Part 1

LEINSTER

Described by Stephen Gwynn Pictured by Alexander Williams

BLACKIE AND SON LIMITED LONDON GLASGOW AND BOMBAY 1911

Beautiful Ireland

LEINSTER ULSTER MUNSTER CONNAUGHT

_Uniform with this Series_

Beautiful England

OXFORD THE ENGLISH LAKES CANTERBURY SHAKESPEARE-LAND THE THAMES WINDSOR CASTLE CAMBRIDGE NORWICH AND THE BROADS THE HEART OF WESSEX THE PEAK DISTRICT THE CORNISH RIVIERA DICKENS-LAND WINCHESTER THE ISLE OF WIGHT CHESTER AND THE DEE YORK

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Page

Bay of Dublin from Howth Cliffs _Frontispiece_

Killiney Bay and Bray Head 8

Near Abbeyleix, Queen's County 14

The Port of Dublin 20

A Hawthorn Glade, Phoenix Park 24

The River Liffey at Palmerston 32

Portmarnock Golf Links 38

The Meeting of the Waters, Woodenbridge 42

St. Kevin's Bed and the Church of the Rock, Upper Lake, Glendalough 46

On the River Boyne at Trim 50

The Bridge of Slane, River Boyne 54

On the River Slaney at Ballintemple 58

I

Leinster is the richest of Irish provinces, the heart of Ireland, and for beauty it can challenge any of its sisters, save in one respect only: it lacks the beauty of wildness. What it has to show of most beautiful lies within twenty miles of the capital. There is no city north of the Alps which has so lovely surroundings as Dublin--or so varied in their loveliness. Sea and mountain, plain and river, all come into that range of exquisite choice. But everywhere in it the beautiful frame of nature has been modified and beautified by man.

Since it is not possible, in the small space available, to describe exhaustively the features of this great province, which stretches from the sea to the Shannon and from the Mourne Mountains to Waterford Haven, a selection must be made and indicated at once. First, then, the county of Dublin itself, infringing a little on Kildare. Secondly, the Wicklow Mountains and their glens. Thirdly, that rich valley of the Boyne, which was the heart of the ancient kingdom of Meath. But, before details are dealt with, some general idea of the topography must be given.

Suppose you are on deck when the mail boat from Holyhead has been two hours out, or a little more (I write here for strangers), you will see Dublin Bay open before you. To your right, making the northernmost horn of the curve, is the rocky, almost mountainous, peninsula of Howth, and ten miles north of it you see its shape repeated in the Island of Lambay.

Except for that, to the north and to the west, coast and land are all one wide level, far as your eye can reach--unless by some chance the air be so rarefied that you discern, fifty miles northward, the purple range of Carlingford Hills (still in Leinster), and beyond them, delicate and aerial blue, the long profile of the Mourne Mountains, where Ulster begins.

But to the south of the city (where it lies in the bight of the bay, spilling itself northward along the shore to Clontarf of famous memory, and southward to Kingstown and beyond) mountains rise, a dense huddle of rounded, shouldering heights, stretching away far as you can see. Near Dublin they almost touch the shore: one rocky spur comes down to Dalkey Island, which was the deep-water landing place before Kingstown harbour was built: it rises into the peaked fantastic summit of Killiney Hill. Beyond it the coast curves in a little, giving a bay and valley in which lies Bray, our Irish equivalent for Brighton. The Bray river marks the limits of County Dublin; and beyond Bray again is the high, serrated ridge of Bray Head, fronting the water in a cliff. Landward from it rises, peak by peak, that exquisite chain of heights which from Little Sugarloaf to Great Sugarloaf runs back to connect here once more the main body of mountains with the sea.

Mr. Williams in his picture has shown Bray Head and the lesser Sugarloaf in a glow of light which turns their heather covering to a golden pink; and from his vantage on the slope of Killiney, he has been able to catch the shape of Wicklow Head beyond and between the nearest summits of this chain.

