Page:Biographia Hibernica volume 2.djvu/338

 334 HUTCHINSON, his best exertions were zealously directed. Measures of severity, fines, rustications, and expulsions, had proved inef fectual,—and, therefore, others were to be tried, apparently more indirect, but rapidly more effectual. Amongst these means was a project, for blending with the severer studies of the Parthenon, the more vigorous and attractive exer cises of the Gymnasium. A riding-house was to be erected, for instructions in horsemanship; accomplished masters in fencing, dancing, and music, as well as in the modern European languages, were to be appointed, and a new era was about to dawn in the system of academical tuition; when the fellows, roused from their sound slumbers by the rumour, took the alarm at these unstatutable novel ties, and those birds of Minerca, dreading the prophana tion of her temple, and the consequent desertion of the goddess, emerged from the gloom of their ivied bowers, and hooted, in harsh concert, against their new provost, and h i s menaced arrangements. All the rusty armour o f college wit was hastily furbished for the war, which immediately broke out against Mr. Hutchinson, i n pas quinades, lampoons, epigrams, doggrel rhymes, pamphlets, essays, and newspaper squibs. The chief engineer o f this ordnance was the late Doctor Patrick Duigenan, o f virulent memory, then one o f the senior fellows o f the university; and n o man ever proved himself more skilled i n the pyrotechnics o f vituperation. He was a n accom plished master i n the science o f scurrility, and possessed a l l that happy coarseness and copia verborum, that might have well entitled him t o a professor's chair, had the elo quence o f the fish-market formed a branch o f study i n the college system. The Hibernian Journal, a popular newspaper o f the day, became, o n this occasion, a gratui tous channel for the ridicule and sarcasm of the doctor and his partisans. He attacked the provost under the appellation o f Prancer, allusive t o the horsemanship, dancing, fencing, &c. which h e proposed t o introduce and these fugitive effusions were afterwards collected into a volume, published under the title o f Pranceriana.