retreating across the Cadets' front, and making as hard as they could for the west side of the mountains. At this point Blake's men came in sight from the south, and quickly getting in touch with the Cadets' right wing, completed the cordon. The gunmen, seeing that they were surrounded and all retreat cut off, split up into two parties, took up positions on two kopjes, and waited for the attack. As a frontal attack would have entailed heavy loss, and seeing that there was another kopje on Blake's side which would command and enfilade the gunmen's positions, Dominic ordered the Cadets to pin the gunmen down by their fire, and at the same time sent a signaller to Blake telling him to occupy the commanding kopje. This Blake did, and also sent to the nearest group of soldiers for a machine-gun. The fight lasted for two hours, and though the gunmen were always subject to a hot fire, and several times a man was seen to spring into the air and collapse in the heather, yet they stuck it gamely until the machine-gun was brought up and opened a heavy fire on both kopjes; the remaining gunmen then stood up and put up their hands. On the two kopjes the police found twelve dead gunmen and twenty-eight prisoners, eighteen of whom were wounded. And amongst the dead Dominic found Cormac, shot through the heart. After arranging for the burial of the dead (with the exception of Cormac, who was carried down the mountain-side on a stretcher) and the removal of the prisoners, Dominic took a party of Cadets to search some caves which he knew of about half a mile to the south-west. Here, as he expected, he found that the gunmen had been living in comparative comfort. One cave had been used as a living-room and contained chairs and tables, while two smaller inner ones were fitted up with bunks in tiers like a Boche dugout, and had heather for bedding. Towards evening the wornout Cadets got back to their Crossleys on the pass road which ran along the north shore of the lake; and after leaving a party with a searchlight mounted on a tender to stop any stray gunmen escaping during the night on bicycles by the road to the east, Dominic started for Murrisk in a Crossley with his brother's body. Many an evening the two brothers had driven home together over the same road after a happy day's grouse-shooting, never dreaming that their last journey together would be to bring Cormac's body to the home of their ancestors. The mac Nessa met the party in the great hall of Murrisk, and his ancestors looking down from the walls must surely have thought that they were back again in their own times of everlasting war and sudden death. OLIVER GOLDSMITH. BY J. A. STRAHAN. established for his benefit the College of the Holy Trinity in Dublin, which was to be the mother of a University. sity, however, are still one; and Trinity remains not merely the silent but the single sister of Oxford and Cambridge. THE great Queen Elizabeth is called in England to this day the good Queen Bess. And a good as well as a great Queen she was to the English. When The College and the Univerthey were fighting for their lives, and, what perhaps they valued more, their religion, against Philip of Spain and the Spanish Inquisition, she was the soul of the struggle. As she told her soldiers assembled at Tilbury, though but a weak woman, she had "the stomach of a king, and of a King of England too"; and her superb courage did more than aught else to inspire her subjects to singe the Spanish King's beard in his own ports, and to destroy his Invincible Armada in the open sea. But in her own mind she was Queen only of England, and her care and love for men began and ended with the English. For the Irishry, who were the Spaniard's friends and the Englishman's enemies, she had no use or pity, though she was also Queen of Ireland. Her love of her English followed them wherever they went. To her, unlike her successors, the Englishman in Ireland was as much her care as the Englishman in England. She strove her utmost to protect, to prosper, and to instruct him. And so for the last purpose, she During the three or four centuries since its foundation Trinity has had many eccentric and many distinguished students; but, as a rule, its eccentric students were not distinguished, and its distinguished students were not eccentric. Archbishop Ussher and Bishop Berkeley, Congreve, Burke, Grattan, Curran, Plunket, Tom Moore, Charles Lever, Earl Cairns, and Lecky are some of its alumni of whom most of the world has heard; but they were very like ordinary students, except in the matter of brains and sometimes of application. Most of the eccentric students' names have long since passed into oblivion; but some are remembered either because their peculiarities were amazing or their parts were. One of these, whose parts were great, but whose peculiarities were astounding, has found his way not merely into the College history, but into the world's fiction. He figures in Charles Lever's 'Charles O'Malley' under his own name, and is painted there exactly as he was; and surely a queerer character has never been invented by the most imaginative of novelists. This is the Rev. Dr Barrett, a senior fellow of the College, and the greatest Hebrew scholar of his age, and also the greatest recluse and the greatest miser. From the time he took up residence as a young student till the day of his death, only twice was he known to have gone outside the College gates. The first occasion was when he was summoned to an assize court to give evidence. In a country inn he saw in the yard a bird whose gorgeous plumage astonished him, and he asked the ostler what it was. The amazed ostler replied that it was a cock. Evidently the learned doctor on his return to Trinity had inquired further into the matter, for after his death a note in his handwriting was found in the margin of a book on natural history, opposite a disquisition on domestic fowl, which ran, "The ostler was right: it was a cock." The second occasion of his passing the College gates was when his bed-maker, while going with a bottle and a penny of his to buy milk for his tea, fell and broke her leg. "Mary," Mary," he said to her when he saw her in the hospital, "I suppose the bottle is smashed, but where is the