South of that, you, from your steamer, can distinguish how the margin of land between mountain and coast line widens progressively. Wicklow Head shoots far out into the sea; and beyond it you can trace the long, low coast of Wexford projecting farther and farther from the hills. Wicklow, in truth, is a ridge of mountains, with small apanages of lowland on each side; Wexford, a level space east of the mountains which separate it from the vast central plain, nearly all of which is Leinster.

This mountain range, trending south and a little west from Dublin, is the main feature of Leinster--well marked in history. All the rest of the province was the most fertile, the most accessible region in Ireland, and therefore the first to be subdued. The Normans made, indeed, their first landings in Wexford and Waterford, but they quickly consolidated their power in Dublin, which was itself a city of foreign origin--which, even when they came in the twelfth century, was Danish rather than Irish. Centuries after that, when southern Ireland had slipped completely from under foreign control, the "pale"--the district centring round Dublin and varying from reign to reign in its limits--always remained subject to English law.

But the pale, however far it might stretch west and northward, stopped at the base of the Dublin hills. There the Irish clans of the O'Tooles and O'Byrnes held sway in strong fastnesses; and even in the nineteenth century, after the last great rising of 1798 had been put down in blood and fire, Michael Dwyer could still hold out on these hills so securely that Emmet, escaping from his ill-starred attempt in 1803, found sanctuary within two hours' march of those castle gates which he had failed to storm.

Climb those hills as Emmet climbed them. If you care to follow the most tragic romance of Irish history, get your car driver to bring you where Bride Street joins Thomas Street, not far from the house where Lord Edward Fitzgerald was taken (a tablet marks it). There, in the wedge of mean yards enclosed by Bride Street and Marshalsea Lane, was the site of Emmet's armoury and arsenal, whence he issued out that July night--to how ghastly a failure! Then you can drive up Francis Street (the route he followed in escaping) and so to the Green at Haroldscross where he used to meet Miles Byrne, the Wexford rebel, Emmet's right-hand man, but later a colonel of Napoleon's army with the cross of honour upon his breast. Beyond the Green is a little range of houses on the right; somewhere there Emmet was taken by Sirr. Farther still towards the hills is Rathfarnham, where he lived during the long months of elaborate preparation; and here it was that his faithful servant, Anne Devlin, refused to betray his movements though they half-hanged her between the shafts of a cart Farther still, beyond Rathfarnham, a road takes you past the Priory, the abode of John Philpot Curran, that famous orator and patriot, whose daughter, Sarah, was the heroine of Emmet's romance and of Moore's lovely song, "She is far from the land where her young hero sleeps". In the grounds of the Priory and of the neighbouring Hermitage, "Emmet's Walk", "Emmet's Seat", are shown: that old story has left many marks. Curran's name has not been so cherished: instincts are quick in Ireland, though it is only within the last few years that we have learnt how mean a part the great orator played in that tragic history. Yet it is worth glancing at the Priory, for here came all that was famous in Ireland's most famous day: famous orators, famous duellists, patriots, and placemen--worse even than placemen, for Curran's closest friend was Leonard MacNally, who for a lifetime posed as the champion of men like Emmet, and for a lifetime sold their secrets to Government, while acting as their advocate in the courts where they were tried for dear life.

All the great houses that stud the lower slope of these hills, with parks about them, and with much beautiful decoration inside, are work of that period in the eighteenth century when Ireland had her brief prosperous hour, when her capital was in truth a metropolis. To-day, as you rise above this belt of wooded land and make your way out on to the slopes of Three Rock or Kilmashogue or Tibradden--the nearest heights--you will look over a country not much changed in aspect probably, save that land which was then cornbearing is now nearly all in grass. The city itself spreads wider than it did in Grattan's day--there has been a great movement out along the shore of the bay. But the building has been mostly of houses for people with small means and narrow ambitions. The great houses of great men that clustered within a short radius of College Green are great houses no more. South of the river they have become public buildings: Lord Castlereagh's a Government office in Merrion Street, "Buck" Whalley's the old University College, and so on. But on the north side, Lord Moira's mansion, once a marvel of splendour, is to-day a mendicity institution; and few of the fine houses of that period have had even so lucky a fate. With their elaborate, plaster-moulded ceilings, their beautiful entrance fanlights, and all the other marks of that admirable period in domestic architecture, they house squalid poverty to-day, each room a tenement. The growth of Dublin is illusory. In Grattan's time it was one of the great capitals of Europe. To-day it is something between a hope and a despair.

