“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.
CHAPTER III
THE IRISH COUNTRY
DUBLIN possesses great natural advantages. The sea, the mountains, the green country, are at her gates. You take one of her many trams, and at the terminus you step into solitudes, into “dear secret greenness” of country; on to expanses of sea-sand, with the waves breaking in little crisped curls of foam at your feet. She is ringed about with mountains. She has a most beautiful coast-line. Turn which way you will on leaving her, you are safe to turn to beauty. Round about her are clustered various beauties. Beyond the Dublin mountains, the Wicklow Mountains, into which they gently pass, invite you. The mountains have the most beautiful colouring. It is an effect of the mists and clouds. I have seen a mountain red as a rose, and I have seen one black as a black pansy and as velvety. Sometimes they are veiled in silver, with the soft feet of the flying rain upon them; and sometimes, because the sun is shining somewhere, that same rain will be a garment of silver or of the rainbow.
She is the greenest country ever was seen. England may think she wears the green; but as compared with Ireland her green is rust-coloured and dust-coloured. I have gone over from London in May and have found a green in Ireland that absolutely made me wink.
“Sweet rose whose hue, angry and brave,
Bids the rash gazer wipe the eye,”
says Herbert; but the green, which is the eye’s comforter of all the colours, is, in an Irish May, of so intense a greenness as to have something of the same effect as Herbert’s rose. I think of the fat pasture-lands at the gates of Dublin, as well I know them. In May they are drifts of greenness, with the cattle sunken to their knees, while the meadows white with daisies, gold with buttercups, presently to be brown and green with seeding-grasses, have an exceeding cleanness and brightness of aspect. Grass-green, milk-white, pure gold—these are fields of delight. There used to be luxuriant hedges, too, ten or twelve feet high. What hedges they were in May! with the hawthorn in full bloom—no one calls it may in Ireland—and, later, the woodbine—honeysuckle in Ireland is the white and purple clover—and with the woodbine the sheets of wild roses flung lavishly over every hedge. Since my young days an improving county surveyor has cut down the hedges, though not so ruthlessly as here in Hertfordshire, where they are noted hedgers and ditchers, and so strip the poor things to the earth almost, just as they are coming into leaf, leaving the roads pitiless indeed for the summer days.