to the primacy of all Ireland, and on 29 June 1886 Reeves was consecrated bishop of Down, Connor, and Dromore. He left with regret the library at Armagh, where many volumes of records copied by his hand remain. He went to live at Conway House, Dunmurry, in the south of Antrim, and administered his diocese with energy. He was in 1891 elected president of the Royal Irish Academy, to whose publications, and in other places, he contributed more than fifty original papers after his publication of his ‘Life of Columba,’ besides editing part of the works of James Ussher [q. v.], and writing many indexes and notes to the works of others. He had also made large preparations for editing the ‘Book of Armagh,’ a manuscript written there early in the ninth century, which he purchased for 300l. at a time when his means were small [see MacMoyer, Florence], and which Primate Beresford afterwards bought from him and gave to the library of Trinity College, Dublin, with a sum of money to defray the cost of an edition. It is in its original leather sack with straps, and Reeves used to carry it about suspended from his neck and under his waistcoat. On 26 Dec. 1891 he married, in Dublin, as his second wife, his cousin, Charlotte Townley. He was attacked, on 6 Jan. 1892, while still in Dublin, by pneumonia, died on 12 Jan., and was buried on 15 Jan. at Armagh.
Reeves was a tall man with an aquiline nose, well-formed head, and bright expressive eyes. His conversation was always interesting, full of learning, and enlivened by a ready wit. He knew a thousand pleasing stories, and told them admirably. He was the friend of John O'Donovan, of Todd, and of all in Ireland who cared for historical learning; while in the districts in which his life was spent he was liked and admired by people in every rank of society and of every shade of opinion (cf. Prothero, Life of Bradshaw, p. 302). A portrait is prefixed to his life by Lady Ferguson, and at the end of the same book is a complete bibliography of his works by John Ribton Garstin, B.D.
[Lady Ferguson's Life of Reeves, Dublin, 1893; Works; personal knowledge.]
REGAN, MORICE (fl. 1171), Irish interpreter, is stated in an old French poem, of which the only text (Carew MSS., Lambeth Palace, No. 596) begins ‘Par soen demeine latimer,’ to have acted as an interpreter (l. 1) and herald, or envoy (ll. 422, 1657) in the service of Diarmaid MacMurchada [q. v.], king of Leinster. The poem professes to be founded on a history (l. 7) of King Diarmaid, written by the interpreter, and gives an account of the flight of MacMurchada, of the landings of Robert FitzStephen, Morice de Prendergast, Maurice FitzGerald, Raymond le Gros, and Earl Strongbow; of the death of MacMurchada, and subsequent events up to the taking of Limerick in the autumn of 1175. Regan is said in the poem (l. 422) to have been sent by Diarmaid into Wales with offers of lands or other rewards to any who would support his cause in arms. In the third and only other passage in which his name is mentioned he is sent to the citizens of Dublin, then besieged by Strongbow, Miles de Cogan, and Diarmaid, to demand their surrender and thirty hostages. The text of the poem (l. 1844) mentions the canonisation of Lawrence O'Toole as ‘Seint Laurence’ in December 1225, and cannot therefore have been written before about 1226. The manuscript is probably half a
