The most prominent distinction between the primitive and the medieval schools, as I have already many times said, was, that the latter had a range and system in their subjects and the manner of their teaching, which were unknown to the former. The primitive schools, for instance, lectured from Scripture with the comments of the Fathers; but the medieval schools created the science of theology. The primitive schools collected and transmitted the canonical rules and traditions of the Church; the medieval schools taught the science of canon law. And so as regards secular studies, the primitive schools professed the three sciences of grammar, rhetoric, and logic, which make up the Trivium, and the four branches of the mathematics, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, and music, which make up the Quadrivium. On the other hand, the medieval schools recognized philosophy as a science of sciences, which included, located, connected, and used all kinds and modes of knowledge; they enlarged the sphere and application of logic; and they added civil law, natural history, and medicine to the curriculum. It followed, moreover, from this, that while, on the one hand, they were led to divide their work among a number of Professors, they opened their doors on the other to laity as well as clergy, and to foreigners as well as natives.
Of schools founded on this magnificent idea and answering to a profession so comprehensive and so engrossing, there could be but a few specimens; for instance, Paris, Oxford, and Bologna. These, too, owed their characteristic splendour in no small measure to the zeal and learning of the Friars, especially the Dominicans; accordingly, their great era was the thirteenth century. But various causes came into operation to modify the University type, as I have described it, or at least its applications and manifestations, when that century had passed away. The first movements of new agents, both in the physical and social world, are commonly more energetic and more successful than those which follow; and this remark includes both Universities themselves, and the religious bodies which were their prominent supporters. New orders of religion commonly achieve their greatest works in their first fervour. The very success too of the experiment would tend to impair the University type by multiplying copies of it; for an imperial power (and a University was such in the intellectual world) must be solitary to be imperial. As, then, the utility of the new schools was recognized, they became more numerous and their respective territories less extensive. Moreover, it was natural, that, as country after country woke up into existence and assumed an individuality, each in turn should desire a University of its own, that is, an institution indigenous and national. Peace between states could not always be maintained; the elements were beyond the traveller’s control; and a safe-conduct did not secure the pilgrim scholar from bandits and pirates. The mutual divergence and distinctive formation of languages and of national character, national histories, national pride, national antipathies, would all carry forward the course of events in the same direction; and the Collegiate system, of which I shall presently speak, coöperated in making a University a local institution, and in embodying it among the establishments of the nation. Hence it came to pass, that Oxford, for instance, in course of time, was not exactly the Oxford of the thirteenth century. Not that the great and primary idea of a University was not sufficiently preserved; it was still a light set upon a hill, or a sort of ecumenical doctor on all subjects of knowledge, human and divine; but it was directed and coloured by the political and social influences to which it was accidentally exposed. This change began about the commencement of the fourteenth century; however, I am not going to dwell upon it here; for the foregoing reference to it is only introductory to a short notice, which I propose now to give, of the ancient University of Dublin or of Ireland, set up at this very era,—a subject to which the mind naturally reverts just at this moment, when we are now on the point of laying down the rudiments of its revival or reconstruction upon the old foundations, on a grander scale, and, as we trust and believe, with a happier prospect for the future.
If by “University” is meant a large national School, conducted on the basis of the old Roman education, it was impossible that such should not have existed in a people so literary as the Irish, from the very time that St. Patrick brought among them Christianity and civilization. Accordingly, we hear of great seats of learning of this description in various parts of the country. The school of Armagh is said at one time to have numbered as many as seven thousand students; and tradition assigns a University town to the locality where the Seven Churches still preserve the memory of St. Kevin. Foreigners, at least Anglo-Saxons, frequented such schools, and, so far, they certainly had a University character; but that they offered to their pupils more than the glosses on the sacred text and the collections of canons, and the Trivium and the Quadrivium, which were the teaching of the schools of the Continent, it is difficult to suppose; or that the national genius for philosophizing, which afterwards anticipated or originated the scholastic period, should at this era have come into exercise. When that period came, the Irish, so far having its characteristic studies already domiciled among them, were forced to go abroad for their prosecution. They went to Paris or to Oxford for the living traditions, which are the ordinary means by which religion and morals, science and art, are diffused over communities, and propagated from land to land. In Oxford, indeed, there was from the earliest time even a street called “Irishman’s Street,” and the Irish were included there under the “Nation” of the Southern English; but they gained what they sought in that seat of learning, at the expense of discomforts which were the serious drawback of the first age of Universities. Lasting feuds and incessant broils marked the presence of Irish, Welsh, Scotch, English, and French in one place, at a time when the Collegiate System was not formed. To this great evil was added the very circumstance that home was far away, and the danger of the passage across the channel; which would diminish the number, while it illustrated the literary zeal, of the foreign students. And an additional source of discontent was found in the feeling of incongruity, that Ireland, with her literary antecedents, should be without a University of her own; and, moreover, as time went on, in the feeling which existed at Rome, in favour of the multiplication of such centres of science and learning.