Barrister and author, Bartholomew Warburton was born in Tullamore, Co. Offaly, Ireland, and educated at Cambridge. Having contributed travel articles to the Dublin University Magazine he was persuaded by the editor Charles Lever, to publish The Crescent and the Cross: Romance and Realities of Eastern Travel (2 vols., 1844), which ran to sixteen editions up to 1860. A novel Reginald Hastings (1849), is set in the "Rebellion of 1641, while another, Darien, or the Merchant Prince (1641), full of scenes of torture, ironically anticipated his own death by fire at sea. He also wrote on British historical subjects and planned a History of the poor in Dublin. (See Welch (ed), Oxford Companion).