DISTINGUISHED GRADUATES.
_Felix prole virum._--VIRGIL.
The close of the sixteenth century was a brilliant period in the
history of the English people. Three years before the measure
for the foundation in Dublin of a College “whereby knowledge and
civility might be increased” passed the Great Seal, the “Invincible
Armada” had suffered disastrous defeat at the hands of English
seamen. The Queen, who had “confirmed to her people that pillar of
liberty, a free press,” had shown herself possessed of a deeper
sympathy with her subjects than enemies were willing to allow her,
and the determined spirit of her ancestors--determined whether
in the good cause or the bad--had been displayed at a crisis of
supreme gravity. It was a good omen for the future of the “College
of the Holy and Undivided Trinity,” that it could write beneath the
portrait of this sovereign, “_Hujusce Collegii Fundatrix._”
The history of the University founded by Elizabeth is the history
of the greatest institution in this country, which, amidst so much
failure, has been a permanent and indisputable success. During
the dark ages of Ireland’s confusion and misery, the lamp of
learning and culture was here kept alight. No small achievement
will this seem in the eyes of those to whom the social and
political condition of the country, during the two hundred years
which followed the granting of the Charter to the “mother of a
University” in Dublin, are even superficially known.
In 1591, the meadow land and orchards of the Monastery of All
Hallows, near the city, which had become the property of the
Corporation upon the dissolution of all such establishments
by Henry VIII., were transferred to the Provost and Fellows
appointed under the Royal Seal; and where, fifty years before, the
brotherhood of Prior and Monks had passed their days in the quiet
seclusion of a life apart from the busy world of ambitious men,
there now began the quick and vivid play of thought and feeling
which mark a University in which the minds of the future leaders of
the people are moulded and exercised. The more prominent names in
the list of the graduates of Elizabeth’s College are abundant proof
of the paramount position of influence from the first maintained
by it in every department of the public life of the country, and
the importance of its work in training the men who have been in
the van of progress in culture and science, and among the leaders
of every political movement in Ireland; many of them, too, in
the wider field offered by England, and, in these later days, in
the still wider field of the colonies and dependencies under the
Crown. The traditions and prestige attached to such an institution
are inalienable, and it will indeed be strange if any statesman
attempt, as is sometimes apprehended, the impossible task of
disturbing or transferring them. The greater part of the history of
Ireland since the opening of the seventeenth century can be read in
the more public lives of the alumni of Trinity College.
Oxford, it is said, has been the University of great movements;
Cambridge, of great men. Genius indeed is not the outcome or
resultant of academic life and traditions, while intellectual and
social movements may in a measure be traced to such sources. Thus
may Oxford fairly claim for herself influences more wide-reaching
than her sister, although she cannot boast an equally distinguished
family. It must indeed be remembered that genius is resentful of
restrictions, and the debt acknowledged to any University by its
greatest sons is usually but a limited one. To her poets, Landor
and Shelley, Oxford was a harsh stepmother, and many a young man,
afterwards to be famous, left the banks of Cam without gratitude
and without regret. Nevertheless, a distinctive type of culture,
often of directing power, even though resisted, prevails at every
great centre of learning. If the dignity of a seat of learning
is to be determined by the intellectual splendour of the names
associated with it, Oxford must give place to Dublin as well as to
Cambridge. There is no Oxonian to rank with Swift or Burke.
But all such comparisons are idle; the Irish sister of the two
great English Universities has had a far different career, and
her type of culture is essentially distinctive, and not that of
another. Oxford, “the home of lost causes and forsaken beliefs
and impossible loyalties,” has a charm all her own. The old Irish
College does not lie, like that “Queen of Romance, steeped in
sentiment, and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of
the middle ages.” To sentiment she has ever been a stranger, and
she lies at the heart of a metropolis. But perhaps the atmosphere
of sentiment is not compatible with that of reason, and Dublin has
been the home of intellectual sanity. Unadorned by creeper or “ivy
serpentine,” no quaint windows or secluded cloisters bring to the
thoughtful student of “Old Trinity” visions of the monks of the
Monastery of All Saints; and no one who knows her history, or has
breathed her keen disillusionising air, would conceive as possible
the fostering of an intellectualism such as that of Newman under
the shadow of her Greek porticoes. Like her architecture, the mind
of the University of Dublin has been more Greek than that of her
English sisters. The spirit of Plato dwelt in Berkeley as it never
could have done in a thinker educated in a University dominated
by the methods of Bacon. In Edmund Burke the philosophical
statesmanship of the Athenian Republic was revived as the “last
enchantments of the middle ages,” with all their witchery, could
never have revived it. Dublin has never given herself over to the
idols of the forum or the market-place, nor worshipped at the
shrine of utilitarian philosophies. She has not swung incense in
the chapel of Hobbes or Herbert Spencer, nor bowed the knee to a
dictator in the Vatican of science. She has betrayed as little
enthusiasm for the cause of the Stuarts as for that of Pusey and
Keble. When we call to mind her position in the heart of a country
misunderstood and misgoverned for centuries, we cannot but marvel
that she has so serenely kept the _via media_ between political,
philosophical, and social extremes. At once less conservative
and less radical than her sisters, a dry intellectual light has
been her guide. It may be that the native humour of the soil has
preserved her from the follies of dogmatism--ecclesiastical,
scientific, political, or literary,--and equally so from frenzied
devotion to hopeless causes or extravagant theories. Stranger to
sentiment, and no “Queen of Romance,” I cannot think that an enemy
could deny beauty to the solemn stateliness of her quadrangles. In
the quiet of moonlit nights, or when the summer sun shines upon the
grey walls and the green of grass and foliage in her courts and
park, there are few so unimpressionable as to remain insensible
to her dignity and loveliness. But her truest dignity is in the
intellectual honour of her sons.
[Illustration: JACOBUS USSERIUS, ARCHIEPISCOPUS ARMACHANUS, TOTIUS
HIBERNIÆ PRIMAS]
Among the very first batch of graduates in these the infant days
of the College a great personality appears. At the first Public
Commencements held in 1601, on Shrove Tuesday, in St. Patrick’s
Cathedral, “Sir Ussher,” one of the students entered at the first
matriculation examination, was admitted to his Master’s degree.
James Ussher was of a family that had been resident in Ireland
since the time of King John, and on both sides of the house his
ancestors had held important public offices. His grandfather
had been Speaker of the Irish House of Commons, and his uncle,
afterwards Primate of Ireland, while Archdeacon in Dublin had
had much to do with the foundation of the Irish University. “Sir
Ussher” became Fellow and Proctor in due time, and while still
under age was by a faculty ordained Priest and Deacon. His first
recorded visit to England was that upon the errand in which he met
with Sir Thomas Bodley buying books for the Oxford Library which
now bears his name. Two of the greatest Libraries of the United
Kingdom were thus associated in their foundation. The energy and
extraordinary abilities of Ussher were soon very widely recognised,
and he was offered the Provostship in 1609, which position,
however, he declined. On the occasion of his next visit to England,
he bore a letter of recommendation to King James from the Lord
Deputy and Council, it being supposed that the King was prejudiced
against him. The gifts and learning which had made him so
conspicuous a figure in Ireland did not fail to impress the King,
who appointed him Bishop of Meath, “a Bishop of his own making,”
as he said. He preached, while in London, before the Commons and
at St. Margaret’s. During his tenure of the Bishopric he was very
prominent in public affairs, and in 1625 he was raised to the
Primacy. While occupied with the high civil and episcopal duties of
his many offices, he was extending that learning which placed him
at the head of the scholars of the day, and for which he is still
read and honoured. Burnet writes of him as a man “of a most amazing
diligence and exactness, joined with great judgment. Together with
his vast learning, no man had a better soul and a more apostolical
mind. In his conversation he expressed the true simplicity of a
Christian, for passion, pride and self-will, and the love of the
world seemed not so much as in his nature; so that he had all the
innocence of the dove in him. He was certainly one of the greatest
and best men that the age, perhaps the world, has produced.” Selden
spoke of him as “vir summa pictate, judicio singulari, usque ad
miraculum doctus.”