But this is history. I return to topography.

From your height on the Dublin hills you can look over two-thirds of Leinster. Southward, the mountains hide Wicklow and Wexford, Carlow and Kilkenny. But over all that vast plain, stretching in champaign north and west, your eye can travel till it reaches far into Ulster on the north, and westward there is nothing to stop it between you and the Shannon. This is a country of many rivers. The Liffey flows out below your feet. Five-and-twenty miles northward the Boyne has its estuary. All the rest of the plain is drained southward--part into the Shannon, and so ultimately westward, but most into the great systems of the Nore and Barrow; and ill they drain it. For twenty miles inland is choice soil, but beyond that you reach the central bog of Allen, where long expanses of brown heather or of land only half-reclaimed make up a landscape of melancholy charm. Such a scene as Mr. Williams has drawn somewhere in the Queen's County is intensely typical of this midland country. Even where the furze blossom makes a flicker of gay colour, the whole effect is dismal, and its loneliness is constantly accentuated by what he has suggested, the flight of wild marsh-haunting birds: the trees are apt to be stunted and weather-twisted by winds off the "stormy Slieve Bloom", whose veiled purple shapes are shown against the western sky in his picture.

Yet the folk of this outer pale are "kindly Irish of the Irish"--none kindlier; and I have often thought the character of Ireland could not be better expressed than in a chance phrase I heard in the talk of a girl from that low-lying region. "My father used always to tell me: 'Put plenty of potatoes in the pot, Maria. You couldn't tell who would be stepping in to us across the bog'."

Leaving out of sight, because I must, the famous city of Kildare with its Cathedral (half-church, half-fortress); the broad lakes of West Meath, endeared by hope to patient anglers; the city of Kilkenny, where something of Ireland's prosperity remains unbroken, where the Butlers' Castle stands undestroyed, where are churches that were never ruined (almost a prodigy in Ireland); saying nothing of Lissoy, where Goldsmith lived in the village that his pen immortalized; briefly, dismissing about two-thirds of Leinster with a wave of the hand, let me come back to Dublin and its environment.

II

Of Dublin itself, what shall be said? A much-travelled Belgian priest told me recently that only in Naples had he seen such widespread marks of destitution, and in Naples they have little to suffer from cold. A young Irish nationalist, London-bred, describing the emotion with which he made his first visit to the country he had worked so hard for, said that his week in Dublin left one leading impression on his mind--the saddest people he had ever seen; nowhere had he heard so little laughter. He had lived near poverty all his life in London and yet had not seen so many pinched and drawn faces. All this is true, especially on the north bank of the Liffey. And yet an artist who came with me once to the city spent his days in rapture over the beauty of the public buildings. That also is true. The King's Inns, the Four Courts, and the Custom House on the north side of the river; in College Green, the front of Trinity College and the old Parliament House, (still--in 1911--the Bank of Ireland), are all splendid examples of the severe Georgian style of architecture, which found even happier expression in many noble and nobly ornamented dwelling houses. All this building was done in the latter part of the eighteenth century, when Dublin had its day, when it was in reality the capital of Ireland.

