{102} [Rambler, May 1859.]

Literary Notices

The Failure of the Queen's Colleges and of Mixed Education in Ireland. By John Pope Hennessy, of the Inner Temple. (London, Bryce.) We have elsewhere referred to this seasonable and telling pamphlet, which is too full of facts to condense into a notice. It seems from it that Sir Robert Peel's government, in 1845, established three colleges for superior education at Belfast, Cork, and Galway, on the principle of uniting all denominations, both as professors and as students. They were opened in December 1849, under the name of the Queen's Colleges; and in 1850 the Queen's University was founded also, not as an educational body, but for the purpose of granting degrees in arts, medicine, and law to the students of the three colleges. The building and establishing of the colleges cost the country 100,000l., which has since been increased by 25,257l. The original endowment 18,000l. per annum; but soon afterwards this endowment was raised to 21,000l.; in 1849 there was an additional grant of 12,000l., and since 1854 there has been an annual addition of 4800l. Mr. Hennessy does not give us the gross sum to which these several grants amount; but from Mr. Maguire's statement, which we quote below, it appears they reach the enormous sum of 375,000l. The gentlemen holding office in the three colleges amount to 260. The Commissioners report that the total number of students who have entered the colleges since 1849 is 1209: this Mr. Hennessy declares is incorrect; but, assuming it, we find that the average per annum will be 134; that is, the officials of the colleges are as near as possible twice as many as the undergraduates. During the same period the total number of scholarships offered to (that is, we suppose, enjoyed by) these students is 1326, with the addition of 1000 class prizes: this will give a yearly average of 147 scholarships and 111 prizes, the average students being 134; that is, the scholarships are more, and the prizes not much less, than the students. The {115} numbers were largest in the year that the colleges opened. In that year forty-five students at Belfast competed for forty-three scholarships of 30l. each. The Dean of Law at Cork advocated before the Commissioners the abolition of his faculty, on the ground that "he had found no students." The Professor of Metaphysics at Cork, who had seven students in class in 1851, now has only four. The Professor of English Literature in (we suppose) Cork has only five. The Professor of Jurisprudence at Galway has only two. The Professor of Medicine at Galway has five, the Professor of Law three. Then, as to degrees, each graduate has cost the country above 1 000l. a-year. The total number of graduates in law in ten years does not equal the number of professors and examiners in that faculty in one year. The number of university medals and money exhibitions actually given in the faculty of arts is greater than the number of candidates. The number of graduates has been diminishing for the last three years. As to the non-matriculated students, in the first year there were fifty at Cork, the next year thirty, the next twenty-one, at the last return twenty. In the first year the Professor of Greek had fifty-six, now twenty-seven. It is as regards the non-matriculated students that Mr. Hennessy has most to say as to the inaccuracy of the Commissioners' Report. We will quote but one sentence from him: "I have in my possession unequivocal evidence that in the grand total the same individual students have been counted by the Commissioners seven and eight times over." Lastly, he gives the obvious reason of this deplorable failure, viz. that the grants from Government have not met and stimulated any existing zeal and pecuniary sacrifices in the community, Catholic or Protestant; but have been simply lavished independent of any action or cooperation whatever of the voluntary system. He contrasts the case of grants to English education. To the National Society's Training College the Government gave only 7242l. out of 32,578l.; to the College of the British and Foreign School Society not 4000l. out of 20,100l.; to the Wesleyan Colleges, 5049l. out of 38,150l.; but for a variety of interesting details, we must refer the reader to the pamphlet itself.

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Lectures and Essays on University Subjects. By John Henry Newman, D.D. (London, Longmans.) The author notices in the preface of this small volume, which we are surprised to see is dated so far back as November last, that it does but supply another instance of his lot all through life, to have been led to his publication not on any matured plan or by any view of his own, but by the duties or the circumstances of the moment. Early in life he wished to devote himself to the study of the Holy Fathers; and even before he ceased to be tutor of his college at Oxford, he entered upon it. Hardly had he published his work on the Arians, when he was called off by what has been called the Oxford Controversy; but even in that controversy his first work, the Church of the Fathers, was patristical in its subject. When, after the No. 90 affair, he retired from the controversy, he returned at once to the Fathers, and published {116} a translation of St. Athanasius and an Essay on Ecclesiastical Miracles. But the necessary course of events carried him again off from his books, and he cannot be said even yet to have returned to them. As to the present volume, it is perhaps the most miscellaneous which he has written. Some portions of it have already appeared in the University Gazette; but the greater part of it is new. By thinking it worthy of being dedicated to a friend and a public man, it is to be presumed that, on the whole, he is not dissatisfied with it.

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The complete Latin Prosody of Emanuel Alvarez, S.J. By James Stewart, M.A., Professor of the Greek and Latin Languages in the Catholic University of Ireland, and late of Trinity College, Cambridge. (Dublin, Duffy, 1859.) This useful little work, or at least as much of it as is practically necessary for the ordinary student, is here presented by Mr. Stewart for the first time in an English version. The writer was a Portuguese of Madeira, was Rector of the Portuguese Colleges of Coimbra, Evora, and Lisbon, and died in 1582. The book is a standard one in itself, and has been repeatedly edited with alterations keeping it on a level with the advance of knowledge, and is now enriched by Mr. Stewart with similar additions,—as, for instance, with an analysis of the measure of the hexameter verse (p. 107), with an appendix of exercises in the Elegiac, Alcaic, and Sapphic stanzas, and with an elaborate catalogue by Stirling of all the ordinary rhetorical and grammatical figures of speech. "The book is intended," says Mr. Stewart, "to prevent the evil of entire dependence on the Gradus, and as help towards systematising that knowledge of metrical quantity and metrical composition, which is most usually secured, not by the mere study of abstract rules, but by continual practice in the writing of Latin verse." Used in this way, it cannot but be a valuable addition to a schoolboys library; and we wish so useful a book, in so compendious a form, had existed in our own early days of verse-making. Mr. Stewart would be doing a service by putting together a similar manual for the composition of Greek verse, for which there is at present very little assistance provided of this sort, not even, we believe, any thing worthy of the name of a Greek Gradus. A friend has suggested to us a small work of this kind, published by Parker, Oxford, in 1824, called the Indices Attici, and drawn up by the late Mr. Tyler of St. Giles's, and the two Mr. Newmans; but we believe it is out of print.

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