translation of Homer.  As will be inferred, he spent much of his time in England, and on one of his journeys to Ireland he died in his thirty-ninth year at Chester, where he was buried.  He wrote a great deal of verse—­songs, hymns, epistles, eclogues, translations, tales, and occasional trifles; but three poems, A Hymn to Contentment, which is fanciful and melodious, A Night-piece on Death, in which inquisitorial research seems to have found the first faint dawn of Romanticism, and The Hermit, which has been not inaptly styled “the apex and chef d’oeuvre of Augustan poetry in England”, constitute his chief claim to present remembrance.

Francis Hutcheson (1694-1746), the son of a Presbyterian minister, was born at Armagh, and studied at Glasgow University.  He opened in Dublin a private academy, which succeeded beyond expectation.  The publication of his Inquiry into the Original of our Ideas of Beauty and Virtue (1720) and his Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions (1728) brought him great fame, and in 1729 he was elected to the professorship of moral philosophy in the University of Glasgow.  Others of his works are a treatise on Logic and A System of Moral Philosophy, the latter not published till 1755, nine years after his death.  Hutcheson fills a large space in the history of philosophy, both as a metaphysician and as a moralist.  He is in some respects a pioneer of the “Scotch school” and of “common sense” philosophy.  He greatly developed the doctrine of “moral sense”, a term first used by the third Earl of Shaftesbury; indeed, much of his whole moral system may be traced to Shaftesbury.  Hutcheson’s influence was widely felt:  it is plainly perceptible in Hume, Adam Smith, and Reid.  He was greater as a speaker even than as a writer, and his lectures evoked much enthusiasm.

George Berkeley (1685-1753), bishop of Cloyne, was born at Dysert Castle, near Thomastown, Co.  Kilkenny, and was educated first at Kilkenny school and afterwards at Trinity College, Dublin.  Having taken Anglican orders, he visited London, where he wrote nine papers for the Guardian and was admitted to the companionship and friendship of the leading literary men of the age—­Swift, Pope, Addison, Steele, and Arbuthnot.  This connection proved of great assistance to him, for Pope not only celebrated him as possessing “every virtue under heaven”, but also recommended him to the Duke of Grafton, Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, who appointed him his chaplain and subsequently obtained for him the deanery of Derry.  In furtherance of a great scheme for “converting the savage Americans to Christianity”, Berkeley and some friends, armed with a royal charter, came to this country, landing at Newport in Rhode Island in January, 1729.  All went well for a while:  Berkeley bought a farm and built a house; but when the hard-hearted prime minister refused to forward the L20,000 which had been promised, the project came to an end, and Berkeley returned to London in February, 1732.  In 1734 he was appointed bishop of Cloyne, and later refused the see of Clogher, though its income was fully double that of his own diocese.  In 1752 he resigned his bishopric and settled at Oxford, where he died in 1753.