EDWARD DICCONSON'S DOUAI DIARY, 1704-7, 1714 .
The manuscript of this diary is in the collections of Ushaw College 1 , no . 60 pp. 181-202). is only a fragment of the original, and even the pages which remain are often damaged and portions are impossible to decipher. But it is important because it provides details of that period in the history of Douai College before the College diary was recommenced in 1715 by Dr. Witham. (Since the Sixth Diary, which covered the years 1676-92 has been lost, there is no full diary available from 1654 when the Fifth Diary ended , until 1715.) The Dicconson diary is also very important because of the light which it throws upon the troubles which the College experienced as a result of the false accusation of Jansenism which was levied against it. The extant portions of the diary cover the following dates: 15 July 1704-27 October 1704 18 January 1705-25 November 1705 7 July 1706-16 December 1706 4 February 1707-23 March 1707 21 July 1714-1 October 1714. was much used by John Kirk in the early nineteenth century when he was working on his projected continuation of Dodd's Church History; this was never completed but the biographical section was published by J. H. Pollen and E. Burton in 1909 under the title Biographies of English Catholics in the Eighteenth Century. Joseph Gillow also used the diary when preparing his Literary and Biographical History, or Bibliographical Dictionary of the English Catholics ( 1885-1902) . The 1714 section was used by E. Burton in his Life and Times of Bishop Challoner ( 1909 volume 1 , pp . 37-8). Most of the diary was printed by E. Bonney in volume 13 ( 1903) of the Ushaw Magazine (pp. 287-313) . Father Bonney however thought it prudent to omit two passages of considerable length and some shorter portions , which contain bitter remarks about the Jesuits as he wrote (p. 288) : In those days they cared too much for the reality, to think of the phrase in which it was wrapped, and the pen's bitterness was too often a calumny of the feelings that prompted it . The passages in question appear under the following dates: 19 October 1705 13 October 1706 2 November 1706
(Ushaw Manuscripts , volume
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