To compass, even in a volume, the bare record of the important
public acts of Ussher while Archbishop of Armagh, would be a
difficult task. He is the towering figure of his time, and seems to
stand as centre to its history, overshadowing both churchmen and
statesmen of ordinary stature, a period which reckoned among its
prominent men educated in Dublin such scholars as Dudley Loftus,
and such antiquarians as Sir James Ware. In 1640 the Primate was
forced by the troubles of the time to go for a sojourn to England,
which proved to be for the rest of his life. He was taken into
the counsels of King Charles about the modification of Episcopal
government such as to satisfy Presbyterians, and propounded a
scheme with that view. From this time he was one of the King’s
confidential advisers, and warned him against the signing of the
Bill of Attainder against Strafford. When he knew that it had
been done, Ussher broke out with “O sir! what have you done? Pray
God your Majesty may never suffer by signing this Bill!” He bore
the King’s last messages to Strafford, and attended him in prison
and to the scaffold, bearing back the report of his execution to
Charles.
At this period of his life, an unhappy and stormy one, he had many
invitations from abroad; among others, from Cardinal Richelieu,
who offered him a pension and free exercise of his religion in
France. After the manner of the Greek heroes, these two princes
of the Church interchanged gifts, the Cardinal sending Ussher a
gold medal, and the Primate, in return, two Irish-greyhounds. The
invitation to settle in France was renewed by the Queen Regent,
Anne of Austria; but this, among other offers, such as that of a
Chair in the University of Leyden, he declined. During the civil
war his experiences were most unhappy, and although reverenced
by the chiefs of the Parliamentary party as a man of astonishing
genius and unswerving rectitude, his property was frequently
plundered, and his life, if not actually endangered, rendered
hopeless and miserable by the uncertainties and distress of his
condition. He suffered, indeed, at the hands of the Government;
for when summoned to the Assembly of Divines at Westminster
by Parliament, he declined to present himself, and was, as a
consequence, denounced, and his library confiscated; but by the
help of influential friends it was restored to him. Ussher’s
learning was so wide and deep, especially in theology, that in
many instances the researches and discoveries of modern scholars
have only served to confirm his judgments. A striking example
of his acumen is to be found in his edition of Ignatius and
Polycarp. Observing that three English writers of the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries cite Ignatius in a different form from
what was then known, but agreeing with citations made by Eusebius
and others, he was led to divine the existence of copies of the
different form in England. Search was accordingly made, and his
forecast was verified by the discovery of two Latin versions--one
in Caius College, Cambridge, while a Greek text corresponding was
recovered in Florence. This is the text of Ignatius now generally
received, and has recently been established as the true text, as
against that current before Ussher’s time, by the late Bishop
Lightfoot, who speaks of this work as “showing not only marvellous
erudition, but also the highest critical genius.” The great
Primate’s sagacity, not only in matters of scholarship but in
matters of State, was regarded in his own day as approaching that
of inspiration, and a volume of his predictions respecting public
affairs was actually published.
The Parliament relented towards Ussher so far as to vote him a
pension in his later years, which was, however, but irregularly
paid. The death of his royal master was a great blow to Ussher, and
he ever after kept the momentous day of execution as a fast. A few
years before his death he published his _Old Testament Chronology_,
whence is taken the Table commonly inserted in Bibles. The great
Protector sent for him, treated him with marked courtesy, and was
indeed almost persuaded by him to grant a certain toleration to
the Episcopal worship, but finally refused any such boon to his
“implacable enemies;” showing himself, as Ussher tersely described
him, a man possessed of “intestina non viscera.” At his death the
honours of a public funeral were ordered by Cromwell, who, with all
his sternness against his foes, could not but reverence the moral
grandeur of the man; and the service of his own church was read
over the grave of the greatest churchman of his time, in the chapel
of St. Erasmus.
While Dodwell, that prolific author, whose name is also connected
with the Camden Professorship bestowed on him by the University
of Oxford, was a Fellow of Trinity lecturing in logic, his most
brilliant pupil, soon to become a friend, was William King. Among
his contemporaries several names of note occur in the College
records--Tate and Brady; Dillon, Earl of Roscommon; Leslie,
Denham, Peter Browne, Robert Boyle, and Wilson, the author of
_Sacra Privata_. But King has claims to more than passing notice.
A churchman of whom Swift, a warm admirer, could write as follows,
can have been no common man--“He spends his time in the practice
of all the virtues that can become public or private life. So
excellent a person may justly be reckoned among the greatest and
most learned prelates of this age.”
[Illustration: The most Reverend Father in GOD William King D.D.]
King was of a Scotch Presbyterian family, his father having
settled in Ulster after his excommunication for refusal to sign
the Covenant. He betrayed in his infant years an aversion to
the mechanical lessons of his schoolmistress, and suffered much
whipping as a consequence. The art of reading came upon him later
quite as a surprise, as he suddenly found himself able to make
sense of the combinations of letters which had baffled him under
the tuition of an orthodox school _régime_. During his career in
College he lived as a Spartan. “I scarce had twenty pounds,” he
tells us in an unpublished autograph memoir preserved in Armagh
Diocesan Library, “in all the six years I spent in College, save
from the College (Scholarship). Yet herein do I acknowledge
God’s providence that I was able to appear _nearly_ all that
time decently drest and sufficiently fed.” Although without
definite religious opinions, since as a child he had received no
instruction, by study and conversation with men of weight and
learning in the University he came to have that settled faith which
drew him to the ministry of the Church, and remained with him all
through life. Thus King’s debt to Trinity College was a large one;
he owed to her not only the intellectual but the spiritual training
which determined his life and character. When ordained Priest, he
was appointed Chaplain to the Archbishop of Tuam. The change from
the narrow fare of his life in College to that of the Palace, where
a “dinner of sixteen dishes and a supper of twelve, with abundant
variety of wines and other generous liquors,” were the usual diet,
affected his health. “The issue was, that before I had begun to
dream of ill effects,” he says quaintly, “I was taken with the
gout.”
