Abstract
This roughly chronological survey of the dialectical tradition has proceeded from the general (dialectic) to this chapter on the particular (dialectic at a certain college), which begins with a few facts regarding Swift at Trinity College, Dublin. From 1674 to 1682, aged six to fourteen, Swift was sent by his uncle, Godwin Swift, to Kilkenny Grammar School midway between Dublin and Cork, described as the best school in Ireland, one of the best in the British Isles, the Eton of Ireland. The connections between Kilkenny and Trinity were close, with the Duke of Ormond patron of the one and chancellor of the other, and the Provost of Trinity always one of the three visitors of Kilkenny. Swift entered Trinity on 24 April 1682 at the age of 14 and remained there seven years, taking his BA degree in February 1686 and staying on for three years’ study towards the MA, until the enforcing of James II’s Catholic programme in Ireland caused such fears that by early 1689 Swift sailed for England, about the time that the college plate and manuscripts were sent over.
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Notes
On Emmanuel’s connection with Harvard, see A. Heimert, ‘“Let Us Now Praise Famous Men”’, Cambridge Review, 106 (November 1985) 177–82.
C. E. Maxwell, A History of Trinity College, Dublin, 1591–1892 (Dublin: The University Press, 1946) p. 51
H. L. Murphy, A History of Trinity College, Dublin, from Its Foundation to 1702 (Dublin: Hodges, Figgis, 1951) p. 200.
Robert Bolton, A Translation of the Charter and Statutes of Trinity-College, Dublin (Dublin, 1749) pp. 35, 83–4, 78.
See R. S. Crane, ‘The Houyhnhnms, the Yahoos, and the History of Ideas’, 1st pub. in Reason and the Imagination: Essays in the History of Ideas, 1600–1800, ed. J. R. Mazzeo (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962)
rpt. in R. S. Crane, The Idea of the Humanities and Other Essays, Critical and Historical (University of Chicago Press, 1967) vol. II pp. 261–82, esp. pp. 281–2
I. Ehrenpreis, Mr Swift and His Contemporaries, vol. I of Swift: The Man, His Works, and the Age (London: Methuen, 1962) pp. 49–50.
E. J. Furlong, ‘The Study of Logic in Trinity College, Dublin’, Hermathena, 60 (1942) 40; Maxwell, p. 138 n. 23
W. M. Dixon, Trinity College, Dublin (London: Robinson, 1902) p. 171.
Drawing on the Dublin University Calendar for 1847, D. C. Heron, The Constitutional History of the University of Dublin (Dublin, 1847) p. 118, describes the pro forma disputations for the BA degree, which consisted of three papers, each containing four sets of questions to be systematically defended and opposed by the disputants.
W. B. S. Taylor, History of the University of Dublin (London, 1845) p. 145, describes the same ceremony.
Neither the 1847 Calendar nor the two histories say that the syllogisms were written out beforehand, but whether they were advanced extempore (from memory) or read, the procedure described is as wooden and ritualistic as that in Wesley’s Guide to Syllogism (1832), which shows the Cambridge procedure in the nineteenth century.
(See C. Wordsworth, Scholae Academicae [Cambridge, 1877] pp. 37–8
J. P. Mahaffy, ‘Students’ Fees and Tutorial Duties’, Hermathena, 18 (1919) 198.
The most recent and readable biography of Swift, that by D. Nokes, repeats observations made by R. S. Crane, and the more misleading ones by Ehrenpreis regarding Swift’s practice of dialectical disputation in college: Jonathan Swift, A Hypocrite Reversed: A Critical Biography (Oxford University Press, 1985) pp. 11–12.
G. P. Mayhew, ‘Swift and the Tripos Tradition’, Philological Quarterly, 45 (1966) 85–6, agrees with Walter Scott, F. E. Ball and H. Williams that Swift may have contributed to the tripos of 1688, and he agrees with Ball that Swift may have contributed to that of 1685.
John Barrett’s Essay on the Earlier Part of the Life of Swift (London, 1808) overstates the case for Swift’s writing the 1688 tripos and Walter Scott seems to have been the first to limit the conjecture to its present state of uncertainty, on pp. xxii–xxiii of app. 2 to vol. I of The Works of Jonathan Swift (Edinburgh, 1814).
J. Forster, The Life of Jonathan Swift (London: J. Murray, 1875) p. 33, says, ‘I have vainly attempted, in two careful readings, to discover in it anything that should recall Swift, however distantly. It is simply an outrage on his memory to call it his.’
Cf. p. ix of the intro. to The Prose Writings of Jonathan Swift, ed. H. Davis, vol. I (Oxford: Blackwell, 1939). The passage is found in vol. V p. 192.
John Potenger, Private Memoirs of John Potenger, ed. C. W. Bingham (London, 1841) p. 29
quoted by L. M. Quiller Couch (ed.), Reminiscences of Oxford by Oxford Men, 1559–1850 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892) p. 53. Cf. Ehrenpreis, pp. 62–3.
The original statutes for Corpus Christi College, 1517, supplemented in 1528, called for undergraduates ‘to be lectured in logic and assiduously practised in arguments and the solution of sophisms’: T. Fowler, The History of Corpus Christi College (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1893) p. 41.
Thomas Sheridan, The Life of Swift (London, 1784) pp. 4, 5–6.
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© 1988 James A. W. Rembert
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Rembert, J.A.W. (1988). Dialectic at Trinity College, Dublin. In: Swift and the Dialectical Tradition. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19072-0_5
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