“She sings the wild songs of her native plains,
Every note which he loved awaking;
Ah! little they think, who delight in her strains,
How the heart of the minstrel is breaking.”
Near by the place where Emmet and his fellow conspirators planned the revolution of 1803, is No. 151 Thomas Street, the house in which Lord Edward Fitzgerald, leader of the insurrection of 1798, was captured after desperate struggle, and it is a curious coincidence that he and Emmet should both have been arrested by the same man, a certain Major Sirr, in command of a regiment at the castle. Lord Edward’s refuge was the house of a tailor who sympathized with the insurrection, as almost every other artisan in Ireland did, and sheltered him for several days before the arrest. The house is marked with a tablet and an appropriate inscription. Lord Edward was wounded in the shoulder by Major Sirr and carried away to prison, where he died before he could be brought into court.
The Corn Market of Dublin is just beyond the house, and the name of the thoroughfare is there changed to Thomas Street, which is customary in Dublin. Sometimes there is a different name for every block, and it is very puzzling to a stranger. You walk from Clare Street into Merrion Street and from Merrion Street into some other; from Dame Street into the Corn Market, and from the Corn Market into Thomas Street, all unconscious, but the names are plainly posted on the walls of the corner houses both in English and Gaelic, so that he who runs may read.
Thomas Street is very wide, and that is understood when you know it was formerly an open market-place outside the city walls for the sale of country produce. The octroi tax levied by the corporation on the farmers who brought in vegetables, butter, chickens, and eggs was paid in kind, a measure of corn from each sack, a pound of butter from each firkin, and one egg from every twelve, which was the origin of a proverb that eleven eggs make a dozen in Ireland. The taxes were farmed out to the highest bidder, who exacted every penny possible from the farmers and used every means of extortion that could be devised to increase his profit. The most odious of all the Dublin tax contractors in history was a woman named Kate Strong, and they hated her so that after her death the farmers erected a gross caricature of her person holding a large toll dish in her hand. It stood for several years.
James Street succeeds Thomas Street on the same thoroughfare and runs down upon the river quay, where the enormous brewery establishment of the Guinness Company begins.
Across the river from the big brewery is No. 12 Arran Quay, named for the son of the Duke of Ormonde, where Edmund Burke was born in 1729 of a Protestant barrister and a Catholic mother. He was educated at a Quaker school at Ballitore, County Kildare, and at Trinity College, where in 1747 he organized a debating club, which still exists.
After finishing his course in 1750 he went to London “to keep terms at the Temple,” that is, to finish his law studies and prepare for his examinations; but suddenly, owing to some disappointment, he conceived a strong distaste for his profession, and plunged into a wild career of dissipation. He was introduced by Goldsmith to that circle of Bohemians which gathered nightly at the Cheshire Cheese Inn and similar resorts. He was a close companion of Garrick, Johnson, and others, and became one of the many devoted attendants of his beautiful countrywoman, Peg Woffington, the famous actress.