Archbishop Parker, who had formed a high estimate of King’s powers,
appointed him, soon after his own translation to Dublin, to the
Chancellorship of St. Patrick’s, at that juncture of affairs when
the Duke of York, heir-presumptive to the Crown, declared himself
a Roman Catholic. In 1683 he was sent to Tunbridge Wells to try a
course of the waters for his health, and fell into acquaintance
with many political persons. Party spirit was then running very
high, and considerable excitement prevailed over the revocation
of the charters of certain cities. He felt it to be his duty to
support the King, so that he might not be driven to seek support
from the unprincipled politicians of the day. This support was,
however, only conditional upon rational and legal action on the
King’s part. When the crisis came in the next reign, and it was
imperative that some side should be taken in the contest between
James and the Prince of Orange, King came to the conclusion that
in the illegal and unjustifiable action of James there was ample
reason for the transference of his allegiance to the champion of
the Protestant party.
At this time, when the confusion and apprehensions of the clergy
drove many of them to England for refuge, the affairs of the Church
in Ireland were wholly managed by King and Bishop Dopping, an
ex-Fellow of Trinity. Archbishop Marsh, indeed, left everything
in the hands of King as his commissary, and the latter’s position
became one of great responsibility and danger. With many others, he
was thrown into prison in Dublin Castle, and, although released in
a few months, was again in the following year imprisoned, until the
victory of the Boyne set him at liberty. As Dean of St. Patrick’s
he preached at a thanksgiving service for the victory in his
Cathedral, at which the King was present; and when it was told his
Majesty, in answer to enquiry, that the preacher’s name was William
King, he remarked, smiling, that their names were both alike--King
William and William King. On his appointment to the Bishopric of
Derry, which followed close upon the Revolution, he showed his
great administrative abilities in the government of the See, which
had been terribly impoverished by the war. As he had been the first
to declare in public speech to which king his allegiance was due,
so was he the first author of a history of the time, _State of the
Protestants in Ireland_, in which he vindicated the lawfulness
of William’s interposition between James and his subjects; a
book spoken of by Burnet as “a copious history of the government
of Ireland during the reign, which is so well received, and so
universally acknowledged to be as truly as it is fairly written,
that I refer my readers to the account of these matters which is
fully and faithfully given by that learned and zealous prelate.”
As Archbishop of Dublin, King proved himself statesman no less
than prelate, as the history of the times clearly evidence. When
in his seventy-fifth year, the See of Armagh became vacant. To
Swift, who wrote warmly expressing his hope that King would be
promoted to Armagh, he replied: “Having never asked anything,
I cannot now begin to do so, when I have so near a prospect of
leaving the station in which I am another way.” But there is
little doubt that the appointment of Boulter, an Englishman, was
not acceptable to him, for he received the Primate at his first
visit, seated, with the words--in which the jest did not disguise
their bitterness,--“My Lord, I am sure your Grace will forgive
me, because you know I am too old to rise.” This practice of
importing Englishmen to fill the greater Sees of Ireland prevailed
until a few years ago, and can scarcely be described as other
than gratuitously insulting to the clergy of that Church in this
Country. King was eminently ecclesiastic and prelate, wise, strong,
and masterful, possessed of many of the gifts which go to make up a
great statesman. Not such a scholar as Ussher, he was more fitted
by nature to play a part among living men, although, as his great
work, _De Origine Mali_, proves, he was a subtle thinker no less
than a far-sighted man of action.
[Illustration: (bust of Dr. Delaney)]
Bishops Downes and St. George Ashe and Dr. Delany are among
the prominent Churchmen of this period who were ex-Fellows of
Trinity. This is the Dr. Delany frequently mentioned in Primate
Boulter’s letters, and in the works of Dean Swift. Of the
Scholars of the day, William Molyneux, the philosophical friend
of Locke, was in the first rank. He it was who founded the
Society in Dublin on the plan of the Royal Society in London,
which, although dispersed during the troubles of the war between
James and William, may rightly be considered the parent of the
present Royal Society of Ireland. He represented the University
in Parliament, and was a public man of mark, although by natural
bent of mind a mathematician and philosopher. Against Hobbes he
carried on a controversy in support of Theism. Molyneux wrote
many scientific works of great value, and one political pamphlet
which is historical--_The Case of Ireland’s being bound by Acts of
Parliament made in England_.
[Illustration: MOLYNEUX.]
Like his own Gulliver among the Liliputians, the gigantic figure of
Swift dominates his age. There is no man in history whose character
and life is a more fascinating study, or whose personality awakens
such powerful and varied emotions. We are awed by the splendour
of the intellectual achievement which created and peopled a
new world in the travels of _Gulliver_, which dominated from
Laracor Parsonage the counsels of statesmen and the fortunes of
governments, and which could, in the _Drapier’s Letters_, fan the
imagination of a people to the white heat of revolutionary action.
We turn to his private life and read his letters, and awe gives
place to pity, not far removed from affection, for the proud heart,
sore with all unutterable and measureless desires, and of gentlest
tenderness to a simple girl. Too proud to be vain; too conscious
of the vanities of the things of ambition to be ambitious; too
constant and open a friend to care for the friendships of the
shallow or conceited--in short, too consummate master of the world
to care for the things of the world, like Alexander, despair took
hold on him because the inexorable limits of time and space left
him without a sphere worthy the exercise of the power he felt
within him. There was something more than misanthropy in the man
to whom the gentle Addison, in sending a copy of his _Travels
in Italy_, could write:--“To Jonathan Swift, the most agreeable
companion, the truest friend, and the greatest genius of his age,
this work is presented by his most humble servant, the author.”
[Illustration: (bust of Dean Swift)]
There was little in the eighteenth century of spiritual fervour or
moral enthusiasm. The mental fashion of the times was a cynical
rationalism, of no depth, because unsupported by any genuine desire
for truth. Swift, while he hated the shallowness of the prevailing
mood of mind, caught the contagion, and could not altogether shake
himself free from its effects, but became in his far more honest
and more terrible cynicism profoundly contemptuous of the cynics.
Stella’s smile alone, like a ray of light, ever broke the leaden
grey of the sky over his head. When that star faded, there was
nothing left for which to live, “the long day’s work was done,” and
death was a friend leading to a rest--
“Ubi saeva indignatio
Cor ulterius lacerare nequit.”
Swift--in name ecclesiastic, in reality statesman and leader of
men--marks the transition period from churchmen to poets, orators,
and men of letters, in the remarkable grouping of the great names
among the graduates of Dublin. Boswell records Johnson’s estimate
of three of the “Irish clergy” of whom I have spoken. “Swift,” said
he, “was a man of great parts, and the instrument of much good to
his country; Berkeley was a profound scholar, as well as a man of
fine imagination; but Ussher,” he said, “was the great luminary of
the Irish Church, and a greater no Church could boast of--at least
in modern times.”
[Illustration: Thomas Southerne Esq^r.]
The great churchmen of the early years of the University were
followed by the great dramatists. Save to the faithful in matters
of literature, the name of Southerne, like that of many of his
predecessors of the age of Elizabeth, is a name alone--“stat
nominis umbra,”--and that although he counted Gray and Dryden among
his admirers, and was the first author whose plays were honoured
by a second and third night of representation, Shakespeare himself
not excepted. In Southerne is to be found the last flicker of the
passion and fervour of the great dramatic period of our literature.
