It was in the spacious apartments of the priory of Kilmainham, that the Lord Deputy Sussex held his vice-regal court, and received the homage of Irish toparchs, and English Pale-lords; and that mirror of magistrates, and model of Irish viceroys, Sir Henry Sidney, having landed at Monkstown, and stopped to take a stirrup cup" at the house of one Fitzwilliam of Merryon," entered the city in state, and "proceeded forthwith to his lodging in St. Mary's Abbey."

Many of the great monasteries had then their "chamber of presence," or "the king's chamber ;" and "the commons' house" was an epithet applied to an old apartment in the cathedral of St. Patrick, even down to those times when a House of Commons had ceased to exist in the realm.

The dissolution of all monasteries, and the forfeiture, or rather the transfer, of their immense revenues to the ecclesiastical princes of the new church, at the time of the Reformation, dissolved the rites of hospitality between abbots and viceroys; the latter of whom, probably, long lamented the loss of that "right good cheer," which the jovial monks of Kilmainham and St. Mary's so sumptuously dispensed. Sir Henry Sydney, however, was the first lord deputy who removed from his "snug lying in the abbey," and took up his residence in the "castel." Previous to his departure, he took special care to erect "certaine lodgins, and other fair and necessary roulmes, both for a convanient plaice for the lord deputy, and receaving of ony government herafter, as for the better and more commodious resort and assembling of the councaill, and greater ease of all suitors, boath rich and poore, which heretofore were accustomed to travail to and from plaices, both farder distant, and less commodious for the dispatch of their causes; and for the keeping of the said house and roulmes newly erected, and sweeping and keaping clane the walkes upon the walls and platforms, as for the tending and keaping of the clock within the castel, an honest, careful, and dilligent person was appoynted, with the fee or enterteynment of sixteen pence currant money of Ireland per day, and with-all a convaynient roulme for his lodging within the sayd castel at the assignment of the governour for the tyme being."

Ye ploughers of the half-acre of modern times, behold here in the "suitors boath rich and poore," that haunted the castel in Elizabeth's day, the antiquity of your vocation! and you, ye exclusive elegants of Almack's, ye dandy habitués of Brookes's, who canvass the official dignities of the Irish vice-regal household with "all appliances and means to boot," behold in the "honest, careful, and dilligent person," who "kept the roulmes and walkes of the castel clane," and wound up the clock into the bargain for sixteen pence a day currant money,—behold the origin and type of your controllerships, your stewardships, and your chamberlainships, and of all those splittings and splicings of an homely office, which once included all your several services !*

"Item, Christopher Barnwell, Lord of Tremlestown." The professed Irish antiquaries well call these families interlopers, new settlers, and "boddie sassoni," English churls; and there is no disputing that their tenures are not above six hundred years old.

*It is but fair to say, that this remark is the pure abstraction of patriotism; for however multiplicity of official places may deserve to be cried down upon a general principle, the private society of Dublin stands largely indebted to the English gen

Still, however, even in the reign of Elizabeth, and down to that of her successor James, with the exception of the "fair houses" and castles built of stone and lime, by the lords of the pale, and the ecclesiastical palaces raised by the wealthy church, the city of St. Patrick's prophecy and promise made but little progress in architectural splendour.

The hovels of mud and wattles were, indeed, exchanged for houses of cage-work and timber, and covered with tiles and shingles. But the arts of peace, an unshakled commerce, the protection of the laws, and above all, an equal distribution of justice, religious tolerance, and national unity, the source of all social improvement, and the basis of solid settlements, commodious and permanent dwellings, were still withheld from that unhappy country, for which no truce from suffering had yet existed. The burghers of the capital were in perpetual conflict with the bordering enemies, or in resistance to the encroachments of the church on personal property.

The mass of the natives without the pale, warring, flitting, fighting, shifting, hiding, pursuing or pursued, now pouring down upon the capital from their mountains in its neigbourhood, now beaten back to their impervious fastness, (their only fortress and security,) now taking "Irish leave" and bravely attacking their oppressors, now "coming in," falling on their knees, at the feet of the representers of English sovereigns, the mass of the natives were thus kept at bay from all social improvement, and were thrown beyond the pale of civilized and commodious existence, as they were placed beyond the political boundary of good laws and wise government.t

If in the reign of Charles the First the citizens of Dublin began

tlemen who fill them, for the educated minds and polished manners they contribute to the social weal.

* The septs of the O'Burns, O'Tooles, and Archibalds. The citizens of Dublin had not only to stand on the defensive against the church, in their own cause, but frequently to fight for one holy order against another. In 1506 the prior of Kilmainham attempted forcibly to take some loads of hay from the Dominicans of Dublin, but the mayor and commoners assembling together in favour of the friars, rescued the hay and drove the prior into Kilmainham. "The abbot of St. Thomas and the citizens of Dublin were perpetually at fisty-cuffs about a toll-booth; but the Church had its revenge, for a citizen having shot a random arrow, struck the image in the rood-loft at St. Patrick's during a riot in the church between the Kildares and the Ormonds; the Pope only absolved them by the penance of the mayor and corporation, who in detestation of the feat, and to keep up the memory of it for ever, were to walk barefooted through the city in procession before the sacrament of Corpus-Christi day yearly."

