The history of the University founded by Elizabeth is the history of the greatest institution in this country, which, amidst so much failure, has been a permanent and indisputable success. During the dark ages of Ireland’s confusion and misery, the lamp of learning and culture was here kept alight. No small achievement will this seem in the eyes of those to whom the social and political condition of the country, during the two hundred years which followed the granting of the Charter to the “mother of a University” in Dublin, are even superficially known.
In 1591, the meadow land and orchards of the Monastery of All Hallows, near the city, which had become the property of the Corporation upon the dissolution of all such establishments by Henry VIII., were transferred to the Provost and Fellows appointed under the Royal Seal; and where, fifty years before, the brotherhood of Prior and Monks had passed their days in the quiet seclusion of a life apart from the busy world of ambitious men, there now began the quick and vivid play of thought and feeling which mark a University in which the minds of the future leaders of the people are moulded and exercised. The more prominent names in the list of the graduates of Elizabeth’s College are abundant proof of the paramount position of influence from the first maintained by it in every department of the public life of the country, and the importance of its work in training the men who have been in the van of progress in culture and science, and among the leaders of every political movement in Ireland; many of them, too, in the wider field offered by England, and, in these later days, in the still wider field of the colonies and dependencies under the Crown. The traditions and prestige attached to such an institution are inalienable, and it will indeed be strange if any statesman attempt, as is sometimes apprehended, the impossible task of disturbing or transferring them. The greater part of the history of Ireland since the opening of the seventeenth century can be read in the more public lives of the alumni of Trinity College.
Oxford, it is said, has been the University of great movements; Cambridge, of great men. Genius indeed is not the outcome or resultant of academic life and traditions, while intellectual and social movements may in a measure be traced to such sources. Thus may Oxford fairly claim for herself influences more wide-reaching than her sister, although she cannot boast an equally distinguished family. It must indeed be remembered that genius is resentful of restrictions, and the debt acknowledged to any University by its greatest sons is usually but a limited one. To her poets, Landor and Shelley, Oxford was a harsh stepmother, and many a young man, afterwards to be famous, left the banks of Cam without gratitude and without regret. Nevertheless, a distinctive type of culture, often of directing power, even though resisted, prevails at every great centre of learning. If the dignity of a seat of learning is to be determined by the intellectual splendour of the names associated with it, Oxford must give place to Dublin as well as to Cambridge. There is no Oxonian to rank with Swift or Burke.
But all such comparisons are idle; the Irish sister of the two great English Universities has had a far different career, and her type of culture is essentially distinctive, and not that of another. Oxford, “the home of lost causes and forsaken beliefs and impossible loyalties,” has a charm all her own. The old Irish College does not lie, like that “Queen of Romance, steeped in sentiment, and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the middle ages.” To sentiment she has ever been a stranger, and she lies at the heart of a metropolis. But perhaps the atmosphere of sentiment is not compatible with that of reason, and Dublin has been the home of intellectual sanity. Unadorned by creeper or “ivy serpentine,” no quaint windows or secluded cloisters bring to the thoughtful student of “Old Trinity” visions of the monks of the Monastery of All Saints; and no one who knows her history, or has breathed her keen disillusionising air, would conceive as possible the fostering of an intellectualism such as that of Newman under the shadow of her Greek porticoes. Like her architecture, the mind of the University of Dublin has been more Greek than that of her English sisters. The spirit of Plato dwelt in Berkeley as it never could have done in a thinker educated in a University dominated by the methods of Bacon. In Edmund Burke the philosophical statesmanship of the Athenian Republic was revived as the “last enchantments of the middle ages,” with all their witchery, could never have revived it. Dublin has never given herself over to the idols of the forum or the market-place, nor worshipped at the shrine of utilitarian philosophies. She has not swung incense in the chapel of Hobbes or Herbert Spencer, nor bowed the knee to a dictator in the Vatican of science. She has betrayed as little enthusiasm for the cause of the Stuarts as for that of Pusey and Keble. When we call to mind her position in the heart of a country misunderstood and misgoverned for centuries, we cannot but marvel that she has so serenely kept the via media between political, philosophical, and social extremes. At once less conservative and less radical than her sisters, a dry intellectual light has been her guide. It may be that the native humour of the soil has preserved her from the follies of dogmatism—ecclesiastical, scientific, political, or literary,—and equally so from frenzied devotion to hopeless causes or extravagant theories. Stranger to sentiment, and no “Queen of Romance,” I cannot think that an enemy could deny beauty to the solemn stateliness of her quadrangles. In the quiet of moonlit nights, or when the summer sun shines upon the grey walls and the green of grass and foliage in her courts and park, there are few so unimpressionable as to remain insensible to her dignity and loveliness. But her truest dignity is in the intellectual honour of her sons.