penny?" Like all University dons of his day, Dr Barrett was a clerk in Holy Orders; but his language, according to all accounts, was often far from holy. A favourite expression of his was, "May the devil admire me,' and Charles Lever has given us an example of its application. Once, it seems, a roguish student, who lived on the floor below the reverend doctor, knowing the good man's love of money, tied a halfpenny to a thread, and laid it on the staircase opposite his door. When the reverend Barrett issued from his rooms he saw the halfpenny, and bent to pick it up. The student pulled the thread, and it dropped down a step. The learned doctor followed, and again tried to pick it up. Again the student pulled the thread, and again it dropped down a step. This continued from step to step till it reached the floor below, when it disappeared under the student's door. The doctor went out into the quadrangle with an amazed face. There the first person he happened to meet was the Provost. though his father was still living. Both led there discontented, disorderly, and dissipated careers, got into constant rows with the authorities, were regarded by their fellow-students as half-mad, and finally left it with degrees which reflected no great honour on the recipients. old stocking filled with gold. the University by an uncle, As he did so the stocking burst, and the gold went rolling over the floor. Dr Magee stooped to help him pick it up. "H-1 to your sowl, Magee," shouted Barrett; "lave them alone and stand up on that chair!" Somewhat startled, Magee complied; and Dr Barrett himself picked up the coins, and then lent Magee the five he wanted. The next day Magee called at Barrett's chambers to repay the loan. "Well, Barrett," he said, "I hope you found all your spilt guineas? "Ay, I did," answered the reverend gentleman drily, "all but one; and it may have rowled down that rat-hole; and, by J-s, it may not." The Rev. Dr Barrett was not the only student of Trinity who is still remembered both for his peculiarities and his parts. Two others are remembered, and are likely to be remembered for indefinite centuries to come, who, if not quite his equals in peculiarities, were in parts incomparably his superiors. In time more than half a century separated them, in character two human beings could not be more different; and yet in their lives and fortunes they were not dissimilar. Both were of English blood, both were of the Protestant religion, both belonged to professional families, and both were very poor. One had lost his father, and was supported at the University by an uncle; the other was supported at Their after lives were not without many points of resemblance. Both were for several years after they left Trinity in extreme penury, and without a profession. The one spent those years in studying deeply both men and books, the other in indolence, vagabondage, and flute playing. Both in time found their way to London and became literary men. Both soon won great names in literature, and mixed as equals with the greatest men of their day; both were regarded by the world as not altogether in their wits, the one being known as 'the mad parson," the other as "the inspired idiot." One lived to an extreme old age, the other only to middle manhood; and one died "in madness, both in misery." The one was Jonathan Swift, the other Oliver Goldsmith. Oliver Goldsmith was born at Pallas in County Longford in 1728, the year in which poor Stella died. Macaulay, under the impression apparently that Pallas was the scene of Oliver's boyhood and of those recollections which he afterwards so delightfully described, expati- intelligence enough to see that ates at great length on the remoteness, inaccessibility, and rudeness of this primitive place. As a matter of fact, Oliver could have no boyish remembrance of it, since his father became Rector of Kilkenny West when Oliver was two years old, and then removed with his family to a comfortable house in the then prosperous English village of Lissoy. There Oliver's boyhood was passed, and there he received the first rudiments of his education from a Mrs Delap, who thought him "impenetrably dull." Macaulay describes her as a maid-servant, but she probably was a poor lady of French Huguenot descent, who earned her living as a sort of nursery governess. From her tuition Oliver went to study at the village school under Thomas Byrne, a retired quartermaster. It is characteristic of the way in which Irish history is treated by English historians that Macaulay should insist that the old soldier could teach nothing but reading, writing, and arithmetic-what more he expected a boy of seven or eight years to be taught he does not explain; while Thackeray, probably to give his tale a touch of local colour, calls Thomas Byrne "Paddy' Byrne, and describes him as a "hedge schoolmaster." Oliver left this primary school in his ninth year, and was sent to the grammar school at Elphin, where the master, Griffin, had the boy, in spite of his indolence and eccentricities, was very clever. Later he went to the grammar school at Athlone, and later still to that at Edgeworthtown, the home of the family which produced the Maria Edgeworth who, half a century afterwards, described so vividly the Ireland that followed those evictions of the English settlers which Swift had denounced and Goldsmith had deplored. Macaulay and Thackeray both attribute Oliver's fondness for Irish music and Irish legends to the instruction of Byrne; but his love of the music at any rate seems to date from his residence at Edgeworthtown, where he is known to have been acquainted with O'Carolan, the last of the Irish bards, and Laurence Whyte, a local minstrel. It was while on his way home from Edgeworthtown that a mischievous schoolfellow directed him to the squire's house as an inn where he could get a good dinner and a comfortable bed. Meanwhile Oliver's. elder brother Henry had graduated at Trinity, and had set up a "schule which he caa'd an academy" in the neighbourhood of Lissoy. A pupil of his called Hodson, the son of a considerable landowner, saw proper to marry secretly the schoolmaster's sister Kate. This led to a little comedy which shows at once the pride and the poverty of the country |