The history of the University founded by Elizabeth is the history of the greatest institution in this country, which, amidst so much failure, has been a permanent and indisputable success. During the dark ages of Ireland’s confusion and misery, the lamp of learning and culture was here kept alight. No small achievement will this seem in the eyes of those to whom the social and political condition of the country, during the two hundred years which followed the granting of the Charter to the “mother of a University” in Dublin, are even superficially known. In 1591, the meadow land and orchards of the Monastery of All Hallows, near the city, which had become the property of the Corporation upon the dissolution of all such establishments by Henry VIII., were transferred to the Provost and Fellows appointed under the Royal Seal; and where, fifty years before, the brotherhood of Prior and Monks had passed their days in the quiet seclusion of a life apart from the busy world of ambitious men, there now began the quick and vivid play of thought and feeling which mark a University in which the minds of the future leaders of the people are moulded and exercised. The more prominent names in the list of the graduates of Elizabeth’s College are abundant proof of the paramount position of influence from the first maintained by it in every department of the public life of the country, and the importance of its work in training the men who have been in the van of progress in culture and science, and among the leaders of every political movement in Ireland; many of them, too, in the wider field offered by England, and, in these later days, in the still wider field of the colonies and dependencies under the Crown. The traditions and prestige attached to such an institution are inalienable, and it will indeed be strange if any statesman attempt, as is sometimes apprehended, the impossible task of disturbing or transferring them. The greater part of the history of Ireland since the opening of the seventeenth century can be read in the more public lives of the alumni of Trinity College.