As regards his own office, he did many things to promote its permanent dignity. He persuaded the Board to give him a grant for enlarging the fine house which his predecessor had built, and this addition is one of its chief features; it is the stately Provost’s study, added at the north end of the main structure. He took care so to lease the Provost’s estate as to preserve its rental undiminished to his successors. The same principles appear in his improvement of the College. With the aid of a grant from the Erasmus Smith’s Board of £2,500, he built the noble Examination Hall, intended for a Theatre or Hall of public Academic performances, at the fortunate moment when our 18th century builders had just reached the zenith of their art. No room in Dublin is more perfect in its proportions, or more rich as well as chaste in its ornamentation. He also persuaded the Senior Fellows, who trembled for their renewal fines, to have the College estates re-valued, and thus added a permanent £5,000 a-year to the property of the Corporation. We are told that he could not carry out this eminently honest and practical reform without guaranteeing each of the persons who sat with him on the Board against loss of income. Not one of them was willing to risk one shilling for the future improvement of the College estate. He showed more questionable taste when he transformed a number of old silver cups into a service of dinner plates, which his enemies said he intended for his own use, and probably for that of his heirs; for he carried them to his suburban residence at Palmerstown [Park], and used them in his entertainments. The service is, however, still safe, and perhaps adds as much to the dignity of College entertainments as would the cups that were melted down. But we grieve to think what splendid old specimens of Caroline or Queen Anne plate have thus been lost.
So far as Hutchinson was a politician—probably accepting the Provostship with the determination to have the University for a pocket-borough, and so to attain a position equal to that of the County magnates—so far his life and conduct are open to severe criticism. In every other respect his 20 years of rule were both brilliant and profitable to the College. He continued the great traditions of his two predecessors, and far surpassed the men who succeeded him for the next 40 years. But whether the opposition of the Fellows was really irreconcilable, or whether he was himself wanting in tact or fairness, the painful result is beyond question, that he lived all his life at war with his subjects.
When his health began to fail in 1793, a full year before his death, intriguing for the succession to his place began in official circles. The Bar, who absorb so many posts outside their profession, began to speak of the Provostship as a political office; and had they succeeded in appointing another lawyer, we should presently have had it put forward as an axiom, that none but a lawyer is fit to hold a post which requires any knowledge of the law. We hear this absurd argument repeated every day with fatal effect. On the other hand, the Senior Fellows, who had considered this great post as their proper prize ever since the necessity of importing scholars from England had passed away, were equally zealous in counteracting these schemes. Four or five times did they send deputations to London to interview Pitt, Dundas, Portland, and perhaps with most effect Edmund Burke and the Marquis of Abercorn, both of whom exerted themselves warmly against the politicians and the lawyers in favour of an academical and clerical appointment. Even Burke himself was spoken of for the office, and then an English Bishop of Cloyne, Bennett, who was deterred by a threatening visit from some of the Fellows.
Meanwhile, the moment for the celebration of the Bi-Centenary of the Foundation had arrived. The Centenary had been held in 1694, the 100th anniversary of the first taking of degrees. The more correct date would have been 1692. But neither date was debated for one moment by the creatures who were thinking of nothing but the loss of a step in their promotion, or the chances of succeeding to a lucrative post. All remembrance of the dignity of the College and its historic position was obscured by these personal anxieties, to which was added, in the minds of better men, a keen sense of the inconvenience of having a stranger and a politician as the head of a place of learning. Had any of the three great Provosts been guiding the councils of the College, this disgraceful omission of so honourable a commemoration would not have been tolerated.
But from this time onward, the College, having conquered in the great struggle concerning Hutchinson’s successor, obtained the practical nomination, and accordingly “the Senior Major of the Regiment,” or the next senior, was regularly promoted. By a curious coincidence, the influence of Primate Boulter’s policy, and the exclusion of Irishmen from Bishoprics, had also passed away, and so we find our Provosts passed on to the Episcopal Bench, leaving no mark upon the College, and taking no interest in ought beyond the decent management of the routine studies of the place. The history from the appointment of Murray to that of Bartholomew Lloyd, in 1837, is probably the least creditable in all the three centuries. No fine buildings were erected during these years. Even the belfry which was taken down was not rebuilt, and the great bell relegated to a shed in a remote corner of the College, where it lay for fifty years, till the munificence of a Chancellor educated at Oxford retrieved the disgrace. When the old Chapel was removed, so careless were these men of 1798 of the memories of the dead, that the alabaster monument of the pious founder, Luke Challoner, was thrust aside, not even into a shed, but into a corner, where the recumbent figure was defaced by the weather beyond recognition within thirty years. During the rule of the great Provosts there had been frequent bequests from rich members of the Society, who justly held that some practical expression of gratitude was due to the College which had conferred upon them wealth and dignity. That spirit died out with the century. From that day onward, many men drew £50,000 in salaries from the College, and did not return to it one farthing beyond their (often second-rate) official work. Constant gifts of plate from rich students, as well as Fellows, for the use of the College, had replaced the tax for argent, at one time levied (as it still is in some Oxford Colleges) on all who entered the College. These honourable gifts were no longer made, though any but a criminally supine set of rulers could easily have kept them up by example and advice. In fact, the existing plate was concealed in the safes of the Board-room, and never issued except for the Provost’s private use. During these disgraceful forty years no public display brought the College into notice except the lavish feast to George IV. (1821). At the same time, the number of students was very great, the incomes of Seniors in renewal fines, and of Juniors in Tutors’ fees, larger than they ever were before or since; yet these were the years which justly earned for the University of Dublin the now obsolete title of “Silent Sister.” There was a day when Oxford, for like reasons, had obtained the kindred name of “the Widow of Sound Learning.”
