Chapter 15

The most Reverend Father inGodWilliam 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 schoolrégime. 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 “I scarce had twenty pounds,” he tells us in an unpublished autograph memoir preserved in Armagh Diocesan Library, “in all the six years I spent in College, save from the College (Scholarship).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 appearnearlyall 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 theArchbishop 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 ofWilliam’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.(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 acontroversy 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.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 ofGulliver, which dominated from Laracor Parsonage the counsels of statesmen and the fortunes of governments, and which could, in theDrapier’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 hisTravels 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.”(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 indignatioCor 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.”Thomas Southerne Esqr.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” ofmodern 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” isthe 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 runWithout a blot to eighty-one.Kind Boyle before his poet laysA 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 atour de forcein dramatic art.MrWilliam 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:—“DearBob, 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 hisFool of Quality, published in the same year as the now famousVicar 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.Berkeley.At Kilkenny School, the Eton of Ireland, where Congreve and Swift had also been pupils, George Berkeley received his early educationsub ferulaa 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’sEssaywas 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 VisionandThe Principles of Human Knowledgeare 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, theeffluence 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 senseThe 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 fuerisSi amans patriæUtroque nomine gloriari potesBerkleium 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 theVicar of Wakefieldand theDeserted 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. Addisonis 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.Catois forgotten, butShe Stoops to Conqueris with us still. TheSpectatoris read in the study of the student of literature, but theVicar of Wakefieldin 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 afilius 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 themens conscia rectican 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 acautious 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.”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 DublinMater 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.” Itmay 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 measurewhich 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 profoundimpression 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.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 authoritiesas 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 theTravels 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, inLalla Rookhor theIrish Melodies, the intellectual mastery of life without which poetry has for them no real value. They complain that in Moore the sense of

The most Reverend Father inGodWilliam 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 schoolrégime. 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 appearnearlyall 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 theArchbishop 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 ofWilliam’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.

(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 acontroversy 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.

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 ofGulliver, which dominated from Laracor Parsonage the counsels of statesmen and the fortunes of governments, and which could, in theDrapier’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 hisTravels 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.”

(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 indignatioCor ulterius lacerare nequit.”

“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.”

Thomas Southerne Esqr.

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” ofmodern 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” isthe 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 runWithout a blot to eighty-one.Kind Boyle before his poet laysA table with a cloth of bays,And Ireland, mother of sweet singers,Presents her harp still to his fingers.”

“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;”

“ ... 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 atour de forcein dramatic art.

MrWilliam 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:—“DearBob, 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 hisFool of Quality, published in the same year as the now famousVicar 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.

Berkeley.

At Kilkenny School, the Eton of Ireland, where Congreve and Swift had also been pupils, George Berkeley received his early educationsub ferulaa 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’sEssaywas 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 VisionandThe Principles of Human Knowledgeare 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, theeffluence 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 senseThe 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.”

“In happy climes, the seat of innocence,Where nature guides and virtue rules,Where men shall not impose for truth and senseThe pedantry of courts and schools;

“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.

“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.

“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.”

“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 fuerisSi amans patriæUtroque nomine gloriari potesBerkleium vixisse.”

“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 theVicar of Wakefieldand theDeserted 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. Addisonis 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.Catois forgotten, butShe Stoops to Conqueris with us still. TheSpectatoris read in the study of the student of literature, but theVicar of Wakefieldin 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 afilius 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 themens conscia rectican 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 acautious 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.”

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 DublinMater 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.” Itmay 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 measurewhich 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 profoundimpression 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.

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 authoritiesas 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 theTravels 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, inLalla Rookhor theIrish Melodies, the intellectual mastery of life without which poetry has for them no real value. They complain that in Moore the sense of

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