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. Addison is 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. Cato is forgotten, but She Stoops to Conquer is with us still. The Spectator is read in the study of the student of literature, but the Vicar of Wakefield in 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 a filius 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 the mens conscia recti can 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 a cautious 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 Dublin Mater 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.” It may 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.”