absentee Provost, from 1710; he was appointed Provost in 1717. Baldwin appears to have been in no sense a literary man, beyond what was necessary for his examinations; on the other hand, he was a strong and consistent Whig politician, a disciplinarian, and evidently very keen about the architectural improvement of the College. He accumulated a large fortune, which he left to endow it, and which various claimants of his name from England strove to appropriate for seventy years. In spite of all these merits towards the College, he is not remembered with affection. The extant portraits of him represent a stupid and expressionless face, suggesting severity without natural dignity or good breeding, though he became so great a figure in the College from the mere duration of his influence. He did little to improve the intellectual condition of the students. His temper was morose, and his policy of crushing out not only political, but other opposition among both students and Fellows made him for a long time very unpopular. It is more than likely that his tyrannical conduct in politics increased rather than diminished the Jacobite spirit in the College, for the recalcitrant tendencies of youth were then as they now are, and neither Queen Anne nor George I. was ever likely to inspire the Irish students with any enthusiastic loyalty. But Baldwin may fairly be called the architect of the College. I do not include under that expression his vigilant supervision and enhancement of the College rents--a very important duty,--or his large bequests to the society, which have made the office of Provost one of wealth as well as of dignity. His claim to be remembered by the Irish public rests upon more obvious grounds. The undertaking of the present Library building coincides with his advent to power. It was actually commenced when, as Vice-Provost, he ruled for the easy-going Pratt. It was finished in the early and stormy years of his Provostship; and when we consider that of all the buildings which give Dublin the air and style of a capital not one then existed, we may better understand the largeness and boldness of the plan. The Royal Hospital at Kilmainham had indeed been recently erected, as the arms of the second Duke of Ormonde over the main door testify. This building, which a vague and probably false tradition in Dublin attributes to Wren, must have produced no small impression by its splendour. It was planned exactly as a college, with the hall and chapel _in directum_, forming one side of a quadrangle, and surmounted by a belfry. Such is the plan of many colleges at Oxford. And such was still the plan of Chapel and Hall in Trinity College when the eighteenth century opened, and when larger ideas suggested themselves with the increase of wealth and the disappearance of danger from war or tumult. Building had never ceased in the College since the Act of Settlement secured the great College estates in the North and West.