Accustomed to Irish ways, English villages have always appeared very dead to me. Unless it be on market morning, one might be in the Village of the Palace of the Sleeping Beauty. I once visited Dunmow of the Flitch of a golden May-day. It was neither Flitch Day nor Market Day, and I aver that I walked through the town and saw no living creature, except a cat fast asleep, right in the midst of the sun-baked roadway. Such a thing could not have happened in Ireland.
CHAPTER II
DUBLIN
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.
SACKVILLE STREET, DUBLIN.
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.