As we read, we are startled here and there by the “gusto of the
Elizabethan voice,” the unmistakable tone which has “somewhat
spoiled our taste for the twitterings” of modern verse. The great
actress still lives, Helen Faucit, Lady Martin, whose impersonation
of Isabella in the “Fatal Marriage” is vividly remembered by our
older playgoers as one of the most powerful of her parts. But we of
this generation can know nothing of Southerne save in the study. To
the best known of his plays a place of unique honour belongs. The
poet is ever foremost in the holy cause of freedom, and “Oroonoko”
is the first work in English which denounced the slave trade. The
story of the tragedy is said to be literally true down to the
minutest details. Much court was paid to this “Victor in Drama” in
his old age; and his person, no less than his reputation, seems
to have demanded it, for he was “of grave and venerable aspect,
accustomed to dress in black, with silver sword and silver locks.”
To him, on his 81st birthday, Pope wrote:--
“Resigned to live, prepared to die,
With not one sin but poetry;
This day Time’s fair account has run
Without a blot to eighty-one.
Kind Boyle before his poet lays
A table with a cloth of bays,
And Ireland, mother of sweet singers,
Presents her harp still to his fingers.”
In the Dublin class-rooms two of the comic dramatists of the
Restoration obtained their scholarship. The intellectual splendour
of William Congreve did not more indisputably place him at the
head of that coterie of letters than his learning and culture
made him the most courted gentleman of the period--“the splendid
Phœbus Apollo of the Mall.” “His learning,” says Macaulay, “does
great honour to his instructors. From his writings, it appears
not only that he was well acquainted with Latin literature, but
that his knowledge of the Greek poets was such as was not in his
time common, even in a College.” For those who feel with Charles
Lamb, when he says, speaking of the comedy of the last century--“I
confess, for myself, I am glad for a season to take an airing
beyond the diocese of the strict conscience,” Congreve must always
remain prince of wits. He is as absolute master of his domain as
Shakespeare of his. We do not now rank him, as Dryden and Johnson
did, with the world’s master-mind--
“ ... Heaven, that but once was prodigal before,
To Shakespeare gave as much, she could not give him more;”
but we cannot refuse him an absolute supremacy in the narrower
sphere of his genius, Congreve’s laurels were all reaped at the
age of thirty. The “Old Bachelor” was produced when the author
was but twenty-three, and that most perfect of English comedies
of manners, “Love for Love,” when he was twenty-five. No such
dialogue, for brilliancy, subtlety, intellectual finish, and
flavour, was ever before heard. We who read cannot feel surprised
that its sparkle should have dazzled the critics into the language
of exaggerated panegyric. The “Mourning Bride” was the only essay
in tragedy made by the man who, in Voltaire’s words, “raised the
glory of comedy to a greater height than any English writer before
or since.” Such a genius as Congreve could not fail absolutely, and
though most of us know it only in its first line--
“Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast;”
or perhaps by the passage which Johnson overpraised as “the most
poetical passage from the whole mass of English poetry,” beginning--
“How reverend is the face of this tall pile,”--
the “Mourning Bride” is a _tour de force_ in dramatic art.
[Illustration: M^r William Congreve.]
Congreve’s career is a striking contrast to that proverbially
assigned by fortune to the man of letters. Patronage from rival
ministers placed him in various sinecure offices, and he died
possessed of a large fortune. His funeral was that of a Prince. His
body lay in state in the Jerusalem Chamber, and the greatest Peers
of England were the bearers of the pall.
Farquhar’s career was less happy than that of Congreve, if indeed
success be happiness. The genial Irish spirit of the gallant
gentleman could not carry his life beyond its thirtieth year.
Over-exertion, necessitated by the impecuniosity inevitable
to a nature akin to Goldsmith’s, undermined his health, and,
like many another, in seeking to save his life he lost it. To
Wilks, the actor, he wrote in a characteristic vein during his
last illness:--“Dear Bob, I have not anything to leave thee
to perpetuate my memory but two helpless girls. Look upon them
sometimes, and think of him that was, to the last moment of his
life, thine, George Farquhar.”
In the “Beaux’ Stratagem” and the “Recruiting Officer,” there is
far less of the prurient indecency characterising the period than
in the comedies of any other member of the famous group. Farquhar’s
broad humour resembles that of Chaucer and Shakespeare; it bears no
relation to that of Wycherley. A gentleman of letters, he carried
with him into his plays the happy lovable disposition of the land
of his birth, and the gay indifference to fortune’s buffets of the
military adventurer. “He was becoming gayer and gayer,” said Leigh
Hunt, “when death, in the shape of a sore anxiety, called him away
as if from a pleasant party, and left the house ringing with his
jest.”
Among the poets patronised by Frederick, Prince of Wales, at the
beginning of the eighteenth century was Henry Brooke, afterwards
better known as a novelist by his _Fool of Quality_, published in
the same year as the now famous _Vicar of Wakefield_. Brooke, in a
remarkable poem entitled “Universal Beauty,” wherein every aspect
of Nature is described with scientific exactness, anticipating the
manner of Darwin in the “Loves of the Plants,” gave promise of a
poetic future and fame to which he never attained. In early life
a friend of Swift, Pope, and Chesterfield, as a man of letters he
was widely known and respected for his public spirit and generous
disposition, as well as for the high merit of his work.
Ireland has never produced a more truly original poet than Thomas
Parnell, the author of “The Hermit.” After he had acquired in
Trinity College the classical training which, in the estimation of
Goldsmith, placed him among the most elegant scholars of the day,
a country parsonage received him into an oblivion which would have
been final but for the kindly encouragement of Swift and Pope.
So modest and diffident a man could never have emerged from the
obscurity of his position in life unaided by some helping hand.
As it was, his poems were not published, except in a posthumous
edition by his great contemporary last mentioned. Although unable
wholly to effect escape from the influences of the artificial
school of the poetry of the so-called Augustan age, there is more
real feeling naturally expressed, more genuine poetic sweetness,
in Parnell’s “Hymn to Contentment,” or his “Night Piece on Death,”
than in any other verse of his time. Without Pope’s incisive
vigour or precision, he sounds a note more pure and exquisite, a
note which appeals to the modern lover of poetry as Pope’s keen
intelligence and perfection of phrase can never do.
[Illustration: Berkeley.]
At Kilkenny School, the Eton of Ireland, where Congreve and
Swift had also been pupils, George Berkeley received his early
education _sub ferula_ a Dr. Hinton. At the age of fifteen he
entered Trinity, and soon after became Scholar and Fellow of the
house. Mathematics chiefly occupied the attention of the more
eminent scholars of the day, but the larger problems claimed
Berkeley’s allegiance. The philosophical issues raised by Locke and
Malebranche had given a new impulse to the study of metaphysics,
now emancipated from the fetters of scholasticism. Dublin was
abreast of the thought of the time, for Locke’s _Essay_ was adopted
as a text-book immediately on its publication, and is still a part
of the course in Logics. On accepting the Deanery of Derry in
1724, Berkeley resigned all his College offices, but before that
time his best known work had been done. _The New Theory of Vision_
and _The Principles of Human Knowledge_ are the direct outcome of
his thought while a Junior Fellow of Trinity. The originality of
Berkeley’s mind was equalled by its purity. The “good Berkeley,”
as Kant calls him, charmed, as some rare spirits have the power to
charm society which cared nothing for his theories, no less than
philosophical friends and foes. To him the satiric vivisector Pope
ascribed “every virtue under Heaven;” and Swift, misanthropist and
scorner of friendship, made him a confidential friend. In some
men, as has often been remarked, there resides a nameless power,
the effluence of a character at once strong and good. No less
a philosopher in life than in theory, no word of bitterness has
ever been breathed against one of the fairest fames in history.