Traces of its earlier history are found in the Castle, Norman built, but standing where the Danish founders of the city set their stronghold by the ford above the tideway; and in Christ Church, first founded by the Danes when in the eleventh century they came over to Christianity. Skilful restoration of the cathedral has disclosed much of the early fabric--Norman work on Danish foundations. And yet that ancient Danish stronghold interests me no more than Cæsar's Londinium; nor does the medieval city hold any charm for my mind--lying as it did outside the real life of Ireland, merely a fortress of a foreign power. Strongbow's tomb is there to see in Christ Church, but to my thinking a far more significant monument is to be found in the other cathedral, St. Patrick's. Dublin as we know it, the capital and centre of an English-speaking Ireland, really dates from the eighteenth century; and its first outstanding and notable figure was Jonathan Swift, the immortal Dean. The Deanery, in which were spent the most remarkable years of his splendid and sinister existence, stands outside the main entrance; near that entrance, in the south aisle, surmounted by a small bust, is the marble slab which enshrines his famous epitaph. I translate it:--

"Jonathan Swift, for thirty years Dean of this Cathedral, lies here, where fierce indignation can no longer prey upon his heart. Go, traveller, and imitate, if you can, him who did a man's part as the strenuous upholder of liberty."

The liberty which Swift upheld was the liberty of Ireland. He sought to free Ireland from that system of laws restricting all industrial development, whose consequences are with us to-day. He came to Dublin in 1715, a politician in disgrace, and was hooted in the streets. Seven years later he was king of the mobs, and no jury could be bullied to convict, no informer could be bought to denounce, when Government sought the author of those pamphlets which every living soul knew to be his. He began the work which Grattan and the volunteers completed--yet he was an Englishman and no lover of Ireland. Born in Ireland by chance, bred there of necessity, consigned to a preferment there against his hope and will, he was spurred on to work for Ireland by that _saeva indignatio_ which his epitaph speaks of, which he himself renders in this sentence of a letter:--

"Does not the corruption and folly of men in high places eat into your heart like a canker!"

The greatest perhaps of British humorists, he died mad and miserable; and died as he expected to die. His other monument is Swift's Hospital, built for a madhouse out of the money willed by him in a bequest, which his savage pen thus characterized:--

"He left the little wealth he had To build a house for fools and mad, And showed by one satiric touch No nation wanted it so much".

In the north transept an epitaph written by Swift marks the tomb of "Mrs. Hester Johnson, better known to the world by the name of 'Stella', under which she is celebrated in the writings of Dr. Jonathan Swift, Dean of this Cathedral". The world has always wanted to know, and never will know for certain, whether she ought to have borne the name of him who celebrated her. But his bones were laid by hers, and still lie there, under a column in the nave; though the indecency of antiquarians dragged out their skulls when the cathedral was under restoration, made a show of them at parties, and preserved a memorial of this outrage in plaster casts, now deposited in the robing-room.

You can see also, in the vestry, not a cast, but the authentic skull of William's General Schomberg, who fell in glory at the head of victorious troops crossing the Boyne. You can read also Swift's epitaph on the tomb which Schomberg's relatives and heirs declined to pay for, leaving the pious task to Swift and his chapter. The Latin sentence keeps the vibrant ring of Swift's indignation. If only his ghost could write the epitaph of those who ransacked tombs and groped among mouldering relics of the immortal and unforgotten dead, to find objects for a peepshow! Yet after all it is in keeping with the story. In the dark end of Swift's life, while he paced his guarded room between keepers, servants used to admit strangers for a fee, to see that white-haired body which had once housed so great and terrible a mind.

St. Patrick's Cathedral, which Swift made famous, dates, like Christ Church, from Norman builders; but it was renovated fifty years ago at the cost of Sir Benjamin Guinness, head of the famous brewery. Christ Church, on the other hand, was rebuilt out of whisky--the restorer was Mr. Henry Roe. Broadly speaking, the century which began with the legislative Union was marked in Dublin by the growth of distilling and brewing and the decay of all other industries. Guinness's is to-day one of the sights of the city, and admission by order, easily procurable, will take the visitor over the biggest thing of its kind anywhere to be seen--and, let it be said, one of the best managed. Nowhere are workmen better treated, and no rich manufacturers have made more public-spirited use of their wealth. Dublin owes to Lord Ardilaun not only the opening but the beautification of St. Stephen's Green, once an enclosure but now a very attractive public park in the middle of the city's finest square. We may well thank Providence for this one great industry--but of how many it has had to take the place!