And yet the moment when Murray succeeded was one more than likely to stimulate bright spirits to do brilliant work; it was the moment when revolutionary ideas from the Continent were making their way into Ireland; when hot-headed politicians were speaking of National Independence, of Republicanism, of the Rights of Man; it was the age that bore the great poets of the early nineteenth century. One of them, Thomas Moore, whom his greatest contemporaries have recognised and honoured as their peer, was actually a student of Trinity College. He was the last of a considerable series of playwrights and poets, which proves that English studies, at all events, were not neglected in the College course. Congreve, Swift, Goldsmith, Parnell, Sheridan, not to speak of Brady and Tate, and Toplady, prove what Burke mentions in acknowledging the honorary degree offered him by Hutchinson—“I am infinitely pleased that that learned body ... condescends to favour the unaltered subsistence of those principles of Liberty and Morality, along with some faint remains of that taste of Composition, which are infused, and have always been infused, into the minds of those who have the happiness to be instructed by it.”[96] He might have added another all-important training in expression, which used to be a peculiarity of the Dublin Classical School, and which Chatham devised as a means of making his son the prince of debaters. It consisted in the practice of free vivâ voce translation from Greek and Latin into English, wherein the fluency of expression was rated as of equal importance with grammatical accuracy. When we competed for Scholarships in the earlier half of the century, we were required to know a long course of authors in this way; and surely to express the thoughts of another language in fluent English is the best preparation for those who desire to express their own thinking in apt and ready words. So far, then, the narrowness of the Governors was not able to affect the students. Those who went into the world became practical orators of the first rank, while those who remained in the College sank into learned insignificance.
Yet the time, as I have said, was full of excitement, political and social. There were wars and rumours of wars, some men’s hearts failing them for fear, others beating with the expectation of a millennium of Liberty. It was impossible that the great agitation of the country should not reach the ardent spirits whom the late Provost had permitted or encouraged to mix in the world. They had, moreover, started a debating club, the Historical Society, which, after various modest beginnings and failures, became of recognised importance towards the waning of the century. The very essence of these debating societies is to transgress sober discipline; for while it is the duty of Governors of a College to keep their students’ attention upon abstract science, pure philosophy, and classical languages, it is the one aim of debaters to avoid such subjects, and choose those of present and burning interest. Moreover, in those days the modern engines of the press and the platform had not accustomed men to discount the mendacities, the false passion, the gross exaggerations of political oratory. Generous natures were more easily carried away than they now are, when the poison and the antidote succeed one another in the columns of the same newspaper. Wolfe Tone found even among the Fellows two distinguished men, John Stack and Whitley Stokes—these family-names have been for more than two centuries frequent in the honour-rolls of the College—who adopted the views of the United Irishmen, and admitted the principle of making Ireland an independent nation. It is hard to avoid the observation that Boulter’s policy of filling every post of importance with English placemen must have been a powerful agent in turning the opinions of the professional men in Ireland in this direction. Presently the College was seized with military ardour; a yeomanry corps was established, in which four companies were commanded by four lay Fellows, for the purpose of aiding the Government in the impending crisis. But along with the ardour for amateur soldiering so universal among civilians, there crept in the feeling that, with arms in their hands, men should secure not only peace and order in the country, but some recognition of the claims of Ireland, so long neglected and postponed to the most vulgar English interests. One of the captains was, in fact, already an United Irishman, though he seems to have been deterred from going as far as Wolfe Tone would lead him, by Tone’s open assertion that the liberties of the country must be attained even through arms and blood.
Presently it became necessary to revive the dormant Statute forbidding students to attend any political meetings; and when some of the scholars went so far as to avow publicly that they were United Irishmen, in the sense then considered seditious, and one member at least of the Board, who was also M.P. for the University, openly declared himself opposed to taking extreme measures against them, the time seemed come for a formal Visitation. In all this difficult and dangerous passage of the history of the College the Provost is hardly mentioned. The result of the great battle between the Dons and the politicians upon Hutchinson’s death had resulted, as has been said, in the appointment of the Vice-Provost, Murray, a respectable, modest, benevolent old man,[97] wholly unfit to guide the counsels of the Board, or to lead back the wilder students into the paths of discretion or common sense. Moreover, the ultra-Protestant party were in such panic at the state of the country as to make them cruel in their punishments. The Vice-Chancellor was Lord Clare, a very strong and uncompromising member of the Protestant ascendency, who all through his life was perfectly consistent in advocating the English supremacy, and in crushing out all Irish aspirations, even with the halter and the sword. He had been baulked in his policy of repression by the admission of Roman Catholics to Degrees in Trinity College, carried in 1793 by an Act of Parliament, but which would not have been put into effect in that year but for the stout action of Dr. Miller, who, as Senior Master Non-Regent, stopped all the conferring of Degrees till the Vice-Chancellor consented to remit the old oath against Popery. The facts, which are worth knowing in their details, are thus stated by Dr. Stubbs:—
When the first Commencement day after the passing of the Act of Parliament arrived, the Letters Patent altering the College Statutes had not been prepared, and consequently, although the declaration had been abolished by Act of Parliament, the corresponding oath remained. Lord Clare was well known to be opposed to the admission of Roman Catholics to Degrees, and he presided as Vice-Chancellor of the University, and it was expected that he would place every impediment in his power to the relaxation which had been granted by the change in the law. Mr. Miller, who was called upon to act as Senior Master Non-Regent, declined to take his place until he had been formally elected by the Senate, according to the letter of the University Regulations. After some opposition to this proceeding on the part of the Vice-Chancellor, this legal formality was carried out, and Mr. Miller took his seat as one of the Caput.