In what exquisite words he declined, when Bishop of Cloyne, to
apply for the Archiepiscopal See of Armagh: “I am no man’s rival
or competitor in this matter. I am not in love with feasts, and
crowds, and visits, and late hours, and strange faces, and a hurry
of affairs often insignificant. For my own private satisfaction,
I had rather be master of my time than wear a diadem.” But in the
interest of others he was willing to spend that time. Like every
other idealist thinker, he had his Utopia. “He is an absolute
philosopher,” wrote Swift to Lord Carteret, “with regard to money,
titles, and power, and for three years past has been struck with a
notion of founding a University at Bermudas by a charter from the
Crown.”
On May the 11th, 1726, the Commons voted “That an humble address
be presented to his Majesty, that out of the lands in St.
Christopher’s, yielded by France to Great Britain by the Treaty of
Utrecht, his Majesty would be graciously pleased to make such grant
for the use of the President and Fellows of the College of St. Paul
in Bermuda as his Majesty shall think proper.” The College, though
here named, was never established, but the glow of anticipated
success was the inspiration of prophetic and noble verse--such
verse as Mr. Palgrave tells us is written by thoughtful men who
practise the art but little.
“In happy climes, the seat of innocence,
Where nature guides and virtue rules,
Where men shall not impose for truth and sense
The pedantry of courts and schools;
“There shall be sung another golden age,
The rise of Empire and of Arts,
The good and great inspiring epic rage,
The wisest heads and noblest hearts.
“Not such as Europe breeds in her decay;
Such as she bred when fresh and young,
When heavenly flame did animate her clay,
By future poets shall be sung.
“Westward the course of Empire takes its way;
The four first acts already past,
A fifth shall close the drama with the day;
Time’s noblest offspring is the last.”
Most of the critics have omitted to mention Berkeley among the
stylists, probably because of the subject-matter of his work; but
as a master of language he alone of the philosophers ranks with
Plato. A felicity of style, consisting in perfect naturalness and
perfect fitness in the choice of words, has been a birthright of
great Irishmen. There is perhaps no surer test of delicacy of moral
fibre or of intellectual precision than a refinement of touch in
language, such as that of Goldsmith and Berkeley.
After the disappointment in the matter of the University in
Bermuda, Berkeley devoted himself once more to Philosophy. With
Queen Caroline he was so great a favourite that the royal command
frequently brought him to the Palace; and when through some
official hitch he was disappointed of the Deanery of Down, the
Queen signified her pleasure that, since “they would not suffer Dr.
Berkeley to be a Dean in Ireland, he should be a Bishop,” and in
1734 appointed him to the See of Cloyne.
His letter to the Roman Catholic Bishops of Ireland shows the large
spirit of charity with which he exercised his episcopal office.
Traditions of his loved and cherished presence still linger about
the Palace of Cloyne, now a ruin; and a beautiful recumbent figure
recently placed in the Cathedral perpetuates his memory there. But
as he advanced in years, feeble in health, and long desirous of
ending his days in a quiet retirement, he made Oxford his choice,
and wrote to the Secretary of State (in 1752) to ask leave to
resign his Bishopric. So unusual a desire as that of voluntary
retirement, involving the loss of the episcopal revenue, led the
King, George II., to enquire who it was that preferred such a
request, and on learning that it was his old friend, Dr. Berkeley,
declared that he should die a Bishop in spite of himself, but might
reside where he pleased. Before he left Ireland, he instituted in
his old College the two medals which bear his name for proficiency
in Greek. In Oxford he died, and was buried in the Cathedral of
Christ Church. Markham, the Archbishop of York, wrote his epitaph:--
“Si Christianus fueris
Si amans patriæ
Utroque nomine gloriari potes
Berkleium vixisse.”
Of the three portraits in our College perhaps none can be regarded
as accurate. Probably the somewhat idealised outlines of the Cloyne
monument convey a true image of Berkeley as his own generation knew
him. “A handsome man,” it is said, “with a countenance full of
meaning and benignity.”
It would be out of place to attempt here to estimate Berkeley’s
philosophical rank. If Hamann’s verdict be just--“Without Berkeley
no Hume, without Hume no Kant,” we owe to the gentle wisdom of our
great countryman a metaphysical debt difficult to overestimate; but
quite apart from the importance of his position in the evolution of
the critical idealism, the figure of that serene thinker, modest,
tender, without reproach, will ever win and hold the admiration and
reverence of all lovers of the beautiful in life and character.
One of Berkeley’s most remarkable Episcopal brethren was Bishop
Clayton, the mover of a motion in the Irish House of Lords
proposing that the Nicene and Athanasian Creeds should be expunged
from the Liturgy of the Church of Ireland--a somewhat bold proposal
on the part of a dignitary of the Church. Mention should also here
be made of Philip Skelton, a contemporary of Clayton, and a scholar
of wide repute.
In 1744 two remarkable boys entered Trinity College, strangely
unlike in disposition and genius, both heirs of Fame, but destined
to reach her temple by very different avenues. Their names were
Edmund Burke and Oliver Goldsmith. The life of the tender-hearted,
vain, improvident, generous, altogether lovable author of the
_Vicar of Wakefield_ and the _Deserted Village_, with all its
vicissitudes, its hours of extravagant luxury, and years of
hopeless poverty, is as well known to most children as are the
works which his exquisite art left the world for “a perpetual feast
of nectared sweets.” There is nothing to tell of him which has not
been told and re-told, read and re-read, from the story of the
young aspirant for ordination presenting himself to his Bishop in
a pair of scarlet breeches, to that simple sentence of Johnson’s,
when he heard of his death and his debts, “Let not his frailties be
remembered; he was a very great man.”
Goldsmith’s College career, like that of Swift, was not a brilliant
one. Set him to turn an ode of Horace into English verse, and you
might count on a version that would surprise the scholars; but
give him a mathematical problem to solve, and he was a disgrace
to his University. It was the same until the end. The mathematics
of life--the simple additions and subtractions--were too much for
him; but those marvellous versions of the tales of his experience
or imagination we still delight in and wonder at. The charm
of that delicate simplicity and ease of style has never been
surpassed. Addison is justly honoured, and as a writer of English
generally appraised higher than Goldsmith; but I cannot think that
the Magdalen Scholar has a lightness of touch or a grace at all
comparable to the poor Sizar of Trinity. In Addison’s best essays
a fastidious critic, while he admires their chastened correctness,
will observe a certain primness, an over-studied perfection of
diction. Addison is a finished artist; but Goldsmith’s freedom
gives greater pleasure, for he wrote under the direct inspiration
of Nature. Posterity, too, has given its inexorable decree in
favour of the Irishman. _Cato_ is forgotten, but _She Stoops to
Conquer_ is with us still. The _Spectator_ is read in the study of
the student of literature, but the _Vicar of Wakefield_ in every
English home. “To be the most beloved of English writers”--as
Thackeray says--“what a title that is for a man!”
