DUBLIN is a city of magnificences and squalors. It has the widest street in Europe, they say, in Sackville Street, which, after the manner of the policeman and the muzzling order, half the population calls O’Connell Street. The public buildings are very magnificent. These are due, for the greater part, to the man who found Dublin brick and left it marble—that great city-builder, John Claudius Beresford, of the latter half of the eighteenth century, whose name is at once famous and infamous to the Irish ear, because when he had made a new Dublin he flogged rebels in Beresford’s Riding-School in Marlborough Street with a thoroughness which left nothing to be desired except a little mercy. Beresford, who was one of the Waterford Beresfords, was First Commissioner of Revenue, as well as an Alderman of the City of Dublin. Before he went city-building, Dublin was a small place enough. For centuries it consisted chiefly of Dublin Castle, the two cathedrals—Patrick’s and Christ’s Church; Dublin is alone in Northern Europe in possessing two cathedrals—and the narrow streets that clustered about them. Somewhere about the middle of the eighteenth century St. Stephen’s Green was built—the finest square in Europe, we say; I do not know if the claim be well founded. A little later Sackville Street began to take shape, communicating with the other bank of the river by ferry-boats. Essex Bridge was at that time the most easterly of the bridges, and the banks of the river were merely mud-flats, especially so where James Gandon’s masterpiece, the Custom-House, was presently to rear its stately faÇade. The latter part of the eighteenth century was the great age of Dublin. Ireland still had its Lords and Commons, who had declared their legislative independence of England in 1782. Society was as brilliant as London, and far gayer. It was certainly a time in which to go city-building, for these splendours needed housing. Before Beresford began his plans, calling in the genius of James Gandon, with many lesser lights, to assist him, Sackville Street and Dublin generally were as insanitary as any town of the Middle Ages. Open sewers ran down the middle of the streets. There was no pretence at paving. The streets were ill-lit by smelly oil-lamps. The Dublin watchmen found plenty to do, as did their brethren in London, in protecting peaceful citizens from the pranks of the Dublin brethren of the London Mohocks in the tortuous and ill-lit streets. Dublin, the city of the English pale, remained and remains an English city—with a difference. The Anglo-Irish did the things their London brethren were doing—with a difference. If there were unholy revels at Medmenham Abbey on the Thames, they were imitated or excelled by their Irish prototypes, whose clubhouse you will still see standing up before you a ruin on top of the Dublin mountains. In many ways the society of Dublin models itself on London to this day.

The Lords and Commons of Ireland were already living about the Rotunda in Sackville Street, Rutland Square, Gardiner’s Row, Great Denmark Street, Marlborough Street, and North Great George’s Street, when John Claudius Beresford began his work. He bridged the river with Carlisle—now O’Connell—Bridge. He constructed Westmoreland Street right down to the Houses of Parliament.

He built the Custom-House, now a rabbit-warren of Government offices, on a scale proportioned to the needs of the greatest trading city in Europe, oblivious of the fact that Irish trade was going or gone; or, perhaps—who knows?—building for the future. All that part of the city lying between the new bridge and the Custom-House was laid out in streets. Meanwhile the nobility and gentry who had town-houses were seized with the passion for beautifying them. The old Dublin houses were of an extraordinary stateliness and beauty. Money was poured out like water on their beautification. The floral decoration in stucco-work on walls and ceilings still makes a dirty glory in some of the old houses. Famous artists, like Cipriani and Angelica Kauffmann, painted the wall-panels and ceilings with pseudo-classical goddesses and nymphs. A certain Italian named Bossi executed that inlaying in coloured marbles which made so many of the old mantelpieces things of beauty. The old Dublin houses still retain their stately proportions, although some of them have been dismantled and others come down to be tenement-houses. But there is yet plenty to remind us that Dublin had once its Augustan Age.

If you have the tastes of the antiquary, the old Dublin houses and buildings will afford you matter of great interest.

In the first place, there is Dublin Castle, which was built by King John. Of the four original towers, only one now remains. The castle has been the town residence of the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland since Sidney established himself there in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. For the rest, it is a congerie of Government offices of one sort or another.

The castle was built over the Poddle River, which now creeps in darkness, degraded to a common sewer, under the dark and dismal houses, and empties itself in an unclean cascade through a grating in the Quay walls, whence it flows away with the Liffey to the sea. You can visit the Chapel Royal, if you will, and the viceregal apartments are sometimes open to inspection if the Viceroy is not in residence. I lived many years in Dublin without desiring to inspect what may be seen of Dublin Castle, though I have often stood in the castle yard under the Bermingham Tower, and, looking up at that great keep, have remembered how Hugh O’Donnell and his companions escaped by way of the Poddle one Christmas Eve in the spacious days of great Elizabeth, and how the young chieftain of Tyrconnel narrowly escaped the frozen death which befell his companions as they climbed those Dublin mountains over yonder to find refuge with the O’Tooles and O’Byrnes of the Wicklow Hills.

