In connection with the name of Edmund Burke, some mention must be made of the Historical Society, which claims him as its founder. Its splendid traditions date from the inauguration of Burke’s Historical Club in 1747. Throughout its chequered career it has preserved a peculiar pride and independence of spirit, intolerant of interference on the part even of the authorities of the University, which not infrequently resulted in serious disagreement affecting its existence inside the College walls, and on two occasions led to periods of exile from the University, during which it found a home in the city. No other debating society in the world, perhaps, can claim to rank with it as a cradle of orators. It has been the palæstra of many of the most eloquent speakers of the English tongue. Besides its founder Burke, Grattan and Curran, Plunket and Bushe, Sheil and Butt, and many another master of rhetoric, practised at the debates of the “Historical” the art which has made Ireland no less famous as mother of orators than she was formerly as mother of saints. Throughout its career this Society has given to the Irish Bench and Bar their most distinguished leaders, and many to England and the dependencies of the Crown. Three of the members of the present Government were officers of the Society in their student days; and the most recent loss it has sustained was by the death of William Connor Magee, the late Archbishop of York, the first Auditor after its reconstitution in 1843. The objects of the Club at its foundation, as appears from the minutes, were “speaking, reading, writing, and arguing in Morality, History, Criticism, Politics, and all the useful branches of Philosophy.” There are many points of interest in the earliest minute-book of the Society, of which the greater part is in Burke’s handwriting. A critical discrimination on the part of the members, remarkable in the light of later history, is recorded in the minute of April 28, 1747, when “Mr. Burke, for an essay on the Genoese, was given thanks for the matter, but not for the delivery.” The Club, consisting of a very few members, grew in numbers until, at the period in which an Irish Parliament sat in College Green, it was an assembly of six hundred, many of its prominent members being also Members of Parliament. An ordinary excuse for the absence of a speaker from his place seems to have been compulsory attendance in the Commons. The influence of such a Society upon political opinion in Ireland was naturally considerable, and the expression of the revolutionary views of many of its members, such as Emmet and Wolfe Tone, gave great uneasiness to the Board of the College. It is only in comparatively recent years that the feeling of suspicion with which the Society was regarded by the authorities has disappeared, and it is far indeed from probable that occasion for it will ever again arise. There are few pages of mere chronicle of names more