The Charter then proceeds to enact that the College shall be a body corporate consisting of a Provost, Fellows, and Scholars, with perpetual succession, and with power to hold and acquire goods, chattels, lands, hereditaments, &c., for their sustentation and support. They are granted permission to hold, purchase, and possess property of whatsoever kind, notwithstanding the Statutes of Mortmain, to sue and be sued, &c., under the corpo- rate name of "the Provost, Fellows, and Scholars of the College of the Holy aiid Undivided Trinity of Queen Elizabeth near Dublin." They are to have a Common Seal, and in the case of vacancies in their body from death, resignation, deprivation, or any other cause, they are to have power to elect fit persons into the vacant places,[1] so as to continue and perpetuate the corpo- ration.
But that with which we are here mainly concerned is the relation defined in the Charter between the College and the University. The University, as we have seen, is a body, to which the College has given birth, and of which the College was in some sort constituted the head. To the Provost and Fel- lows Elizabeth gave the absolute power of making, from time to time, laws, statutes, and ordinances for the pious and faithful government of the College; and also to select from the laws and
statutes of either of the English Universities such as they shall
- ↑ This power, so far as the Provostship is concerned, has been repealed, and the appointment of the Provost reserved to the Crown.
same with that body of Colleges, afterwards to be founded, which are to constitute a future University. It is true Trinity College is the only College in the University; but this does not make her the same with the University, nor does it explain, in either of the interpretations proposed by Dr. Miller, in what intelligible sense she is the "Mother of the University." I am persuaded that the true sig- nification of this phrase is the plain and obvious one that I have given. We have only to take the word "Mo- ther " in its literal and common signi- fication. The College brings forth, educates, nourishes, as a mother docs her children, the future graduates of the University. She is their Alma Mater; and although in England this phrase is generally applied to the University, and not to a College, yet it evidently means the same as the Elizabethan Mater Universitatis.
