Two Oriel Men in Ireland

Extract

Two Fellows of Oriel walked daily in the calm and classic ways of Oxford. They were bosom friends, and, men said, kindred spirits, burning and shining lights of their college, then the leading Oxford college in culture, studies, and famous names. The elder, tall, strenuous, robust, talked didactically, rather pompously, but with precision of thought and word. He was an author of text-books on Logic and on Rhetoric, and on the Johnsonian principle, that ‘who drives fat cattle should himself be fat,’ was a living embodiment of the science and the art of accurate thinking and correct phrasing. He was Richard Whately (1787-1863).

The delicate, pale youth by his side, another Fellow of Oriel, listened and learned from Whately—and learned with lasting profit to himself and to the men of all time, logic and rhetoric. Both were parsons, staunch Protestants. In their walks several times they met poor strolling Irishmen, ragged, hungry Papists, toilers from the fields, beggars, ballad singers. The dons were almost heedless, unobservant of the poor human clods, their religion, their country. If any seer or sybil had told those master-thinkers that one of them would become a bitter opponent of the faith and fortunes of Ireland, as a leader of politics and religion in the fateful isle, and that the other would after a forlorn expedition come to love Ireland and be a prince of her faith—both Richard Whately and John Henry Newman would have laughed, logical and rhetorical laughs. Yet Fate destined the Oriel men to drift, to part, and to live in Dublin, not under the same roof as at St. Alban’s Hall and at Oriel, but within five minutes’ walk of each other’s houses.