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.
DUBLIN BAY FROM VICTORIA HILL.
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.