the belated performance of a long-expressed intention.  The advantages to Trinity in making it a part of a great National University are hard to exaggerate.  She has long been described as the only successful British institution in Ireland, and in that may perhaps be found the comparatively evil days on which she has fallen, as her admission lists every year testify, and as was explained to me recently by a member of the very class from which she used to draw her undergraduates, when he said—­“The respectable Protestant country gentry don’t send their sons to Trinity now in the numbers in which they used to.  They send them to Oxford and Cambridge.”  The last part of his remark I was able to indorse from my own personal observation.

On two occasions advances have been made by the Board of Trinity College to the heads of the Catholic hierarchy, asking them what would be their attitude if Trinity were to allow Catholic students in the College the same facilities for religious teaching by the members of their own Church as are at present provided for undergraduate members of the Episcopalian Protestant Church.  On the first occasion Cardinal Cullen, shortly after the passing of the University Tests Act, replied that he could be no party to such a proposal.  When the process of sounding the Catholic bishops was repeated in November, 1903, the Provost and Senior Fellows expressed their willingness to consent to the erection of a Catholic chapel in the College grounds provided a sufficient sum of money was forthcoming for its erection.  A similar advance was made to the Moderator of the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church, and the reply in each case was the same—­that the parties concerned could not accept the offers made by the College Board.  The failure on the part of Presbyterians to make use of the College has been attributed by the Commissioners to the ancient alienation of the Presbyterians from Trinity, as well as to the existence of the useful work done for that body by the Queen’s College, Belfast.  That this ancient alienation exists in the case of Catholics far more than in that of the Presbyterians is but natural, seeing that the College was founded by Elizabeth to undermine the Catholicism of the people.  For all that, however, the taunt is raised with some superficial measure of plausibility that in refusing the offer the Catholics and their bishops lay themselves open to a charge of narrowmindedness, seeing that they have not a College suitable to their needs as have the Presbyterians in Belfast.  That the genius loci is Episcopalian Protestant no one will deny.  At an inaugural meeting of the College Historical Society a few years ago Judge Webb declared—­“Their University was founded by Protestants, for Protestants, and in the Protestant interest.  A Protestant spirit had from the first animated every member of its body corporate.  At the present moment, with all its toleration, all its liberality, all its comprehensiveness, and all its scrupulous honour, the genius loci, the guardian spirit of the place, was Protestant.  And as a Protestant he said, and said it boldly, Protestant might it evermore remain.”  To this exposition of the spirit of the College two of its most distinguished members—­Lord Justice FitzGibbon and Professor Mahaffy—­gave their assent.