598 The Silent Sister. [JUNE, 



many efforts have been made to attract the admiration of the public. 

 Now one, now another individual of spirit, seeing himself looked on as 

 a lazy monk, and branded as a "faineant" conceived the noble resolve 

 of breaking the chain of silence, and astonishing mankind but mark 

 the issue ! The enemy they had to contend with was the system. It 

 met them at every step, infested their line of march, and foiled them in 

 every field. Whether they essayed eloquence, divinity, science, or polite 

 literature, their gowns entangled them ; and every enterprise proved 

 abortive. They tried the press, the pulpit, the political arena speeches, 

 sermons, magazines, treatises, commentaries, with sundry other experi- 

 ments on the public purse and patience, were hazarded in sad succession. 

 Two egregious gentlemen assumed in partnership the province of 

 oratory, determined by all the rules of Tully and Quintilian to vindicate 

 the college. A sphere was not long wanting for the efforts of Messrs. 



S , and B -. The " sons of thunder" went down together into 



Ulster in the royal mail ; but the system ! the system ! alas, the system ! 

 it followed them wherever they went as tenaciously as their shadows 

 not (like the cowardly shadow of the lion in the treatise on the Bathos) 

 deterred from following them, because 



They roared so loud, and looked so wonderous grim 



No ! it clung to them as obstinately as the " old man of the sea," to the 

 back of Sindbad, until every tavern in Armagh, Tyrone, and Derry, re- 

 sounded with evidence of their failure. Practice was vain. Mr. S 



wrote, studied, recited, laboured, but no progress ! He was no nearer 

 Demosthenes when he addressed the merchants last summer in Dublin, 

 than when he began his career three years ago at the -political dinner at 

 Armagh. If the truth of this criticism be questioned, compare the best 



passages in both speeches. Mr. S in Dublin at the late election 



" Do we not glory in the recorder?" Mr. S in Armagh his maiden 



oration " I adore the archbishop of Dublin." Indeed there is rather a 

 falling off in the later effort. We leave it to Longinus or perhaps the 

 assistant professor of oratory, with the help of Blair and a bottle, will 

 resolve the question. But the divine might succeed, though the dema- 

 gogue failed. The triumphs of the pulpit .might efface the disasters of 

 the dinner-table. Dr. K. was the man. He was nominated preacher for 

 the year. He composed, he mounted, he preached. The sermons on 

 the " Creation of the World will scarcely be forgotten by the men of 

 Trinity before the end of it. The resources of the language were un- 

 explored till then. No, one could believe our dictionaries contained from 

 cover to cover so many seven-leagued words as were now assembled in 

 one discourse. An Arab orator is said to have harangued the live-long 

 day without once availing himself of the first letter of the alphabet. Dr. 

 K. held forth for three months without drawing a dozen times on the 

 monosyllables or dissyllables of the language. The son of the desert 

 was out-done by the Fellow of Trinity. The book of Genesis was 

 " the Cosmogonic portion of' the Pentateuchal Chronicles." The seven 

 days of the first week were the " Demiurgic Hebdomad" The school 

 divinity of the dark ages, from the dust and silence of the uppermost 

 shelves of the college library, lent all her mongrel and dissonant phra- 

 seology. Geology, pressed into the foreign service of theology, con- 

 tributed a host of jaw-breakers. The college groaned through all her 

 corners. Better indeed had she been mute for ever than vocal through 