Whenever the citizens of Dublin (who in their corporate capacity were always devoted to the dominant interest) had nothing else to do, they went out a "hosting" against their country neighbours, headed by some lord of the pale, or lord deputy, and pillaged, burnt, and spoiled all before them. Thus in 1505, "The mayor of Dublin, with Walter Peppa and Maurice Colton, bailiffs, marched out at the command of the Earl of Kildare, Lord Deputy, to Ballaghasped, against O'Carroll, whom they harassed and destroyed, and then returned to Dublin." The unfortunate borderers occasionally made reprisals, and the septs of the O'Burnes and the O'Tooles, invading the pale forts of Fassagarde and Bathcool, struck terror into the citizens of Dublin, " as well by their number, as their policies in laying ambushes up and down the woods of Glendolary, on the south side of the city of Dublin."

In the reign of Charles the First, gardens, spaces of ground, and thatched houses, were to be seen within the narrow compass of the walls of Dublin.

to exhibit some improvement in architecture and accommodation, still the rebellion of 1641, the civil wars of the commonwealth, the struggles of the houses of Stuart and Orange, and above all, and worse than all, the ferocious penal codes and paralysing statutes of Queen Anne and the two first Georges, produced the same effect on the material and physical aspect of the capital and country, as on the moral, social, and political existence of the people. In all its bearings civilization was retarded; and in the early part of the eighteenth century Dublin was one of the most dilapidated, antiquated, and least commodious cities in Europe. It was, indeed, the reverse of that modish and wellworn figure of an oasis in a desert; it was a piggery in a paradise. Embosomed in picturesque mountains and luxuriant woods, watered by a noble river, and commanding its own magnificent bay, still it looked like some City of the Plague of Asiatic climes, where Ñature and man

are ever at variance.

The narrow lanes, shut-up closes, and pent-in courts, were calculated only to nourish disease and perpetuate infection. Even towards the middle of the eighteenth century, when the slow dropping off of one penal infliction after another gave some free breathing to the natural energies of the country, and permitted some effort at improvement in the wretched people, Dublin, with the exception of a few well laid out and spacious streets, had made such little progress, in spite of the prophecy of St. Patrick, that it was compared by a veracious and impartial traveller of that time, to "the worst part of St. Giles's in London; its streets ill-paved, and worse lighted, its raised flags few, and incumbered with bulks, its quays but partially banked in, its police neglected, and filth every where accumulated, rendered the ways impassable, and the air noxious.

The causes which had so long weighed down upon the material and moral improvement of the metropolis, were still more disgustingly obvious on the majority of its population. The lower classes, that crawled forth from their dens and alleys,† exhibited the most painful appearance; and at that early period of the day, when the wealthy and luxurious had not yet issued forth to chequer the general wretchedness with images of wealth and splendour, it would have seemed to a

*"You may conceive what the style of building was here formerly, when I tell you that the mansion-house of the lord mayor is a brick house of two stories with windows of but two panes breadth in each."-Philosophical Survey of Ireland, 1775. At this time, with the exception of Leinster and Charlemont House, both then recently finished, there were but two or three houses of hewn stone in Dublin; and Dr. Campbell observes, that “almost all the tolerable houses and streets have been built within forty years;" say from the year 1735 to 1775.

A sort of bird's eye view may always be taken of the moral state of a country by the appearances of the street population, and the lower orders. "I cannot describe to you," says Dr. Campbell, "how much I was hurt by the nastiness of the streets (Dublin) and by the squalid appearance of the canaille! the vast inferiorities of the lower ranks in Dublin compared even with those of the country towns in England is very striking. Seldom do they shave, and when they do, it is but to unmask the traces of meagreness and ferocity. Here, to be sure, you meet some splendid equipages, and a large suit of lackeys after a sedan chair; and you frequently meet faces fair enough to make Circassia gaze; but all these scarcely compensate for the painful sensations produced by the general mass." What a picture-drawn too from the life. Such were the results of the penal lash in the middle and towards the close of the eighteenth century.

stranger's eye, as if all the prisons and lazar-houses of the realm had emptied their cells and wards into the filthy avenues of the Irish capital. From two to three thousand professed mendicants then daily swarmed forth, with malady stamped on their squalid visages, while want or vice, famine or inebriety,* maddened them into vociferous cravings, or blasphemous imprecations. Thronging more particularly round the doors of the Catholic gentry (whose mistaken charity, in this instance, has ever served to perpetuate street-beggary), they impeded the threshold of business, infected the avenues of pleasure, and presented one of the most fearful and obvious results of that fatal policy, which reduced the nation to a state vibrating between the extremes of a debasing mendicity and a vicious and overwhelming opulence.

A step above this unhappy order in caste, though differing from it but little in appearance, stood at the corner of every street and court incorporated groups of professed humourists, the conservators of that wit which is supposed to be the indigenous produce of the soil, who, scattering about in prodigal profusion lamp-black and lampoons, and who, steeped to the eyes in mud and merriment, obtained no small celebrity among the genuine lovers of low but racy humour, by the style and title of his majesty's black-guards, or the company of shoeblacks.

