THE THEATRE.
The Examination Hall, or Theatre, as it is more correctly called, was designed by Sir William Chambers in 1777, and corresponds in its external appearance exactly with that of the Chapel, although its interior arrangement is naturally very different. Ten pilasters, with feeble capitals of a tasteless composite order, are disposed round the walls, standing each one singly at intervals of twelve feet on a rustic basement ten feet high, and supporting a handsome stucco frieze and bold cornice, the work of Italian artists. The pilasters themselves are ornamented with stucco scroll-work of florid Roman character. From the cornice springs the ceiling, which is also very richly ornamented in stucco, designed, modelled, and painted in the same style as the ceiling of the Chapel, by Mayers, under the direction of Sir William Chambers. In the five panels on the east side of the Hall are placed full-length portraits of Queen Elizabeth, the foundress, in her state robes; of Archbishop Ussher, Archbishop King, Bishop Berkeley, and Provost Baldwin.[153] In four of the panels on the opposite side are portraits of Edmund Burke—not by Sir Joshua Reynolds, as is usually asserted, but by Hoppner; of William Molyneux; of Fitzgibbon, Earl of Clare, by Stewart (an American artist of some reputation); and of Dean Swift. Under the centre panel is placed an elaborate monument (which is represented in the accompanying engraving) to Provost Baldwin, who died in 1758. The monument is some nine feet long and about six feet high and four feet in depth from the wall, and consists of three figures in white marble standing over a sarcophagus of dark porphyry. It is the work of a Dublin artist of the name of Hewetson, who executed it at his studio at Rome. The Hall is seventy feet long to the base line of the semicircular apse, which extends to a further distance of twenty feet, and is forty feet wide and forty-four feet high. It is lighted by three windows in the circular apse at the upper end, and by a range of small fan-shaped windows placed over the cornice. An elaborate gilt chandelier, designed to hold sixty wax candles, remarkably light and graceful in character, and which belonged to the old House of Commons in College Green, hangs in the centre of the Hall (see page [130]). At the lower end, and over the deep portico and doorway, is a room in which is placed a small organ that formerly stood in the old Chapel, and which is traditionally said to have been taken out of a Spanish ship which formed part of the Armada, and was wrecked on the coast of Ireland.
BALDWIN’S MONUMENT.
But the legend is without form or foundation. The true history of the organ and its acquisition, however, is sufficiently interesting to be worth recording. On the 11th of October, 1702, a fleet of twenty-five English and Dutch ships of war, under the supreme command of Admiral Rooke, having been foiled in an attack on Cadiz, sailed into Vigo Bay, where the combined French and Spanish fleets were then collected. A body of 2,500 soldiers, under the command of Richard, second Duke of Ormonde,[154] landed under some fortifications eight or nine miles from the town of Vigo, silenced the batteries, and captured no less than forty pieces of cannon. A large number of the enemy’s ships were burned and sunk by the British fleet, including six great galleons with treasure on board to the extent of 14,000,000 pieces of eight; and a number of vessels of all kinds were taken as prizes. Among them was a ship containing, carefully packed as part of her freight, an organ destined in all probability for Mexico or Peru—the gift, it may be, of his most Catholic Majesty Philip the Fifth to some favoured church in Spanish America. Rooke declined to attack the town, and sailed away with his prizes to England. He was tried by court-martial on his arrival, and honourably acquitted, and lived to earn undying fame two years later by the taking of Gibraltar. But the Duke of Ormonde enjoyed all the credit of the victory at Vigo,[155] and was soon after appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (1703), when he presented the organ, so strangely acquired, to Trinity College, Dublin. There was a solemn Thanksgiving Service at St. Paul’s in honour of Ormonde’s victory, at which Queen Anne was present, and a medal was struck in commemoration of the event, of which an example may be seen in the College Library. The organ is said to have been originally built in the Spanish Netherlands, and was repaired and enlarged in Dublin by Cuvillie in 1705, before it was placed in the old Chapel. But the instrument that now stands in the gallery of the Theatre is not the organ as it was presented by the Duke of Ormonde, or even as it left the hands of Cuvillie. “When the University Choral Society,” writes Sir Robert Stewart, “was founded (1837), they resolved to erect an organ for their accompaniments; and by the aid of the Lord Primate, who contributed £50 to the cost, this was done, and an instrument of two rows of keys and pedals was placed at the north end of the Commons Hall about 1839. But the Society, finding it useless for their purpose, sold it to the Board, who were glad to remove it from the space which was required for Commons, Examinations, and Lectures. The organ case which stands in the gallery of the Examination Hall contains at present the pipes of the organ built by Telford for the University Choral Society in 1839. All the old Spanish pipes having been removed from its interior, the case closely resembles all those organs built in the eighteenth century, a familiar type abounding in cherubs, heraldic mantlings, rococo scroll-work, all being surmounted by the Royal Arms.”[156]
Another more modern legend connected with this Theatre may be worth recording. When George IV. visited Dublin, he was entertained, as it was fitting that he should be, by the University. And to make his way plainer from the Provost’s House to the Theatre, where the Degrees were conferred in his presence, a part of the wall of the apse facing the Provost’s House, where his Majesty was received, was removed, and the grand procession entered the Hall without the necessity of going round to the main doorway. The masonry on the outside of the Hall still bears evidence of the destruction and restoration that was necessitated by this most loyal smoothing of the path of the royal guest.
One of the greatest improvements of recent times in the College precincts—a happy artistic inspiration—has been effected at comparatively small cost either of money or of trouble. In matters of art and taste, when the right thing is done, the result is commonly quite out of proportion to the material magnitude of the work. In the spring of 1892, the low granite wall, with its high iron railing, which ran from the north-east corner of the Library Buildings to the side of the Examination Hall, was moved back some fifty feet. As it stood before, it not only broke in upon the fine eastern façade of the Examination Hall, ninety feet in length, but it entirely concealed the lower story of the western end of the Library, and blocked up the main door of that building; and its lines were as meaningless and inappropriate as they are now harmonious and satisfactory. The actual amount of ground thus thrown into the quadrangle is only about five hundred square yards, or perhaps one-fiftieth part of the total area of the great square of the College. But it would be difficult to find a unit to express the magnitude of the improvement.