Page:Biographia Hibernica volume 2.djvu/340

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336 HUTCHINSON. the gentlemen pensioners and junior students adhered to the side of the provost. The severity of Dr. Duigenan was not limited to the productions of his pen;–for his abuse of the provost sometimes extended to coarse per sonal scurrility; but it was deemed beneath notice. For, although the provost was a man of high spirit, he held it incompatible with the decorum of his station to seek per sonal satisfaction from the doctor, whose courage was held to be rather problematical, and who would be more likely to choose the court of King's Bench, than the field of honour, to settle any claims of that nature. The students who adhered to the provost's cause, also incurred the hostility of the doctor and fellows, and felt considerable impediment to their graduation, on that account. The provost had, at this time, three of his sons in the univer sity; Richard, the present Lord Donoughmore, -John, the present Lord Hutchinson, and Francis, a junior bro ther, who, as well as the eldest, was afterwards called to the bar. They were but striplings at the time, yet inhe riting the spirit of their venerated father, they would not have hesitated to call the doctor to account, had they not been restrained by their father's strict injunctions to the contrary. There were two of the grown students, the sons of Mr. Meyers, the college architect, who have since attained high distinction in the army; they were the protégés of the Hutchinson family, and they resolved, wholly unknown to their patron, to call the doctor to account in an honourable way. The brothers were comely and athletic, and extremely like each other. One of them deputed the other to bear a challenge to the doctor, who was himself a practising barrister, and did not choose to settle such affairs with pistols: he understood the safer maxim, cedant arma togae, and he indicted, as he thought, the bearer of the challenge in the court of King's Bench: but, when the day of trial arrived, he found, on coming to give his evidence, that he had selected the wrong name for crimination, and that his indictment attached to the sender, and not the bearer of the hostile message. He l