The Earl of Mornington, whose more illustrious son, the great Duke,
vanquished the “World’s Victor” at Waterloo, was a contemporary
of Goldsmith, and the first Professor of Music in the University.
Malone, the editor of Shakespeare, and Toplady, the hymn-writer,
graduated about the same time as the Earl, then a _filius nobilis_.
In connection with the name of Edmund Burke, some mention must
be made of the Historical Society, which claims him as its
founder. Its splendid traditions date from the inauguration of
Burke’s Historical Club in 1747. Throughout its chequered career
it has preserved a peculiar pride and independence of spirit,
intolerant of interference on the part even of the authorities
of the University, which not infrequently resulted in serious
disagreement affecting its existence inside the College walls,
and on two occasions led to periods of exile from the University,
during which it found a home in the city. No other debating society
in the world, perhaps, can claim to rank with it as a cradle of
orators. It has been the palæstra of many of the most eloquent
speakers of the English tongue. Besides its founder Burke, Grattan
and Curran, Plunket and Bushe, Sheil and Butt, and many another
master of rhetoric, practised at the debates of the “Historical”
the art which has made Ireland no less famous as mother of orators
than she was formerly as mother of saints. Throughout its career
this Society has given to the Irish Bench and Bar their most
distinguished leaders, and many to England and the dependencies
of the Crown. Three of the members of the present Government were
officers of the Society in their student days; and the most recent
loss it has sustained was by the death of William Connor Magee, the
late Archbishop of York, the first Auditor after its reconstitution
in 1843.
The objects of the Club at its foundation, as appears from the
minutes, were “speaking, reading, writing, and arguing in Morality,
History, Criticism, Politics, and all the useful branches of
Philosophy.” There are many points of interest in the earliest
minute-book of the Society, of which the greater part is in Burke’s
handwriting. A critical discrimination on the part of the members,
remarkable in the light of later history, is recorded in the minute
of April 28, 1747, when “Mr. Burke, for an essay on the Genoese,
was given thanks for the matter, but not for the delivery.” The
Club, consisting of a very few members, grew in numbers until, at
the period in which an Irish Parliament sat in College Green, it
was an assembly of six hundred, many of its prominent members being
also Members of Parliament. An ordinary excuse for the absence of a
speaker from his place seems to have been compulsory attendance in
the Commons. The influence of such a Society upon political opinion
in Ireland was naturally considerable, and the expression of the
revolutionary views of many of its members, such as Emmet and Wolfe
Tone, gave great uneasiness to the Board of the College. It is only
in comparatively recent years that the feeling of suspicion with
which the Society was regarded by the authorities has disappeared,
and it is far indeed from probable that occasion for it will ever
again arise. There are few pages of mere chronicle of names more
potent in arousing patriotic enthusiasm in a lover of Ireland, than
those in the proceedings of this Society which are a record of its
officers.
Although the oratory of Burke signally failed, on the great
occasions upon which it was displayed, to alter the determination
or the policy of the majority of those to whom it was addressed,
he stands by general consent--to make no wider comparison--at the
head of the orators who spoke the English tongue. “Saturated with
ideas” and magnificent in diction as Burke’s oratory was, it is
not as orator merely that he claims the attention of students of
history, nor as “our greatest English prose writer” (as Matthew
Arnold calls him) the attention of students of literature; the
nobility of the man commands a deeper admiration. “We who know Mr.
Burke know that he will be one of the first men in the country,”
said Dr. Johnson, with that magnanimous appreciation of merit so
characteristic of him; and the estimate was not an exaggerated one.
By far the most sagacious and chivalrous statesman of his time, the
high-minded disinterestedness and moral fervour of the man, in an
age such as that in which his lot was cast, give him a far-shining
pre-eminence. Again and again in his utterance rings the splendid
note that stirs the blood as with the sound of a trumpet--the note
which only the brave man to whom belongs the _mens conscia recti_
can dare to utter. Take this: “I know the map of England as well
as the noble Lord or any other person, and I know that the path
that I take is not the way to preferment;” or this, when a purblind
electorate complained of his Parliamentary policy: “I do not here
stand before you accused of venality or of neglect of duty. It
is not said that in the long period of my service I have, in a
single instance, sacrificed the slightest of your interests to my
ambition or to my fortune--No! the charges against me are all of
one kind, that I have pushed the principles of general justice and
benevolence too far--further than a cautious policy would warrant,
and further than the opinions of many would go along with me. In
every accident which may happen through life--in pain, in sorrow,
in depression and distress--I will call to mind this accusation,
and be comforted.” To read the speeches of Burke is, I think,
a liberal education in literature, in ethics, and in political
philosophy. No man can rise from a study of them uninstructed or
unennobled.
To say that in his later years many of the finest qualities of his
head and heart failed him, is but to give trite expression to the
familiar fact that man too has his “winter of pale misfeature.”
There is no figure in the history of English politics at once so
great and so noble as that of Edmund Burke.
As has been remarked, any record of the alumni of Trinity College
must take note of the remarkable grouping of the great names. The
brilliant oratorical group belongs to the period of the history
of Ireland when her circumstances in a special sense called
for the public speaker, assigning to him patriotic duties and
a noble theme. When Dublin became the seat of a Parliament of
real political power, it was the natural ambition of every young
Protestant Irishman of talent to make for himself a name and fame
within its walls. The responsibility of self-government brought
in its train a national enthusiasm and zeal which gave a new life
to the country so long hopelessly misgoverned. For the first time
became possible in Ireland great public service in the cause of
Ireland. In 1746 was born Henry Grattan, the man destined by an
ironical fate to gain by the splendour and force of his advocacy
an honourable independence for the legislature of his country, and
to live long enough to see the whole edifice, raised with so many
fervent prayers and hopes, crumble to pieces, undermined by the
sustained effort of unexampled treachery and fraud in power. In
pathetic words Grattan described, when all was over, his relations
to the Irish Parliament--“I watched by its cradle; I followed it to
the grave.”
[Illustration: EARL OF CLARE.]
The story of the Irish orators of this fascinating epoch has been
told by the most judicial of living historians, Mr. W. E. H. Lecky,
himself, like them, a son of the Dublin _Mater Universitatis_.
As he tells us, however divided political opinion in our day may
be over the vexed question of the government of this island,
“the whole intellect of the country” was bitterly opposed to the
measure for a Union introduced by Lord Castlereagh. The only man
of ability and position in Ireland to whom it was not intolerable
was Fitzgibbon, Earl of Clare. Sheridan, the champion of the
Irish cause in the English Parliament, could scarcely find words
strong enough to express the intensity of his feelings. “I would
have fought for that Irish Parliament,” he said, “up to the knees
in blood.” It may be difficult for the student of history to
understand the fierceness of the opposition with which Grattan,
Flood, and Plunket met the proposal of the English Ministers,
but in the fire and force of their utterances a very sincere
and determined spirit manifests itself. The purity of their
patriotism has never been questioned. Flood, the first of the
Irish orators who rose to prominence in the House, was described
by Grattan as “the most easy and best-tempered man in the world,
as well as the most sensible.” Grattan, though fearless in the
open advocacy of his principles, was himself a man of modest and
courteous disposition. There was nothing of the political bully or
blustering demagogue in the champions of the cause of legislative
independence. While Grattan and Flood were devoting all their
energies to a common cause, they were separated by a quarrel
which no reconciliation ever brought to an end. Standing apart
from each other, they nevertheless, with the native generosity
of the country which gave them birth, recognised each the mental
and moral worth of the other. As speakers, Flood was admitted to
be the more convincing reasoner of the two; but Grattan, rapid
and epigrammatic, whose sentences were always forged to a white
heat, was irresistible. His was “an oracular loftiness of words
which certainly came nearer the utterance of inspiration than any
eloquence, ancient or modern.” Both were, in youth, unwearied
students of the art of which they became masters, and like
Demosthenes also in this, that they thought no pains too great to
accomplish their ends, believing, like him, that pains so taken
were such as show “a kind of respect for the people.” Flood was a
diligent pupil in the school of classic oratory; while Grattan,
no less persevering, in manner, in tone, in everything that
characterises a speaker, was peculiarly original and alone; for
it cannot be said that in any important particular he resembled
any other great speaker. Comparing him with other orators Mr.
