One Irish Summer

by William Eleroy Curtis

St. Stephen’s Green. Dublin

Near by the home of Mrs. Hemans is the Royal Irish Academy, occupying a fine old mansion, once the residence of Lord Northland. It is the oldest and most influential of the learned societies of Ireland, and possesses a large number of ancient manuscripts in the Gaelic tongue, most of them, despite their great age, beautifully clear and legible. The academy, according to its charter, was founded “for the encouragement of science, polite literature, and antiquities.” There is a good deal of interest in the attempt to revive the Gaelic tongue, but the bitter partisanship of politics renders polite literature quite useless.

There is a great deal that is green about Dublin, and the remark is not intended as a joke. There are several fine parks and breathing-places scattered about the city. Many of the residences have large back yards filled with trees and flowers that are hidden from the public by the high walls that guard them from the street, but one can see them from the tops of the tram cars as he rides about. The suburbs of the city are very attractive, with plenty of large trees and vine-clad walls and pretty gardens, and here and there a tennis court. As you look down upon the city from a tall tower there is almost as much foliage as in Washington. Phœnix Park is famous, and one of the largest public playgrounds in the world.

St. Stephen’s Green is a rectangular inclosure, twenty-two acres in extent and corresponding to four city blocks, in the fashionable quarter, and is surrounded by the mansions of the nobility and the homes of the rich. Lord Iveagh, the representative of the Guinness Brewery family, has a residence on one of the sides, and the archbishop’s palace is on the other side, near the Shelbourne Hotel, which is the best in the city, and several clubs. St. Stephen’s is handsomely laid out, and has what I have never seen before in a city square,—a bridle-path nearly a mile long around the interior of the fence, where several gentlemen take their exercise on horseback in the morning.

Sir Walter Scott was entertained in what he writes was “a very large and stately house in Stephen’s Green, which I am told is the most extensive square in Europe,” and, writing to his wife, he said, “The streets contain a number of public buildings of the finest architecture I have seen anywhere in Britain.”

A few blocks away from St. Stephen’s Green is another large park known as Merrion Square, which is a private inclosure like many of the small parks in the city of London, and is accessible only to the residents of the neighborhood, who, I understand, purchased the land and made it into a park two or three hundred years ago, so that the public has no rights there. Each of the leaseholders who are entitled to its privileges is required to pay $5 a year for maintaining it and “half a crown for a key to the gates,” as I was informed by a policeman on that beat. It is a pretty place, with deep, lustrous turf such as you seldom see outside of the British Isles, and find in Ireland smoother and richer and greener than anywhere else. There are a pond and several tennis courts, cricket and croquet grounds, which are occupied every afternoon by the rich families in the neighborhood; and it makes you feel a little resentful to see the children of the poor, who need that breathing space more than the owners, peeking through between the iron pickets. It is said that this square plot of ground, which is equal to four ordinary squares in area, was formerly a pond, and that the Duke of Leinster in early days used to sail a boat upon it. But it was drained two hundred years ago or more, and the splendid great trees that are growing there now were then planted. Leinster House is in the neighborhood.

The residences around St. Stephen’s Green and Merrion Square are built of ugly brown bricks, but are spacious in their proportions, and were intended for large families of ample means, and the aristocracy have always occupied them. The Duke of Rutland has one of the largest, and in Merrion Street, just around the corner, at No. 24, in a large house now occupied by the land commission, the great Duke of Wellington was born. It was the town residence of the Earl of Mornington, his father, and her ladyship came in from Dangan Castle, twenty-four miles outside the city, and the country residence of the family, a few days before the event, which occurred on April 29, 1769. There is nothing either in the castle or in the town house to interest people to-day, except that they were the birthplace and the home of one of the greatest of Irishmen, and his fellow countrymen have raised a shaft, similar to that at Washington, in Phœnix Park in his honor.

Across from Merrion Square is the National Gallery of Ireland, which was built in 1864, and contains a fine collection of paintings, numbering about five hundred, which have been presented and purchased from time to time. All of the old masters are well represented, and the Dutch school is especially strong. Attached to the gallery is the Metropolitan School of Art, which is liberally supported by the British government, and has a large number of students. Corresponding to the Art Gallery, on the opposite side of a quadrangle known as Leinster Lawn, formerly the garden of the Earl of Kildare, is the Science and Art Museum and the Museum of Natural History. Both are well arranged and full of interesting things, particularly Irish antiquities, historical relics, and examples of Irish industries. The most precious object is an iron bell shaped like an ordinary cow-bell and riveted on each side, which, it is said, St. Patrick used to carry about with him and ring to call the people together to hear mass. It is accompanied by a silver “shrine” or case for its protection, made in the year 1100 at the expense of Donald O’Laughlan, king of Ireland from 1091 to 1105. The “Annals of Ulster,” written in the year 552, refer to this precious object as “The Bell of the Will,” and its history is known from that date. It came into possession of the Archbishop of Armagh in 1044, and was among the relics in the cathedral there until it was brought to the museum in 1869. No one here seems to doubt that it is genuine.

In the adjoining case is another “shrine,” as the case or covering for sacred relics is called, that contains a tooth of St. Patrick, which, according to the tradition, was loosened and fell from his mouth on the door-sill of St. Brone’s Church at Killaspugbrone in County Sligo, and can be accounted for all these years.