Dublin in its metropolitan days was a true centre of craftsmanship and art. I have spoken of the architecture, which used so finely the dove-coloured limestone of Wicklow. Gandon, who designed both the Four Courts and the Custom House, was not Irish, but Ireland gave him his opportunity and in Dublin only can he be judged. No great painter adorned that period among us; but all the subsidiary arts flourished exceedingly. Horace Walpole used to send across his books to be bound; Sheraton, Chippendale's rival, was a Dublin artist-craftsman; glass-cutting, silversmiths' work, all these things furnished men with infinite skill of hand and grace of design. Within twenty years after the Union all these things had vanished like a dream.

Except Guinness's stout, the nineteenth century has little to show that is local and characteristic and excellent. It can best afford to be judged by Foley's admirable statues of our Irish worthies. Burke and Goldsmith stand outside Trinity College, to which they belonged--though poor Goldsmith had even less cause than Swift to love the stepmother of his studies. Doubtless Goldsmith was not easily distinguished from the ruck of troublesome undergraduates, and that dignity with which the sculptor has invested his odd and appealing ugliness was not evident except to the eye of genius. Grattan holds the centre of College Green, a dominating figure near those walls which he filled with stately eloquence. O'Connell, the great tribune of a later day, stands lifted on an elaborate monument in the street, and facing the bridge, which now bear his name--at the other end of that broad promenade and thoroughfare (which part of Ireland still calls Sackville Street, not so much out of love for a forgotten Viceroy as out of dislike to the change) there will stand from 1911 onwards a newer memorial to a later leader--the monument which Augustus Saint Gaudens designed to commemorate Parnell. The famous American sculptor has set his bronze figure, of heroic size, on a low pedestal; but behind it rises an obelisk of brown Galway granite, inlaid with bronze and crowned with tripod and leaping flame. Thus Dublin possesses the only work by this artist (Dublin born, of a French father and an Irish mother) which the United Kingdom can show, save for the small medallion of Stevenson in Edinburgh. In America, where he lived and worked, his fame is established by many examples.

Moore, a national hero hardly less popular in his day than even O'Connell or Parnell, has been much less happy in his statue. It faces the Bank of Ireland in Westmorland Street, and is, in truth, very absurd and ugly. But Moore's volatile charm of countenance, which a hundred contemporaries describe, did not lend itself to reproduction in bronze. More interesting by far is the tablet in Aungier Street, which marks the little shop where he was born and bred, and from which he issued forth on the most amazing career of social conquest recorded in the annals of society. The earliest and best of the _Irish Melodies_ were written in Dublin about 1810; but Moore's parents had before then moved to a little house near the Phoenix Park, where the son's influence procured his father a sinecure.

The group of poets who succeeded Moore--writers of the Young Ireland Movement in 1848--find their commemoration in the bust of James Clarence Mangan, recently erected in Stephen's Green--almost as unobtrusive as was in life that strange and unhappy genius.

To-day, as the world knows, we have poets neither few nor unremarkable--Mr. Yeats chief among them; and one of the intellectual landmarks of Dublin is the Abbey Theatre, standing obscurely enough, but not obscure in the world. Here have been produced the poetical dramas of Mr. Yeats himself, the still more notable prose dramas of Mr. Synge, together with much work of Lady Gregory, William Boyle, Padraic Colum, and many lesser names; and they have been produced by a company of Irish actors--first formed by Mr. W. G. Fay--who have displayed an amazing range of talent. Any visitor to Dublin who cares for a beauty and an interest wholly unlike that of the usual machine-made play ought to try and see a performance at the Abbey.