(a) Gardiner was Master of the Revels, and Surveyor-General of Customs.
[24] Flood, who did not get the provostship, bequeathed, by his will, in 1791, to the college, his estate in Kilkenny, worth £5,000 a year, to found and endow a professorship of the Erse or Irish language, and to establish a library of manuscripts and books in that language, and in the modern polished languages. Provost Hutchinson did not leave a shilling to the college. Flood’s bequest fell through owing to his illegitimacy. He entered Trinity College as a fellow-commoner, completed his junior sophister terms, and then migrated ad eundem to Oxford.—[Flood’s “Life of Flood,” and Webb’s “Com. Biog.”]
[25] He was a Commissioner of Barracks; as was also Sir Herc. Langrishe. Langrishe was, besides, Commissioner of Revenue and Commissioner of Excise.
[26] There does not seem to have been any Mr. Barlow in these servile days to exercise the ancient tribunitial power of the Senior Master Non Regent—the power to veto, in the name of the community, dishonouring presentations to honorary degrees.
[28] In 1726, Primate Boulter wrote that unless a new Englishman was appointed to a then vacant bishopric there would be thirteen Irish bishops to nine English, to the Primate’s great dismay. The Editor of “Boulter’s Letters,” in 1770, adds, in a note, that there was at one time in the Irish House of Lords a majority of native bishops, of whom five had been fellows of the University, viz., Drs. Howard, Synge, Clayton, Whitcombe (Archbishop of Cashel), and Berkeley. These are, probably, the five alluded to by Duigenan. In a pamphlet entitled “Thoughts on the Present State of the College of Dublin,” published in 1782, the well-informed author says that in King William’s reign, at or nearly at the same time, “the people saw ten prelates on the bench, who had been Fellows.” The writer says that there was a great increase in the number of students—that the undergraduates were 565, the average of entrances 144 yearly, and the average of B.A. degrees, 78.—[Halliday Collection.]
We can ourselves remember, dating from the year 1830, eight bishops and one archbishop, all Ex-Fellows. Altogether “there have been seven archbishops and forty-two bishops of the Irish Church chosen from amongst the Fellows of Trinity College. Eight have become Members of Parliament, and six have been raised to the Judicial Bench.”—[Coll. Cal.]
[29] This seems not to have been the case in Dr. Delany’s time. See Primate Boulter’s Letters, and Mrs. Delany’s, and Swift’s.