Oliver St. John Gogarty was born on 17 August 1878 in Dublin, Ireland; he was the eldest child of Dr. Henry Gogarty, whose father and grandfather had also practiced medicine, and of Margaret Oliver of Galway. Following the early death of his father, Gogarty was sent by his mother to Mungret, a Jesuit school near Limerick, and thence to Stonyhurst, the English Catholic institution. Apparently Gogarty detested both of these schools, referring to the latter late in life as "Stonyhurst the Accurst." But during 1896-1897, he boarded at Clongowes Wood College (where James Joyce's Stephen Dedalus experienced the misery Gogarty knew at Stonyhurst); and, at Clongowes, he began to enjoy himself, passing the matriculation examination for the Royal University in 1896. Though Gogarty continued his studies in arts at the Royal University into 1898, his mother had enrolled him in Trinity College in the summer of 1897; and it was at Trinity that...