hour to see what we could of the metropolis of Ireland in a single day, for social engagements, already contracted by telegraph, required us to set our faces towards London the day following. Our first visit, of course, was to St. Patrick's Cathedral which proved, in some sense, a disappointment. We were expecting to see a venerable, mediæval pile, eloquent of age and historic suggestion. Instead of which we found, it is true, a fine structure; but to all appearance it might have been finished the day before we visited it. The stones were freshly cut. To our expressions of surprise at its modern appearance, the verger informed us that the cathedral had been entirely renovated recently by Guinness, the world-renowned brewer of Dublin, at an expense to him, personally, of over £150,000. He had left scarcely a trace, inside or out, to remind one of the church commenced A.D. 1190, in which Dr. Swift used to preach to his "dearly beloved Roger." Even the places in which the mortal remains of the dean and Stella reposed, had succumbed to the fiend of renovation. The verger pointed to the place where he said their remains were laid, but it is possible that to the next visitor he named some other place. There was no mark or sign to limit his choice. A stone pavement covered the entire floor of the cathedral, bearing no record whatever of anything that lay beneath it. When asked how this came about, the verger said, with a shrug of the shoulders: “Oh, great folks will have their own way." No marks were allowed anywhere on the floor to show where people have been buried.

Upon the walls, but so high that the inscriptions were scarcely legible, were cenotaphs to Swift and Stella placed side by side. While the verger was enlarging to us upon the extent of the renovations, Tilden remarked to me, "It is the old story of the jack-knife: it has had two new blades and three new handles, but it is the same old jack-knife." From the cathedral we drove to No. 12 Angier street,

near by, the birthplace of Tom Moore. It was a plain, three-story brick building. As we descended from our carriage a young man, apparently about thirty years of age, came to the door and said, with a smile, "I suppose you would like to look at the chamber in which Tom Moore was born." We gave him to understand that such was our errand. We saw at once that we were about to enter a drinking saloon, or what is more commonly and fitly denominated a gin-mill. In the course of our visit we learned from our cicerone that such was the business which had been carried on there by Moore's father, and that such was the business which had been carried on there ever since.

The young man conducted us through the front room, which was disorderly and dirty, into and through a middle room, to which there was an entrance from a side street or alley. This room was divided by partitions into stalls like a stable, so that a person could approach the bar, and get what he or she could pay for, in comparative privacy. There were two or three haggish-looking women availing themselves of the privileges of these pens as we passed. They were covered with rags, filthy, and in the last stages of brutal degradation.

We were then conducted upstairs and into the front room of the third story, where we were told the poet was born, and thence to the attic, where he began his career as a writer. It was a low, dark room about eleven by fourteen feet in size, with one window. There was no part of the house, save the front rooms in the second and third stories, that was not reeking with dirt and suspicious odors.

The proprietor was neatly enough dressed, which made the filth, confusion, and disorder around him seem to us the more surprising. We did not ask him for an explanation, but I incline to suspect that it was not to be found in mere carelessness or indifference to order and neatness. Would not neatness and order have affected his patrons unfavorably, and driven them to places more in harmony

with their own condition? Outwardly the house looked well and was in good condition; but inwardly it seemed. to be full of dead men's bones. We could with difficulty realize that a poet of Moore's genius and refinement could have been reared in such a hell as this. And yet, was not the poet's career a more or less logical sequence of his youthful environment? He was not responsible for his father's-dram shop, but did he not become the concocter and dispenser of more subtle and more destructive poisons?

Our driver affected not to know where the poet was born, and, when mildly rebuked for his ignorance, said that "Irish people do not care where Moore was born. English and Americans go to see the house; we Irish never take the trouble." When asked for the cause of this indifference he said, "Moore never wrote anything for the people. He liked to live with and to please the great people in England. He did not, like Burns, write for his own country people."

Manifestly the poet's popularity in England was his real offence in the eyes of our Jehu, who probably did not know how to read at all; and if he did, the fact that Moore was as much the national bard of Ireland as Burns was the national bard of Scotland, or Béranger of France, would not in the least have extenuated his crime of trying to please and be popular on the other side of the channel. Be this as it may, it was very clear that here was one at least of the voices of Erin not disposed to prolong

"Through the answering future Moore's name and his song."

On the front wall of the house, between the first and second story, a piece of white marble was let into the wall, upon which was this inscription:

"In this house, on the 28th of May,

1778, was born the poet

THOMAS MOORE."

Some two weeks after our visit in Dublin, Mr. Tilden and I were guests of the late Lord Houghton one evening at the Cosmopolitan Club, in London. While most of the guests were gone to the refreshment-room, Houghton sat down by my side on a sofa and made a few inquiries about what we had been doing. I spoke casually of my visit to the birthplace of Tom Moore; he interrupted me, “Let me tell you something." He then went on to say that in the early part of this century one of the most eminent surgeons in Dublin was sent for to come in great haste to attend a young woman who was supposed to be dying. Putting everything aside, he jumped into a cab and hastened to the place, of which the address had been given him. Beside the young woman for whose injuries he had been called stood a young man with a face expressing the greatest anxiety and distress. He was alternately denouncing himself for what had occurred, loudly invoking the Divine forgiveness, and begging the doctor to spare no effort or expense to save the young woman's life. The doctor found, upon examination, that though somewhat bruised she was not dangerously injured. After doing for her what seemed in his judgment to be required, he turned to the young man to know what had occurred, and why he held himself responsible for it. The young man proceeded at once to confide to him the story. In brief, the young woman was an actress, then playing minor parts at one of the Dublin theatres; he became enamored of her, and in a moment of passionate recklessness presumed upon her amiability to solicit favors which a lady cannot and she would not grant. He pressed his suit so pertinaciously that at last she threatened that if he did not desist she would throw herself out of the window.

The very extravagance of her threat rather encouraged than discouraged her admirer, for it never entered his mind that she could be so rash as to execute it, and to

threaten it implied to him that she was not more than half in earnest in her resistance.

He persisted with his importunities. True to her word, she sprang through the window, and was soon taken up senseless from the pavement.

Thus far to the doctor. Lord Houghton went on to say that the young man was so shocked by the immediate consequences of his misconduct, and so impressed by the virtuous firmness of the young girl, that as soon as she was sufficiently recovered to entertain such proposals, he asked her hand in marriage and was accepted. They were shortly after married, and the young woman became Mrs. Tom Moore.

I asked Lord Houghton if he considered that story as entirely authentic. He said, "Certainly, the facts are well known to many people still living in Dublin."

We afterwards visited the whilom residence of Daniel O'Connell, the birthplace of the Duke of Wellington, and the old Parliament House-the part in which the Commons sat being then occupied as a banking-house. The Lords sat in a smaller room, the furniture of which we found substantially unchanged. A remarkably fine bust of Curran in this room specially engaged Mr. Tilden's attention.

We left Dublin early on the morning of the 1st of August for England, and after a flying visit to Eton Hall and the Chester Cathedral, pushed on to London, where on the 3d we found ourselves comfortably installed at the Buckingham Palace Hotel. Here for the succeeding eight or ten days we were obliged to devote ourselves pretty constantly to social engagements, most of which had been. contracted for us before our arrival. We, of course, cmbraced the earliest convenient opportunity of waiting upon Mr. Pierrepoint, then our representative at the English court. In the course of our visit he found occasion to give us at some length the history of the measures he took to secure for General Grant a reception in England such as