Like the Forts de la Halle of Paris, the shoe-blacks of Dublin went for something in every city ceremony; and the names of two of their chiefst are scarcely yet obliterated from the Fasti Dublinienses of wit and humour. Superior in grade to all others of the street population of Dublin (in the middle of the last century), and eminently influential in their vocation, were the hawkers of fly sheets, or news criers, who like the colporteurs of Paris of the same day, crowded the steps of every public building, "les nouvelles à la main," and slily circulated publications, which by being placed on the Index Expurgatorius of the constituted authorities of the day, no regular bookseller or printer would venture to vend. The fate of George Faulkner had produced a general intimidation at an epoch when the liberty of the press in Ireland was, like all other liberty, in abeyance; and this order of men, whose cries rendered the streets of Dublin noisy as those of Naples, and whose verbal eulogium, of their literary and political ware, might have rivalled the art of puffing, as practised by the first-rate London booksellers of modern times-this class, if not founded, was at least reformed, and regularly and systematically organized, by that idol of all

本

The government have always sacrificed the health and morals of the lower orders in Ireland, to the supposed interests of the exchequer. In 1685 Sir William Petty relates, that in Dublin, "where there are but four thousand families, there are 1,271 ale houses and brew-houses."

Waddy and Paddy Oughy's frequently pitting against each other "the keen encounter of their wits," finally led to an encounter in which Waddy fell by the hand of Oughy, who suffered in consequence the penalty of the laws.

"The hawkers of news and cleaners of shoes fill up the measure of the apparent poverty in Dublin. "The filth of their bodies is offensive, their manners shocking, their outrages upon decency disgusting, and their several cries, infinitely more sonorous than the English, tingle in the ears with all the enraging variations of the brogue."-CAMPBELL.

the lower classes of the Irish, Dean Swift.* He, who wrote for the common people, wisely made use of the cheapest mediums for distributing productions beneficial to the country at large, and calculated to go home to men's hearts and businesses of whatever class or rank. The "Drapier's Letters" were cried and sold by the hawkers of Dublin at a penny a-piece: every one who could read, read the Drapier's Letters, and those who could not, paused in the highways and public places, to listen to their abrégé, tolled out humorously in the slang brogue of Dublin by the criers and hawkers who distribute them not only through the streets of the metropolis, but through the kingdom, where they were to be seen in all houses and cabins pasted against the walls, with "Don Bellianis of Greece," "The seven wise Maesters," "Black-eyed Susan," and "The last speeches and dying declarations of those who trusted they had not sin'd in vain." It was the writings of Swift and Molyneux (whose politics were not less revered by the Irish, than the morality of Confucius by the Chinese) that first dispelled the dense cloud that hung upon the national mind by the gloomy overshadowing of the penal laws. They first let in some gleam of illumination upon the dark and brooding spirit of the nation, long steeped in the inertness of hopeless despondency. It was in vain that the book of Molyneux was burnt by the hands of the common hangman in Dublin, and that the Dean of St. Patrick's was punished in the incarcerated person of his devoted and patriotic bookseller: the disciples of these two illustrious patriots and of their doctrines increased (as in cases of all martyrdom) by perseverance; and while the Dublin hawkers cried and sold their works, the minds even of the lowest and most degraded order were enlightened, "sans s'en douter,” and the national intellect was prepared to receive those seeds of freedom which burst into such vigorous blow in after-times, and led to the Irish hegira, the glorious and immortal 1782. In the middle of the last century, even the most trading streets of a capital, which possesses one of the finest ports in Europe, exhibited but few images to cheer the eye, or exhilarate the heart; while penal disability, like an incubus, hovered over all. The little movement visible, even in the most commercial avenues, was like the drowsy rotation of some wheel of a ponderous machine, when the power

*Like all genuine Irish patriots, Swift was too indignant, too mortified at the state of Ireland, and the submissive degradation of her sons, to flatter her: he did more--he wrote for her, served her, and enlightened her; and that at the moment when, in the irritation of disapponited patriotism, he was wont to exclaim, “I am not of this rile country."

Dr. Campbell makes a fearful addition to this picture of the lower orders of Dublin in the middle of the eighteenth century, when the penal statules were in their fullest vigour, and ere one link had been knocked off the chain of enslaved Catholics. He describes bands of female harpies, covered with tattered weeds, the most horrid miscreants that ever degraded human nature-"With_vociferations that would startle deafness, and execrations that would appal blasphemy, they cele brate their night orgies, to the reproach of magistracy, the scandal of decency, and the terror of sobriety. Leagued with these are bands of robbers who infest this ill policed city, and render it dangerous to the passengers who walk at night My banker recommended to me a lodging in Capel-street, near Essex bridge, assigning this reason, that as it was the most public part of the town, I was in less danger of being robbed on coming home late, for it seems that even two chairmen are not a sufficient protection."

VOL. X. No. 55.-1825,

See Barrack-street in 1825.

9