A singing man, and yet not sing?
How justify your patron’s bounty?
Forgive me; you mistake the thing;
My voice is in another county.
This same Mansel* came, some years later, to great dignity as Bishop of Bristol and Master of Trinity. His mastership, from 1798 to 1820, closes the eighteenth century. The most distinguished member of the college at this time was the great Professor of Greek, Richard Porson,* who died in 1808 at the age of forty-nine. His beautiful Greek handwriting may be seen in one of the cases in the college library. Otherwise, the scholars of the last century are few and far between. Trinity was, however, the great nursing-place for noblemen; and among the number of her sons may be mentioned the famous Marquess of Granby (* Reynolds) whose head serves as the sign for so many inns; John Jefferies Pratt, Marquess Camden and Chancellor of the University (* Lawrence), George Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Grafton (* Lawrence), and, of royal blood, William Frederick, Duke of Gloucester (* Gainsborough, Romney, Opie), Chancellor of the University, and Frederick Augustus, Duke of Sussex (* Lonsdale). A great statesman of the day was Spencer Perceval,* who was assassinated in the lobby of the Houses of Parliament. But, if we turn to men of letters and poets, we merely find such men as the parodist, Isaac Hawkins Browne.*
Lord Byron received his education under Mansel. His career at Cambridge would be scarcely worth recording, were he not Byron; for it is the record of a foolish series of silly exploits and eccentricities bordering on madness. The place of honour which is given to his statue in the library always seems a little better than his merits. He occupied rooms in Nevile’s Court, and contrived, during his residence, to irritate the college authorities. Mansel, as master, had a very exalted idea of the virtues of his position, and, from the anecdotes which are told of him, must have made himself peculiarly unpleasant. He was the last master of Trinity who combined that office with episcopal dignity. His successor, Christopher Wordsworth,* master from 1820 to 1841, was brother to the poet, and father of the late saintly Bishop of Lincoln.
During Wordsworth’s time, the college was full of great men. Adam Sedgwick* was Professor of Geology. Another member of the college was Thomas Babington Macaulay, who was born with the century. As Fellow of Trinity, the great historian was thoroughly identified with the college, and, nine years after his death, his statue, by Woolner, was placed among the distinguished society of the antechapel. Younger by nine years than Macaulay was Alfred Tennyson (* Watts), who, in a few exquisite verses, made himself peculiarly the poet of Trinity. The chief event of his Cambridge life was, of course, his friendship for Arthur Henry Hallam, who lived, as is well known, in the New Court. Tennyson himself was otherwise not greatly attached to Cambridge. He lived at some distance from Trinity, in Corpus Buildings, and went down without taking his degree. In this respect, Thackeray (* Bogle), two years his junior, was very different from him. Through all his life, Thackeray, although he was so closely identified with London, kept his love for Cambridge, and was at heart a don. While still in residence, he would walk reading along one of the paths in the Great Court, and, in after life, he constantly returned. His rooms were close to Newton’s, north of the Great Gate. Probably no one has handled University life with more success—the subject is proverbially difficult—than Thackeray in the early chapters of Pendennis; and, in most of his novels, he sent his heroes to colleges which, whether he placed them in Oxford or Cambridge, have all the features of his beloved Trinity.
With Thackeray we are hard on the heels of our own age. The modern period of Trinity’s history begins with the mastership of William Whewell, whose name is inseparable from his college. The twenty-five years of his mastership, from 1841 to 1866, form a very distinguished epoch. As scholar, organiser, and benefactor to the foundation, he was pre-eminent. The famous epigram which said of him that “Science was his forte and omniscience his foible” was in the main true, but he carried to everything he attempted an immense interest and a sound judgment. His statue very worthily completes the group in the antechapel. It was erected during the mastership of his successor, William Hepworth Thompson (* Herkomer) the Platonist, famous for his erudition and his bons mots. Before his elevation to the mastership, Dr Thompson had been Regius Professor of Greek. The men of his generation who belonged to the Society were men of the highest eminence; the best known are, perhaps, Joseph Barber Lightfoot (* Richmond, Dickinson), the commentator on St Paul’s Epistles and Bishop of Durham; James Clerk Maxwell,* Professor of Experimental Physics in the University; the late Arthur Cayley (* Dickinson), the greatest mathematician whom Trinity boasts since the days of Newton; and the Public Orator, W. G. Clark (bust by Woolner), Thompson’s life-long friend. When Thompson died in 1886, he was succeeded by the present master, Dr Butler, who had been Head Master of Harrow and Dean of Gloucester. Beneath these rulers, and with the highest prestige in the world as her tradition, Trinity fully justifies her distinction as a royal foundation and a nursing-mother of sound and religious learning. To select from the present society is invidious; but the names of Professor Henry Sidgwick, Professor Michael Foster (* Herkomer), Dr Henry Jackson (* Furse), and Professor Jebb, are of European repute, to say nothing of the present vice-master, Mr Aldis Wright, editor of Shakspeare, and Mr John Willis Clark, the present Registrary, whose investigations in Cambridge history and antiquities are well known everywhere. In the Church one may point to the theologian Dr Westcott, Bishop of Durham, to Dr Farrar, Dean of Canterbury, and to the late Charles Alan Smythies, Bishop of Zanzibar; among politicians, to Mr Arthur and Mr Gerald Balfour, and Sir William Harcourt; while of doctors, lawyers and men of letters the crowd cannot be numbered.