JACOBUS USSERIUS,
ARCHIEPISCOPUS ARMACHANUS,
TOTIUS HIBERNIÆ PRIMAS
Among the very first batch of graduates in these the infant days of the College a great personality appears. At the first Public Commencements held in 1601, on Shrove Tuesday, in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, “Sir Ussher,” one of the students entered at the first matriculation examination, was admitted to his Master’s degree. James Ussher was of a family that had been resident in Ireland since the time of King John, and on both sides of the house his ancestors had held important public offices. His grandfather had been Speaker of the Irish House of Commons, and his uncle, afterwards Primate of Ireland, while Archdeacon in Dublin had had much to do with the foundation of the Irish University. “Sir Ussher” became Fellow and Proctor in due time, and while still under age was by a faculty ordained Priest and Deacon. His first recorded visit to England was that upon the errand in which he met with Sir Thomas Bodley buying books for the Oxford Library which now bears his name. Two of the greatest Libraries of the United Kingdom were thus associated in their foundation. The energy and extraordinary abilities of Ussher were soon very widely recognised, and he was offered the Provostship in 1609, which position, however, he declined. On the occasion of his next visit to England, he bore a letter of recommendation to King James from the Lord Deputy and Council, it being supposed that the King was prejudiced against him. The gifts and learning which had made him so conspicuous a figure in Ireland did not fail to impress the King, who appointed him Bishop of Meath, “a Bishop of his own making,” as he said. He preached, while in London, before the Commons and at St. Margaret’s. During his tenure of the Bishopric he was very prominent in public affairs, and in 1625 he was raised to the Primacy. While occupied with the high civil and episcopal duties of his many offices, he was extending that learning which placed him at the head of the scholars of the day, and for which he is still read and honoured. Burnet writes of him as a man “of a most amazing diligence and exactness, joined with great judgment. Together with his vast learning, no man had a better soul and a more apostolical mind. In his conversation he expressed the true simplicity of a Christian, for passion, pride and self-will, and the love of the world seemed not so much as in his nature; so that he had all the innocence of the dove in him. He was certainly one of the greatest and best men that the age, perhaps the world, has produced.” Selden spoke of him as “vir summa pictate, judicio singulari, usque ad miraculum doctus.”
To compass, even in a volume, the bare record of the important public acts of Ussher while Archbishop of Armagh, would be a difficult task. He is the towering figure of his time, and seems to stand as centre to its history, overshadowing both churchmen and statesmen of ordinary stature, a period which reckoned among its prominent men educated in Dublin such scholars as Dudley Loftus, and such antiquarians as Sir James Ware. In 1640 the Primate was forced by the troubles of the time to go for a sojourn to England, which proved to be for the rest of his life. He was taken into the counsels of King Charles about the modification of Episcopal government such as to satisfy Presbyterians, and propounded a scheme with that view. From this time he was one of the King’s confidential advisers, and warned him against the signing of the Bill of Attainder against Strafford. When he knew that it had been done, Ussher broke out with “O sir! what have you done? Pray God your Majesty may never suffer by signing this Bill!” He bore the King’s last messages to Strafford, and attended him in prison and to the scaffold, bearing back the report of his execution to Charles.
At this period of his life, an unhappy and stormy one, he had many invitations from abroad; among others, from Cardinal Richelieu, who offered him a pension and free exercise of his religion in France. After the manner of the Greek heroes, these two princes of the Church interchanged gifts, the Cardinal sending Ussher a gold medal, and the Primate, in return, two Irish-greyhounds. The invitation to settle in France was renewed by the Queen Regent, Anne of Austria; but this, among other offers, such as that of a Chair in the University of Leyden, he declined. During the civil war his experiences were most unhappy, and although reverenced by the chiefs of the Parliamentary party as a man of astonishing genius and unswerving rectitude, his property was frequently plundered, and his life, if not actually endangered, rendered hopeless and miserable by the uncertainties and distress of his condition. He suffered, indeed, at the hands of the Government; for when summoned to the Assembly of Divines at Westminster by Parliament, he declined to present himself, and was, as a consequence, denounced, and his library confiscated; but by the help of influential friends it was restored to him. Ussher’s learning was so wide and deep, especially in theology, that in many instances the researches and discoveries of modern scholars have only served to confirm his judgments. A striking example of his acumen is to be found in his edition of Ignatius and Polycarp. Observing that three English writers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries cite Ignatius in a different form from what was then known, but agreeing with citations made by Eusebius and others, he was led to divine the existence of copies of the different form in England. Search was accordingly made, and his forecast was verified by the discovery of two Latin versions—one in Caius College, Cambridge, while a Greek text corresponding was recovered in Florence. This is the text of Ignatius now generally received, and has recently been established as the true text, as against that current before Ussher’s time, by the late Bishop Lightfoot, who speaks of this work as “showing not only marvellous erudition, but also the highest critical genius.” The great Primate’s sagacity, not only in matters of scholarship but in matters of State, was regarded in his own day as approaching that of inspiration, and a volume of his predictions respecting public affairs was actually published.