Dublin claims many other names of literary note—Sir Samuel Ferguson, recently lost to us, whose themes were the ancient traditions and legends of his native land; and (to go a generation further back) that poet who has earned the laurel by adding to the treasury of literature one poem not to be forgotten—“The Burial of Sir John Moore.” (See fac-simile, [pp. 260, 261].)
It is not part of my task to write contemporary history, of the Senate or the Bar, in the careers of Butt or Napier or Whiteside or Cairns. With students of philosophy Archer Butler is a name to be reverenced, and Stokes and Graves gave to the School of Medicine in Dublin a European reputation, as witness such a passage as this from Professor Trousseau: “As Clinical Professor in the Faculty of Medicine of Paris, I have incessantly read and re-read the work of Graves; I have become inspired with it in my teaching; I have endeavoured to imitate it in the book I have myself published on the Clinique of the Hotel-Dieu; and even now, though I know almost by heart all that the Dublin Professor has written, I cannot refrain from perusing a book which never leaves my study.” In theology, Magee—Archbishop of Dublin, O’Brien, Lee, and Fitzgerald, and in Irish antiquarian research Todd and Reeves, have made for themselves an abiding reputation.
(bust of James MacCullagh)
Mathematicians will not need to be reminded of the importance of the work done in their province by Hamilton and MacCullagh. Sir William Rowan Hamilton ranks with the greatest of the explorers of new scientific territory. To name the author of the General Method in Dynamics and the inventor of the method of Quaternions is sufficient; it is impossible here to do more. The position held by Trinity College in this century as a seat of mathematical learning is largely due to MacCullagh. He it was who introduced here a more comprehensive study of the work of Continental mathematicians, under the auspices of Provost Lloyd.
LEVER.
The Irish novelists, Maxwell and Le Fanu, have been overshadowed by the greater Lever. Lever’s descriptions of College life in Charles O’Malley and other of his novels are a faithful reproduction of his own experiences. Take him all in all, he is one of the best story-tellers we have had or shall ever have; a romancer who holds his readers breathless till the last page is turned in his stories of adventure, and a dramatist whose situations are among the most powerful in fiction. The underlying melancholy which Thackeray saw in Lever gives to his later books, from which the high boyish spirits of the earlier tales are absent, a graver and deeper human interest. But he is the most cheerful companion of all the great story-tellers; and who does not feel a relief in taking up Lever after the motive-grinding and mental dissections of the modern novel of purpose?
With the last mentioned name I shall close this review, for I must not enter the world of to-day. The careers which we or our fathers have watched in person have been too lately followed to be spoken of here. They must read many books who seek to know the fortunes and achievements of the graduates of Dublin in recent years, for a record of them will carry the reader into the political, military, and literary history of the English-speaking peoples in all the continents.