Lecky says--“It was left for Grattan to be profound while he was
fascinating, and pointed while he was profound.”
Although he had retired from public life, and was seriously ill
when the measure which resulted in legislative union with Great
Britain was introduced, Grattan stood for a vacant constituency,
and re-entered the House whose independence he had gained while the
debate affecting its existence was in progress. There have been few
more pathetic scenes in the history of Parliaments than that which,
in the final debate, shows us the old man eloquent, too feeble to
stand, and addressing the House by its leave seated, pleading for
the last time in the cause of his country. It was that he might
spend his latest years in support of the bill for the removal of
the disabilities of Roman Catholics, whose emancipation had been
one of the objects of his political career, that Grattan consented
to enter the British Parliament. The keynote of his plea sounds
in the words he used in one of the speeches upon the question:
“Bigotry may survive persecution, but it can never survive
toleration.” Like Edmund Burke, the path he chose in life was
not one which led to preferment; and it is best perhaps that his
resting-place in the Abbey beside Pitt and Fox is undistinguished
by name or stone. What epitaph could England write for Henry
Grattan? The full-length portraits of Grattan and Flood possessed
by the College hang upon the same wall in the Dining Hall. That
of Grattan represents him in the hour of his triumph, moving the
Declaration of Independence. Flood, a striking figure, stands
defiantly out, as if replying to a hostile speaker in the measured
invective for which he was famous. Flood’s name is to be found in
the list of the benefactors of Trinity College. He left an estate
of five thousand pounds, to be devoted to the purchase of Irish
MSS., and for the encouragement of the study of that language.
In the minutes of the Irish Parliament, as moving and seconding
motions for the removal of the political disabilities of the Roman
Catholics, appear frequently in combination the names of two
peers educated in Dublin University--Lords Mountjoy and O’Neill.
Parliamentary friends when the insurrection of Ninety-Eight plunged
the country into civil war, they became brothers in arms. Alike in
fate, O’Neill fell at the battle of Antrim, Mountjoy at New Ross.
Another illustrious Irish name among the Dublin graduates of the
period is that of Sir Lucius O’Brien, a leading statesman and
financier in the Lower House, a man of much practical ability and
of unblemished honour. As leader of the “Country Party,” he was
foremost in the successful struggle to relieve Irish finance from
waste and corruption, and to free Irish trade and legislation from
unjust restriction.
Plunket, by some considered Grattan’s equal as an orator, must be
regarded as one of the most remarkable men of his age. At the Bar,
as in the Senate, he made a profound impression upon men who,
like Lord Brougham, his warm friend and admirer, were keen critics
and trained lawyers. The severity of his style distinguishes him
from all other speakers of the period. The grace and beauty of
Plunket’s oratory are not to be found in any wealth of ornamental
diction. Its texture was logical; every phrase, whether direct or
involving illustration, was uttered with but one end in view--that
of persuasion. To dazzle without producing conviction is not a part
of the aim of any sincere man. Plunket made no effort to captivate
the sense; he addressed himself to the reason, and to honourable
victory.
[Illustration: PLUNKET.]
Curran, afterwards Master of the Rolls under Fox during his short
administration, made his reputation as a speaker by his defence
of the prisoners in the trials of Ninety-Eight. The speech--a
masterpiece--in which he defended Hamilton Rowan, was, in the
estimation of Brougham, “the most eloquent speech ever delivered at
the Bar.” Curran’s eloquence is florid and passionate, more typical
of Irish oratory, as that phrase is usually understood, than that
of the greater men of the time. He appealed more directly to the
emotions, and was a consummate master in that difficult art--the
arousing and controlling the feelings of his audience. In this
art his younger contemporary, Richard Lalor Sheil, also excelled.
Although of undignified figure, and denied by nature the gifts of
voice and manner which fascinate public assemblies, he overcame all
obstacles to the attainment of that power which, unlike that of the
poet or philosopher, is always a witness of its own triumph.
Thomas Moore was one of the first Roman Catholics to take advantage
of the Act of 1793, which threw open to them the University of
Dublin. Although his co-religionists now obtained the privilege
of attending the College classes, they were debarred until many
years later from the higher academic honours, and Moore, who was
entitled to a Scholarship on his answering, could not profit by
it. He was, however, recognised by the authorities as a youth of
promise, and was the recipient on one occasion of a special prize
for a set of English verses, the prize being a copy of the _Travels
of Anacharsis_, with the inscription, “_Propter laudabilem in
versibus componendis progressum_.” Moore’s recollections of the
debates in the Historical Society, of which he was a prominent
member, are full of interest. He became a close friend of Emmet,
who was, he tells us, at this time “of the popular side in the
Society the chief champion and ornament.” In 1798, when Lord Clare,
the Vice-Chancellor of the University, held a solemn Visitation,
with the view of discovering whether any treasonable persons or
factions had been at work among the students, Moore was examined
as a witness. At first he refused to take the oath, but, on
learning that such refusal would lead to expulsion, submitted,
and gave his evidence, which disclaimed all knowledge of any
secret societies within the University. Moore acknowledges that
the Visitation, though somewhat of an arbitrary proceeding, was
justified in its results. There were, he tells us, a few, among
them Robert Emmet, “whose total absence from the whole scene, as
well as the dead silence that day after day followed the calling
out of their names, proclaimed how deep had been their share in the
unlawful proceedings inquired into by this tribunal.” The modern
critics of the psychological school seem to have agreed to place
“Anacreon” Moore far down on the roll of the “followers of the
narrow footsteps of the bards.” They are unable to find, in _Lalla
Rookh_ or the _Irish Melodies_, the intellectual mastery of life
without which poetry has for them no real value. They complain that
in Moore the sense of
“The heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world”
is not sufficiently emphasised, and that he must therefore take
rank as a poet of society upon whom the eternal problems did not
press heavily enough to make him a poet-philosopher. The indictment
may indeed be partially true; but there is poetry which has as
little of the character of a profound philosophy as have the
cravings of the human heart. “The Meeting of the Waters” or “She
is far from the land,” though unweighted by any profound or subtle
thought, will outlive--to venture on prediction--the splendid
unravelling of intellectual complexities in “Mr. Sludge, the
Medium.” There is not, I believe, to be found in any literature
more melodious utterance of real emotion than in the songs of
this true poetic brother of Oliver Goldsmith--like him, and
unlike many of his contemporaries, possessed of “the great poetic
heart,” the possession of which, we have been told, is “more than
all poetic fame.” The charm, as I have already observed, of the
greater part of the poetry and prose of Ireland, lies in its
unaffected purity and naturalness. The lyrical cry we hear in
the music-marvels--“I saw from the beach” and “Oft in the stilly
night”--has a piercing sweetness unrivalled by greater poets of
vastly wider range. For the creator of a nation’s songs there is
little need to fear, despite the critics, the verdict, in a phrase
of Archer Butler’s, of “the incorruptible Areopagus of posterity.”