Those were the Irish clans that used to make the English burghers of Dublin shake in their shoes. While they sold their silks or woollens, or sat at meals or exchange, or said their prayers in their churches, they never could be sure that the wild Irish cry would not come ringing at their gates. The O’Byrnes and O’Tooles would swoop down at intervals, and raid the cattle from the fat pastures of the pale, sweeping back again with their spoil to their impregnable fastnesses. Some years ago a Father O’Toole published a book on the Clan of O’Toole, which contained the genealogical tree of the O’Tooles, tracing their descent without a break from Noah. This is a matter of interest to me, as I myself am an O’Toole.

The history of nations is, after all, the history of men—of men and of movements—and it is individual and outstanding men who make for us the milestones of history. Ireland has produced, in proportion to her population, a more than usual number of outstanding men; and, thinking of Dublin houses and monuments of one kind or another, we find it is of men we are thinking, after all.

Thinking of Christ Church, that beautiful Gothic cathedral, I think of St. Patrick, because his staff was preserved there, and was an object of great reverence till it was burnt by a too-zealous reforming Bishop in the days of Elizabeth. St. Patrick was a very delightful saint. One loves the legends that gather about him. I like especially how he wrestled with the angel on Croagh-Patrick, and would not come down from the mountain till he had been granted his several prayers. There were three in particular. The first one was that Ireland should never depart from the Christian faith. “Very well, then,” said the angel, “God grants you that.” “Next,” said Patrick, “I ask that on the Judgment Day I may sit on God’s right hand and judge the Irish people.” “That you can’t have,” said the angel. “Be quiet now, and go down from the mountain.” “What!” said Patrick, “is it for this that I have fasted so many days on the mountain, wrested with evil ones, been exposed to the rain and tempest, prayed hard, fought temptations—only for this?” “Very well, you shall have this,” replied the angel. “And now that you have your wish satisfied, go down from the mountain.” “Not till my third prayer be granted.” “What! a third prayer?” cried the angel. “You ask too much, O Patrick, and you shall not have it. You are too covetous.” “Was it for this?” began Patrick again, with a recital of all he had done and suffered. “Very well, then,” said the angel, tired out; “have your third prayer, but ask no more, for it will not be given to you.” “I ask that all who recite my prayer” (i.e., the prayer known as St. Patrick’s Breastplate) “shall not be lost at the Last Day.” “Very well, then,” said the angel, “you shall have that; but now go down.” “I am content now,” said Patrick; “I will go down.”

He was a fighting saint, despite his many gentlenesses. At Downpatrick, where he built his cathedral, he took a little fawn which his men would have killed, and carried it in his breast. I like the description of him by his friend St. Evan of Monasterevan, which tells us how he was sweet to his friends, but terrible to his enemies.

I think of St. Patrick at Christ Church rather than of St. Lawrence O’Toole, Archbishop of Dublin, who, with Strongbow, that fierce Norman who seized Ireland for Henry II. of England, built Christ Church. St. Lawrence O’Toole’s heart lies here in a reliquary. Here also Lambert Simnel was crowned; but who thinks of that ignoble impostor now?

Christ Church presents an effect of lightness and brightness very different from St. Patrick’s, in which it seems to me it is always afternoon, and winter afternoon. Patrick is in a particularly picturesque slum of the city, in the Earl of Meath’s liberty, hard by the Coombe, which was once a pleasant dell, no doubt, but is now the raggedest of slums. To the Earl of Meath’s liberty came the French silk-weavers expelled from France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and established the industry of poplin-weaving there.

The man with whom St. Patrick’s Cathedral is associated is Jonathan Swift, and for his sake it is perpetually dark. It is haunted by the tragedy of his life and death. Here Esther Johnson is buried; and over yonder, in the Deanery House, Swift, a sick man, lay in bed and watched the torches in the great church when they were making ready her grave. The strange bitterness of the terrible inscription which commemorates that most unhappy great man seems to colour the atmosphere of St. Patrick’s. “Where fierce indignation can no more lacerate his heart,” he rests by the side of the woman who was faithful to him with a long patience, whose death left him to loneliness and madness.

The whole place is haunted by him, as is the deanery close by and the old library of Dr. Marsh, which is said to have a ghost that flings the books about at night.

What ghosts meet one in the Dublin streets! There is Wesley. He was visiting the Countess of Moira at Moira House, which now, docked of its upper story, is the Mendicity, or, as the Irish put it, the “Mendacity” Institution. It was a splendid mansion when Wesley was there. One room with a bay-window was lined with mother-o’-pearl. “Alas,” said Wesley prophetically, “that all this must vanish like a dream!” The Moiras were not only religious: they were cultivated, refined, patriotic in the truest sense—altogether noble and generous. They received poor Pamela, Lady Edward Fitzgerald, with kindly open arms when that romantic hero, Lord Edward, lay dying of his wounds.

