No one—­least of all an Irishman—­can deny the greatness of a College on the boards of which are such names as Berkeley, Swift, Grattan, Flood, and Burke, but it will be admitted by all that as far as the fame of her alumni is concerned—­and there is no other test for a collegiate foundation—­Trinity reached the zenith of her greatness during the years in which a free Parliament served to break down the barriers of religion in the island.  With the passing of that phase of political history she relapsed into her place as the “silent sister” in the country, but not of it, taking no part in national life other than to offer opposition to the legislative changes, which even she is now constrained to admit were reforms.

As owner of some 200,000 acres, Trinity College has proved herself one of the worst landlords in Ireland.  An estate belonging to the College in County Kerry gave rise to one of the bitterest struggles of the land war.  In view of the cry which is being raised in England to-day as to the broad tolerance which is alleged to hold the field in the College to-day, the bitterly anti-Catholic spirit of the present Provost and of his predecessors deserves mention; but I must further call the reader’s notice to a recent event which attracted much attention in Ireland, but was passed unnoticed in Great Britain.  In a sonnet, written by a leading Fellow of the College in “T.C.D.,” the College magazine, the writer spoke of the Catholic churches in Ireland as “grim monuments of cold observance, the incestuous mate of superstition,” of which “to seeing eyes each tall steeple lifts its tall head and lies.”  Sentiments of this kind, expressed in such taste, are not calculated to encourage Catholic parents to send their sons to a college where they may come under influences of which the writer is an example.

The idea of putting into practice the proposed expedient of swamping Trinity by the encouragement of all Catholics to send their sons to that College is to a member of an old university as attractive as on paper it appears easy, but there are drawbacks to its practical application other than the presence in the College of such a spirit as I have exemplified.

In England, where there are public schools, and Oxford and Cambridge colleges, many of which have behind them a career of three or four hundred years, one is inclined to overestimate the value of tradition in a country where educational endowments are rare and ancient endowments are the exception.  The traditions, moreover, of the origin and of the mission of Trinity are not such as to foster for her the same feelings as Oxford and Cambridge have the power of provoking in England.  The part which Trinity has played in Irish history is in no sense analogous to that played by the English Universities in the history of that country.  English Catholics make use of Oxford and Cambridge for the education of their sons because in view of their numbers the notion of