“They did well to place them outside, for no one will ever meet them inside!”
The judges, chosen by the Queen’s government, bear the title of Chief Justice or Baron. There are four at each tribunal, each provided with a salary ranging from three to eight thousand pounds a year. They sit in groups of three, bewigged and clad in violet gowns, with peach-coloured facings, at the extremity of a recess screened by red curtains. Before them sit the barristers and clerks in black gowns and horsehair wigs. The writs and briefs of procedure, written out upon awe-inspiring sheets of foolscap paper, are piled up within capacious green bags, such as are only seen with us at the Comédie Française when they play Les Plaideurs. The judges appear to be a prey to overwhelming ennui, so do the barristers. The public, not being paid as highly as they are for remaining in this sleepy atmosphere, keep constantly going in and out. Now and then, however, Irish wit must have its due: some one delivers himself of a spicy remark; everyone wakes up a bit to laugh, after which business quietly resumes its dull course.
CHAPTER III.
THE POOR OF DUBLIN.
Private houses are built in Dublin on the general type adopted throughout the British Isles: a basement opening on the railed area which runs along the pavement, a ground floor, a first floor, sometimes a second one. Above the front door a pane of glass lighted with gas. It is the custom of the country to place there one’s artistic treasures,—a china vase, a bust, or a small plaster horse. The small horse especially is a great favourite. You see it in a thousand copies which all came out of the same cast. In the suburbs you notice pretty often a window decorated with plants that are seen behind the glass panes,—Breton fashion,—and, striking circumstance, in Ireland also it is the uninteresting geranium which is the favourite flower of the poor. Inside the house the accommodation is nearly the same as in England. It is well known that nothing is more like an English house than another English house. But here, to the classical furniture, horse-hair and mahogany armchairs, and oil-cloth floor, is added a mural decoration of coloured prints and Roman Catholic chromolithographs, Saint Patrick, the Pope Leo XIII., the “Good Shepherd giving His life for the sheep,” surrounded by dried branches of holy palm, rosaries and scapularies. An ornament greatly appreciated on the chimney-piece is a glass vessel full of miraculous water in which swims a reduction of the tools of the Passion, the cross, the ladder, the hammer, the nails, and the crown of thorns.
Eighty-seven per cent. of the Dublin population belong to the Roman Catholic religion. The proportion is higher in some other Irish counties: in Connaught it rises to ninety-five per cent.; nowhere, even in Protestant Ulster, does it descend lower than forty-five per cent.
And those Catholics are not so only in name. The greater number follow the services of the Church, observe all the rites, maintain a direct and constant intercourse with the priests. The sincerity of their faith is particularly striking, and is not to be found in the same degree even in Italy or in Spain. For with them the Roman faith is narrowly bound with traditions most dear to their race; it remains one of the external forms of protestation against the conquest, and has been, till quite lately, a stigma of political incapacity. To the glamour of the traditional religion is added the poetry of persecution and the rancour of the vanquished. This religion is the one that is not professed by the hated Englishman: what a reason to love it above all the others! We must remember that in Dublin, amidst a population nine-tenths of which are devout Catholics, and where the remaining tenth is alone Protestant (Episcopalian’ Presbyterian, Methodist, &c.), the cathedral is in the hands of the Anglican minority with all the ancient basilics, whilst the worship of the majority is sheltered in modern and vulgar buildings. The conquering race has invaded Saint Patrick’s Baptistery as well as the Royal Castle, and the Senate of the University. A threefold reason for rancour to these who were thus deprived of the three sanctuaries of faith, public power, and learning.
Such spoliations are those which a vanquished race cannot forget, because they bring constantly their sore under their eyes. Now the Irish have the artless vanity of the chivalrous races, and the wounds inflicted to their self-love are perhaps more cruel than the others.
This vanity is frequently exhibited in a certain taste for show, and in a slight touch of the mountebank. The least apothecary’s shop in Dublin goes by the pompous name of Medical Hall; the smallest free school is an academy; and it is well known that every single Irishman is descended straight from the “ould kings of Oireland.”