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.66 This also subsequentlyappeared in book-form as the History of Irish Land Tenures and LandClasses (1871).67By the 1880s, Sigerson was the recipient of a degree of establishmentapprobation.Now a Fellow of the Royal University, established underDisraeli during the previous decade, he corresponded with Actonon the subject of education.Having become involved with the situ-ation of Fenian prisoners incarcerated in British jails, Sigerson wasappointed to the Royal Prisons Commission in 1884, helping toprepare the ground for the Amnesty Act of 1885.Out of his involve-ments in this area came an 1890 book on the treatment of Irishpolitical prisoners.68 And following the precedent of Sir WilliamWilde s researches as Medical Commissioner to the Irish Censusat the time of the Great Famine, Sigerson was sent in 1879 to thewest of Ireland to investigate famine and the resulting diseases asMedical Commissioner to the Mansion House Relief Committee.Meanwhile, on the literary front, the first edition of The Bards ofthe Gael and the Gall, Sigerson s much acclaimed anthology of Irishverse in English, appeared in 1897, dedicated by its editor to CharlesGavan Duffy and Douglas Hyde as representing the Gael and Gallrespectively.69 Sigerson had become President of the Irish NationalLiterary Society in 1893 and his address, chaired by Gavan Duffy atthe society s inaugural meeting was later published as Irish literature,its origin, environment and influence in the 1894 collection, TheRevival of Irish Literature, alongside Gavan Duffy s essay of that title andHyde s The necessity of de-anglicizing Ireland.70 Also at this time,writing as a social and political historian, Sigerson wrote the chapteron Grattan s Parliament for R.Barry O Brien s Two Centuries of IrishHistory (1888, reprinted in 1907).71 He later developed this into a book,published in 1918, in the context of the Sinn Féin landslide in theWestminster election of that year as The Last Independent Parliamentof Ireland.72Section IIBy the 1900s, Sigerson was seen as the living embodiment of theSchool s direct continuity with its heroic early days under JohnHenry Newman s Rectorship.Since 1865, successive generationsof students of the Catholic University School of Medicine had been 124 Science, Politics and the Irish Literary Revivalcoming to Newman House on St Stephen s Green to be taught thebiological sciences by Sigerson.William Doolin recalled him as one ofNewman s men & the last surviving link with the early years of theSchool our Professor of Biology, the venerable Dr.George Sigerson.Slow of gait and stooped of figure, with his great mane of silver-white hair and carefully tended moustache and beard, he lookedevery inch a descendent of the Vikings of old a Sigur s son.73Another old student remembered Sigerson as the handsome strikingfigure who had so impressed Augustin Birrell, during his visit to theSchool as Chief Secretary for Ireland, that Birrell had declared thatSigerson should be retained after he had reached retirement age, as hisappearance alone would shed lustre on the new university.74Within literary circles the veneration of Sigerson was equally if notmore advanced by the early years of the new century.The May 1912issue of J.S.Crone s The Irish Book Lover, for instance, noted favourablythata movement has been set on foot to acknowledge in a suitablemanner the many services rendered to Irish literature by the veteranscholar, poet and scientist, Dr George Sigerson & His Poets andPoetry of Munster has been before the public for half a century;his Bards of the Gael and Gall has recently been republished; hisModern Ireland and his standard work on Land Tenures did much toprepare the way for legislation that has effected such a changein the economic conditions of the country, and his famous articleon The holocaust ranks with Lady Wilde s Jacta alea est as thefinest specimen of Irish journalistic literature ever penned.75A year later, the same column anticipated that The many friends andadmirers of Dr George Sigerson will be delighted to hear that Mr JohnLavery, the famous painter, has accepted the commission of the SigersonTribute Committee to paint the portrait of his fellow Ulsterman for theNational Gallery of Ireland , and if funds permit, to also perpetuate thememory of the grand old man of Irish letters by a bust to be erected insome prominent place in the City of Dublin, the home of Dr Sigersonduring the last fifty years.76 In April 1913, The Irish Review: A MonthlyMagazine of Irish Literature, Art and Science, founded by Padraic andMary Colum with Thomas MacDonagh, James Stephens and ThomasHouston, carried as its frontispiece a monochrome reproduction of James McGeachie 125Lavery s Portrait of Dr Sigerson.77 Meanwhile in the Editor s Gossip forthe August September 1920 Irish Book Lover, J.S.Crone recalled a recentvisit to Dublin where his first call was to Dr Sigerson, the grand olddoyen of Irish literature who proudly showed him a beautiful deathmask of Charles Kickham he had recently acquired.78When Sigerson s The Last Independent Parliament of Ireland was repub-lished as a book in its own right in 1918, the author of the May IrishBook Lover review of that year eulogised Sigerson as someone who hasbeen in the forefront of the many Irish movements, literary and polit-ical, the friend and adviser of men who have played prominent partsduring the last sixty years.And when Seanad Eireann sat for the firsttime on 11 November 1922, it honoured Sigerson as its oldest memberby electing him Chairman for that day.In seconding this temporaryappointment, Sigerson s fellow-historian Alice Stopford Green referredto the honour of so learned and faithful an historian of Irelandtaking the Chair for that day.79After Sigerson s death in 1925, Douglas Hyde wrote a Memorialpreface to the new edition of Sigerson s Bards of the Gael and the Gallpublished that year.80 In his opening paragraph, Hyde observed thatThe remarkable man who passed away from amongst us on the17 February, 1925, has left a gap in our midst that cannot be filled
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