You shall see, if you will, the old House of Lords, preserved in its old state by the Governors of the Bank of Ireland, who have made it their board-room. The House of Commons has become the Bank’s counting-house, and there is no trace of its former state. What ghosts you might meet there at night!—Grattan, Flood, Curran, Hussey Burgh, Plunket, to say nothing of lesser worthies. Over against the Parliament Houses was Daly’s Club-House, where forgathered the wits, the bucks, the duellists. There was Buck Whaley, who walked to Jerusalem for a wager, and for the same reason once sprang out of the window of his house on Stephen’s Green into a carriage full of ladies. That house is now University College, and has its associations with Newman; and you might see there some of the most beautiful specimens of the eighteenth-century decoration still remaining—the Bossi mantelpieces, the stucco-work, the beautiful old doors of wine-red mahogany, and all the rest of it. Buck Whaley had a friend, Buck Jones, who is commemorated in Jones’s Road. When I was a little girl—and how long ago that is I shall not tell you—Buck Jones’s ghost still walked the road which is named after him. You see, Dublin still ranged itself alongside London; and we had our Buck Whaley and our Buck Jones if London and Bath had their Beau Brummel and their Beau Nash.

Cheek by jowl with the Houses of Parliament is the ancient college of Queen Elizabeth—the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity. That, too, has memories and ghosts. The University has had illustrious sons. Swift, Goldsmith, Bishop Berkeley, Edmund Burke, were among them. Swift was “stopped of his degree for dulness,” and had no love for his alma mater. She had other sons, such as Robert Emmet and Theobald Wolfe Tone and Thomas Davis, among her brightest jewels, though she would not have it so. She spreads a quiet place of grey quadrangles and green park and gardens midmost of the city, and she helps to give dignity to Dublin, already by her Viceregal Court marked as no provincial town.

If I were to talk to you of the ancient history of Dublin, this book would become, not “A Peep at Ireland,” but “A Peep at Dublin.” You will see for yourself the ancient houses of the nobility, the Lords and Commons of Ireland. Some of them have come to strange uses. Aldborough House is a barracks; Powerscourt House was in my day a wholesale draper’s; Marino, the splendid residence of the Earls of Charlemont at Clontarf, is in the hands of the Christian Brothers. Many of these old houses are turned into Government offices.

“Alas, that all this must vanish like a dream!” said John Wesley. And how quickly he was justified! In the latter part of the eighteenth century Dublin prided itself on being the gayest capital in Europe. Perhaps Dublin had always too many pretensions. However, it was sufficiently gay and extraordinarily picturesque. The Rutland viceroyalty marked, perhaps, its highest water-mark of gaiety. It was said that the Rutlands were sent over “to drink the Irish into good-humour”—that is, to distract them from serious matters, such as legislative independence and the like. However that may be, they did set the capital to dancing. After all, it was always the Anglo-Irish who counted in the rebellious movements. One has to go as far back as Owen Roe O’Neill to find a Celtic leader. For the time, at all events, Dublin gave itself up to the fascinations of the gallant and gay young Duke and his wonderful Duchess. The Irish allowed that the Duchess was one of the handsomest women in Ireland. Elsewhere she was reputed among the loveliest in Europe. We hear of her dancing at a ball attired in light pink silk, with diamond stomacher and sleeve-knots, and wearing a large brown hat profusely adorned with jewels. Every night there were balls at the castle or the Rotunda. The Duchess was dancing Dublin into good-humour. There were all manner of other social festivities. Every Sunday the Duchess drove on the North Circular Road, with six cream-coloured ponies to her phaeton, all the rank and fashion of Dublin following in coaches-and-six, coaches-and-four, and less pretentious equipages. There was card-playing; there was hard drinking; there were all manner of distractions, disedifying and edifying. For then, as now, the representatives of the King and Queen took the charities under their wing; and dancing at the Rotunda supported the Rotunda Hospital, to say nothing of the tax on the waiting sedan-chairs, which put a few hundred pounds more into the hospital’s coffers.

“Alas, that all this must vanish like a dream!” To be sure, many of the most illustrious of the Anglo-Irish, more Irish than the Irish, refused to be either danced or drunk into good-humour. The brilliant viceroyalty lasted not quite four years, and the gay and handsome Duke left Ireland in the saddest way, carried high on men’s shoulders.

Afterwards there were other things than dancing. There was the Rebellion of 1798. There was the Legislative Union with Great Britain, which meant for Ireland the absence of her Lords and gentry, and the spending in London of revenues derived from Ireland.

In the early years of the nineteenth century grass grew in the streets of Dublin. Famine and pestilence followed each other in monotonous succession. Emmet’s Rebellion broke out in 1804. If you were interested in such things, you would penetrate the slummy parts of Dublin as far as Thomas Street to see where, in front of St. Catharine’s Church, Emmet died, and the house where Lord Edward Fitzgerald was arrested.

Dublin is full of memories, of associations, of ghosts: no city in Europe is richer in such. There is hardly a stone of her streets which is not storied.