PALLISER CUP,
1709.
“Lord Mornington, for Plate, £659 11s. 7d.” Whether this sum represents the price of the plate purchased from him by the College, or that which he was authorised to expend for the College, we cannot say. In eight years from 1758, a sum of close upon £1250 was expended in purchases of this description. No doubt the College had at this period many large cups presented to it from time to time, but in respect to ordinary table silver it appears to have been in Provost Baldwin’s time very deficient. When the Lord Lieutenant was entertained by the College, plate had to be hired of the silversmiths for the occasion; but as each Fellow-Commoner had been for a long period charged £6 at his entrance for plate, and each Pensioner 12s., a very considerable sum must have accumulated which was applicable for this purpose.
Looking carefully into the plate chests to see how this large sum of money was spent, we only find a number of large dishes for turbot, joints of meat, &c., and their covers, all of solid silver, together with side cover dishes, and thirty-three open dishes of various sizes, which can account for it. The supply of knives and forks, which is large, all comes from special and named bequests. The designs are not very good, and the plate of a kind not easy to use now-a-days.[171] When the next misfortune happened to the College Plate, it is a pity that the large and now useless dishes had not gone out of fashion. Provost Hutchinson, desiring to have a set of plates to match the dishes, got leave to melt down old cups and pots to make the set which we still possess, and which are really handsome (circ. 1780). A MS. is preserved among the College documents specifying the cups so destroyed, as well as the coats of arms upon them. They mostly dated from the reign of George I., and were in many cases one of a pair given by the same donor, of which the second still survives. But with this act of his Provostship, long before the close of the century, all public spirit in the matter seems suddenly quenched. The tax for argent had been abandoned, we know not when. Provost Murray and his successors had no taste for display, still less for adding material dignity to the College, and it has been left for our own generation to re-discover the beauty and the value of this series of ancient gifts, which for three generations were only seen at dinners in the Provost’s House. The feelings of generous young men were probably damped by seeing that what their predecessors had given in usum Collegii had disappeared from sight, and was lost out of mind. Possibly the tutors may have fanned the indignation of their pupils at the appropriation of the gifts intended for the College Hall by the Provost for the adornment of his country seat. The Fellow Commoners could no longer obtain plate for their breakfasts or luncheons, as the students of Oxford or Cambridge Colleges did, and still do. With the return of greater respect for these bequests will return again to the members of the College the desire to leave this very tasteful record of gratitude for the daily contemplation and use of succeeding generations.
EPERGNE (REIGN OF GEORGE II.).
FOOTNOTES:
[169] The first line is a hexameter, as is the second line of the previous inscription. Moses is a traditional Christian name in Lord Downshire’s family (Hill).
[170] Cf. Stubbs, op. cit. p. 83, who quotes from the Lismore Papers, iii., p. 80. I also presume that Mr. Alvey’s plate, mentioned in the list on page 3, must mean Provost Alvey’s donation, which would be as old as 1609. “Sir William Wentworth’s basin and ewer,” in the same list, would point to his government of Ireland as a date.
[171] A pair of these soup tureens and covers were given as early as 1722 by William Fitzgerald, Bishop of Clogher.