[Illustration: “THE BURIAL OF SIR JOHN MOORE.”
FAC-SIMILE FROM ORIGINAL LETTER IN THE LIBRARY OF THE ROYAL IRISH
ACADEMY.
(_By Permission._)]
[Illustration: (second page)]
Yet other members of the Historical Society were found among the
leaders of the revolutionary party in the troublous times of the
Irish Rebellion. Wolfe Tone, the leader of the United Irishmen, had
sat in the chair of the Society, obtained three of its medals, and
delivered the closing address of one of the sessions. His place
in history has been accurately defined by a brilliant young Irish
University man of the present generation, Mr. T. W. Rolleston:
“He found national sentiment the property of a small aristocratic
section; he left it the dominant sentiment of the millions of the
Irish democracy.”
The author of “A Battle of Freedom,” Thomas Davis, may rightly be
called the Tyrtæus of the national party. He too held the premier
office, that of Auditor, in the Society above mentioned, and might,
had he lived, have reached a high place, not only among Irish but
among English poets.
Dublin claims many other names of literary note--Sir Samuel
Ferguson, recently lost to us, whose themes were the ancient
traditions and legends of his native land; and (to go a generation
further back) that poet who has earned the laurel by adding to the
treasury of literature one poem not to be forgotten--“The Burial of
Sir John Moore.” (_See fac-simile_, pp. 260, 261.)
It is not part of my task to write contemporary history, of the
Senate or the Bar, in the careers of Butt or Napier or Whiteside
or Cairns. With students of philosophy Archer Butler is a name
to be reverenced, and Stokes and Graves gave to the School of
Medicine in Dublin a European reputation, as witness such a
passage as this from Professor Trousseau: “As Clinical Professor
in the Faculty of Medicine of Paris, I have incessantly read and
re-read the work of Graves; I have become inspired with it in my
teaching; I have endeavoured to imitate it in the book I have
myself published on the Clinique of the Hotel-Dieu; and even now,
though I know almost by heart all that the Dublin Professor has
written, I cannot refrain from perusing a book which never leaves
my study.” In theology, Magee--Archbishop of Dublin, O’Brien, Lee,
and Fitzgerald, and in Irish antiquarian research Todd and Reeves,
have made for themselves an abiding reputation.
[Illustration: (bust of James MacCullagh)]
Mathematicians will not need to be reminded of the importance of
the work done in their province by Hamilton and MacCullagh. Sir
William Rowan Hamilton ranks with the greatest of the explorers of
new scientific territory. To name the author of the _General Method
in Dynamics_ and the inventor of the method of Quaternions is
sufficient; it is impossible here to do more. The position held by
Trinity College in this century as a seat of mathematical learning
is largely due to MacCullagh. He it was who introduced here a more
comprehensive study of the work of Continental mathematicians,
under the auspices of Provost Lloyd.
[Illustration: LEVER.]
The Irish novelists, Maxwell and Le Fanu, have been overshadowed by
the greater Lever. Lever’s descriptions of College life in _Charles
O’Malley_ and other of his novels are a faithful reproduction of
his own experiences. Take him all in all, he is one of the best
story-tellers we have had or shall ever have; a romancer who holds
his readers breathless till the last page is turned in his stories
of adventure, and a dramatist whose situations are among the most
powerful in fiction. The underlying melancholy which Thackeray
saw in Lever gives to his later books, from which the high boyish
spirits of the earlier tales are absent, a graver and deeper human
interest. But he is the most cheerful companion of all the great
story-tellers; and who does not feel a relief in taking up Lever
after the motive-grinding and mental dissections of the modern
novel of purpose?
With the last mentioned name I shall close this review, for I must
not enter the world of to-day. The careers which we or our fathers
have watched in person have been too lately followed to be spoken
of here. They must read many books who seek to know the fortunes
and achievements of the graduates of Dublin in recent years, for a
record of them will carry the reader into the political, military,
and literary history of the English-speaking peoples in all the
continents.
[Illustration: BERKELEY’S TOMB.]
[Illustration: (Decorative section heading)]
DISTINGUISHED GRADUATES
_Referred to in Chapter IX._
PAGE
ASHE, ST. GEORGE 243
BERKELEY, GEORGE 249
BOYLE, ROBERT 241
BRADY, NICHOLAS 241
BROOKE, HENRY 248
BROWNE, PETER 241
BURKE, EDMUND 252
BUSHE, CHARLES KENDEL 253
BUTLER, WILLIAM ARCHER 262
BUTT, ISAAC 262
CLAYTON, ROBERT 252
CONGREVE, WILLIAM 246
CONYNGHAM, WILLIAM, LORD PLUNKET 258
CURRAN, JOHN PHILPOT 258
DAVIS, THOMAS 262
DELANY, PATRICK 243
DENHAM, SIR JOHN 241
DILLON, EARL OF ROSCOMMON 241
DODWELL, HENRY 240
DOPPING, ANTHONY 242
EMMET, ROBERT 259
FARQUHAR, GEORGE 247
FERGUSON, SIR SAMUEL 262
FITZGIBBON, JOHN, EARL OF CLARE 255
FLOOD, HENRY 256
GOLDSMITH, OLIVER 252
GRATTAN, HENRY 255
GRAVES, ROBERT JAMES 262
HAMILTON, SIR WILLIAM ROWAN 263
KING, WILLIAM 241
LESLIE, CHARLES 241
LEVER, CHARLES 263
LE FANU, SHERIDAN 263
LOFTUS, DUDLEY 239
M‘CALMONT, HUGH, EARL CAIRNS 262
MACCULLAGH, JAMES 263
MAGEE, WILLIAM (DUBLIN) 262
MAGEE, WILLIAM CONNOR (YORK) 253
MALONE, EDMUND 253
MAXWELL, WILLIAM 263
MOLYNEUX, WILLIAM 243
MOORE, THOMAS 258
NAPIER, SIR JOSEPH 262
O’BRIEN, SIR LUCIUS 257
PARNELL, THOMAS 248
SHEIL, RICHARD LALOR 258
SKELTON, PHILIP 252
SOUTHERNE, THOMAS 245
SWIFT, JONATHAN 244
TATE, NAHUM 241
TONE, THEOBALD WOLFE 262
TOPLADY, AUGUSTUS 253
USSHER, JAMES 238
WARE, SIR JAMES 239
WHITESIDE, JAMES 262
WILSON, THOMAS 241
WOLFE, CHARLES 260-261
WELLESLEY, GARROD, EARL OF MORNINGTON 253
[Illustration:
MEADE. GARRET WESLEY. CAUFIELD.
1760. 1751. 1690.
]