1 Thackeray.
Blessed be the art that can immortalise, as Sir Joshua has immortalised, features so sublime and beautiful, because so bright with noble power and purpose, as those of Edmund Burke. Scholar, statesman, orator, author, linguist, lawyer, earnest worshipper of nature and of art, what a mine of purest gold thy genius! and how the coin stamped with the impress of thine own true self enriches all the world! “The mind of that man,” says Dr. Johnson, “was a perennial stream; no one grudges Burke the first place,” and Sir Archibald Alison speaks of him, as “the greatest political philosopher, and most far-seeing statesman of modern times.”
What a troublous, impressive sight that must have been, when he and Fox, both of them in tears, gave up the friendship of five-and-twenty years, because they loved each other too well to cry “Peace,” where there was no peace.
Out of all the grand music he wrote and spoke, let me select one air and leave him. And are not his words on Marie Antoinette, like music, martial music, “like a glorious roll of drums,” and the sound of a trumpet to knightly hearts? “I thought,” he says, “ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look, which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone.”
But no, I cannot leave him, it would not be honest to leave him, without the confession that there was a flaw in the statue, one note of this grand instrument out of tune, and that this giant had his weakness. It must be sorrowfully owned that he had low and unsound views on the subject of the pursuit of game; he said it was “a trivial object with severe sanctions;” and his most devoted admirers can never emancipate his memory from the stern and sad suspicion, that he could not have been a first-rate shot.
I thought of Grattan, who distinguished himself within these walls,—the brave unswerving patriot, whose fiery eloquence Moore terms “the very music of freedom” (music, by the way, which would very summarily be stopped in our day by Mr. Speaker Denison); of Moore himself, with his head upon his hands, “sapping” at those Latin verses, which he hated with all his heart, ever and anon disgusted to find the second syllable of some favourite dactyl long, or the first of some pet spondee short; finally (as the chroniclers tell), tearing up the performance, and sending to the Dons some English verse in lieu, for which, to their glory be it written, they gave him praise and a prize. Here, too, he commenced his translation of the Odes of Anacreon, (a labour of Love, if ever there was one); and here, doubtless, oft in the stilly night, he sang some of those touching melodies, which were so soon to “witch the world.”
Lastly, I thought (for our jockey in undress was getting rather restive) of genial, jovial Curran, of whom Dan O'Connell said, “there never was so honest an Irishman,” and of whom there is one of the most charming biographies extant in the “Curran and his Contemporaries,” by Mr. Commissioner Philips.
We could not see the very large and valuable Library, as it is closed during Vacations; and so having admired the exterior of the New Museum, and taken a general survey of the college, we made our bow to the Alma Mater of Ireland.
It must be exquisitely gratifying to a large majority of the inhabitants to contemplate King William III. riding, gilt and bronzed, upon College Green, to be kept in constant recollection of the Boyne, and of the immunities and privileges which resulted from it. Everybody knows that he was a fine horseman, but the sculptor has not given him a hunting seat; and I think we could improve him, if we had him at Oxford, by painting him in a cutaway and buckskins.
There is no fault to be found with the statues of Nelson and of Moore, the former being very effective, and the latter (though suggestive in the distance of a gentleman hailing an omnibus) being impressive and pleasing on a nearer view.