Oxford, it is said, has been the University of great movements; Cambridge, of great men. Genius indeed is not the outcome or resultant of academic life and traditions, while intellectual and social movements may in a measure be traced to such sources. Thus may Oxford fairly claim for herself influences more wide-reaching than her sister, although she cannot boast an equally distinguished family. It must indeed be remembered that genius is resentful of restrictions, and the debt acknowledged to any University by its greatest sons is usually but a limited one. To her poets, Landor and Shelley, Oxford was a harsh stepmother, and many a young man, afterwards to be famous, left the banks of Cam without gratitude and without regret. Nevertheless, a distinctive type of culture, often of directing power, even though resisted, prevails at every great centre of learning. If the dignity of a seat of learning is to be determined by the intellectual splendour of the names associated with it, Oxford must give place to Dublin as well as to Cambridge. There is no Oxonian to rank with Swift or Burke. But all such comparisons are idle; the Irish sister of the two great English Universities has had a far different career, and her type of culture is essentially distinctive, and not that of another. Oxford, “the home of lost causes and forsaken beliefs and impossible loyalties,” has a charm all her own. The old Irish College does not lie, like that “Queen of Romance, steeped in sentiment, and whispering from her towers the last enchantments of the middle ages.” To sentiment she has ever been a stranger, and she lies at the heart of a metropolis. But perhaps the atmosphere of sentiment is not compatible with that of reason, and Dublin has been the home of intellectual sanity. Unadorned by creeper or “ivy serpentine,” no quaint windows or secluded cloisters bring to the thoughtful student of “Old Trinity” visions of the monks of the Monastery of All Saints; and no one who knows her history, or has breathed her keen disillusionising air, would conceive as possible the fostering of an intellectualism such as that of Newman under the shadow of her Greek porticoes. Like her architecture, the mind of the University of Dublin has been more Greek than that of her English sisters. The spirit of Plato dwelt in Berkeley as it never could have done in a thinker educated in a University dominated by the methods of Bacon. In Edmund Burke the philosophical statesmanship of the Athenian Republic was revived as the “last enchantments of the middle ages,” with all their witchery, could never have revived it. Dublin has never given herself over to the idols of the forum or the market-place, nor worshipped at the shrine of utilitarian philosophies. She has not swung incense in the chapel of Hobbes or Herbert Spencer, nor bowed the knee to a dictator in the Vatican of science. She has betrayed as little enthusiasm for the cause of the Stuarts as for that of Pusey and Keble.