The shorter the epitaph the greater the man!
The vaults under the Chapel were closed in 1867. Several of the Provosts and Senior Fellows were buried in them; the last burial was that of Provost MacDonnell.
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.