Then raising a little his head,
To get a swate drop of the bottle,
And painfully sighing he said,
O, the hemp will be soon round my throttle.”
Phœnix Park has about eighteen hundred acres of lawn, flower beds, forest, meadow, and pasture, and nineteen miles of perfect roadway. It is open to the public at all times and there are no restrictions. A horseback rider can gallop over the grass anywhere, cricket matches can be played wherever is most convenient to the players. Racing meetings are held on the turf several days in each month, the course being laid out by movable fences. Polo, hockey, football, and all other kinds of outdoor games are going on all the time, and almost the entire working population of Dublin may be seen scattered over the park during these long summer evenings, when one can read outdoors until after nine o’clock. There is no more beautiful park, and no greater enjoyment is found in any similar place in the world.
The viceregal lodge, in which the lord lieutenant of Ireland resides nine months in the year, is in the center of the park, surrounded by an inclosure of fifteen acres with a garden, stables, and cottages for the servants. The chief secretary of Ireland and the under secretary have official residences in the same neighborhood, provided by the state. Immediately before the windows of the viceregal lodge Lord Frederick Cavendish, chief secretary for Ireland, and Thomas H. Burke, the under secretary, were assassinated in 1882. The assassination was witnessed by the occupants of the lodge, but before they could reach the place the assassins had escaped. The spot is now marked in an unobtrusive manner.
Phœnix Park was formerly owned by the Knights of St. John. When their lands were confiscated by Henry VIII. at the time of the Reformation, the monastery was selected as the official residence of the viceroy. Additional grounds were purchased later by the Duke of Ormonde, when he was viceroy, and the great Chesterfield, when he held the office, did the landscape gardening, which illustrates his exquisite taste. The park is beautiful always, they say, but it could not be more beautiful than it is in May, when the hawthorn trees are white with blossom, the furze bushes are blazing with orange, and the rhododendrons, which grow to enormous size, are great banks of purple against the rich, deep foliage. Every flower that grows in that climate seems to be in bloom, and Phœnix Park looks as if it had just left the hands of the Creator.
VII
THE OLD AND NEW UNIVERSITIES
Imagine a university and a campus of forty-seven acres of lawn and grove where Trinity Church stands in New York or where the post office stands in Chicago or St. Louis. In Washington we have something like it in the mall where the National Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Agricultural Department are. Trinity College, Dublin, has an equally expansive setting of green grass and grove and flowering shrubs, cricket grounds, and tennis courts, surrounded on all sides by business houses, clubs, and hotels. It is like an island of verdure in the midst of an ocean of trade and commerce. On one side of the campus the outside world is kept at bay by a continuous line of dormitories and lecture-rooms which overlook a busy street from the windows of one wall and a peaceful lawn from the windows of the other. On the south side the barrier is a high iron picket fence hidden in a wonderful hedge of hawthorn and laburnum bushes. On the other side of that hedge are shops, and a street-car line that leads to the more attractive part of the city. There are only two entrances to the college green, one at the east end and the other at the west, and it is nearly a half mile walk from one to the other across the green and among the buildings. The main entrance and the main buildings face the Bank of Ireland and look upon Dame Street, which is the Wall Street of Dublin. There is a little green crescent to divide the entrance from the street, with bronze figures of Edmund Burke and Oliver Goldsmith, two of the most distinguished of the alumni.