the French silk-weavers expelled from France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and established the industry of poplin-weaving there.

The man with whom St. Patrick’s Cathedral is associated is Jonathan Swift, and for his sake it is perpetually dark. It is haunted by the tragedy of his life and death. Here Esther Johnson is buried; and over yonder, in the Deanery House, Swift, a sick man, lay in bed and watched the torches in the great church when they were making ready her grave. The strange bitterness of the terrible inscription which commemorates that most unhappy great man seems to colour the atmosphere of St. Patrick’s. “Where fierce indignation can no more lacerate his heart,” he rests by the side of the woman who was faithful to him with a long patience, whose death left him to loneliness and madness.

The whole place is haunted by him, as is the deanery close by and the old library of Dr. Marsh, which is said to have a ghost that flings the books about at night.

What ghosts meet one in the Dublin streets! There is Wesley. He was visiting the Countess of Moira at Moira House, which now, docked of its upper story, is the Mendicity, or, as the Irish put it, the “Mendacity” Institution. It was a splendid mansion when Wesley was there. One room with a bay-window was lined with mother-o’-pearl. “Alas,” said Wesley prophetically, “that all this must vanish like a dream!” The Moiras were not only religious: they were cultivated, refined, patriotic in the truest sense—altogether noble and generous. They received poor Pamela, Lady Edward Fitzgerald, with kindly open arms when that romantic hero, Lord Edward, lay dying of his wounds.

You shall see, if you will, the old House of Lords, preserved in its old state by the Governors of the Bank of Ireland, who have made it their board-room. The House of Commons has become the Bank’s counting-house, and there is no trace of its former state. What ghosts you might meet there at night!—Grattan, Flood, Curran, Hussey Burgh, Plunket, to say nothing of lesser worthies. Over against the Parliament Houses was Daly’s Club-House, where forgathered the wits, the bucks, the duellists. There was Buck Whaley, who walked to Jerusalem for a wager, and for the same reason once sprang out of the window of his house on Stephen’s Green into a carriage full of ladies. That house is now University College, and has its associations with Newman; and you might see there some of the most beautiful specimens of the eighteenth-century decoration still remaining—the Bossi mantelpieces, the stucco-work, the beautiful old doors of wine-red mahogany, and all the rest of it. Buck Whaley had a friend, Buck Jones, who is commemorated in Jones’s Road. When I was a little girl—and how long ago that is I shall not tell you—Buck Jones’s ghost still walked the road which is named after him. You see, Dublin still ranged itself alongside London; and we had our Buck Whaley and our Buck Jones if London and Bath had their Beau Brummel and their Beau Nash.

DUBLIN BAY FROM VICTORIA HILL.

Cheek by jowl with the Houses of Parliament is the ancient college of Queen Elizabeth—the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity. That, too, has memories and ghosts. The University has had illustrious sons. Swift, Goldsmith, Bishop Berkeley, Edmund Burke, were among them. Swift was “stopped of his degree for dulness,” and had no love for his alma mater. She had other sons, such as Robert Emmet and Theobald Wolfe Tone and Thomas Davis, among her brightest jewels, though she would not have it so. She spreads a quiet place of grey quadrangles and green park and gardens midmost of the city, and she helps to give dignity to Dublin, already by her Viceregal Court marked as no provincial town.

If I were to talk to you of the ancient history of Dublin, this book would become, not “A Peep at Ireland,” but “A Peep at Dublin.” You will see for yourself the ancient houses of the nobility, the Lords and Commons of Ireland. Some of them have come to strange uses. Aldborough House is a barracks; Powerscourt House was in my day a wholesale draper’s; Marino, the splendid residence of the Earls of Charlemont at Clontarf, is in the hands of the Christian Brothers. Many of these old houses are turned into Government offices.

“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