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There are many imposing public monuments in Dublin, the most conspicuous of which is a massive pillar, one hundred and thirty-four feet high, erected in 1808 in honor of Lord Nelson, hero of the battle of Trafalgar. In Phœnix Park another native of Dublin, equally famous as a fighter, is honored by a stubby sort of square shaft after the pattern of the Washington monument in Washington, and a little more than one-third of the height. On the four sides of the pedestal the Duke of Wellington’s greatest victories are illustrated by battle scenes in bronze panels. Near this monument is the magazine in which the British soldiers keep their ammunition. It was the subject of Dean Swift’s last epigram:

“Behold! a proof of Irish sense;

Here Irish wit is seen.

When nothing’s left that’s worth defense,

We build a magazine.”

There is a fine equestrian statue of Lord Gough in Phœnix Park, cast from the cannon taken by his command, and a bronze phœnix erected by Lord Chesterfield when he was lieutenant-governor.

Daniel O’Connell’s great services to Ireland are commemorated by the finest bridge over the Liffey River, and an imposing and elaborate monument facing it upon the principal street of the town. It is a little confusing because of the many figures that surround it. The statue of O’Connell is twelve feet high, and is surrounded by fifty small statues, all allegorical, the chief being that of “Erin” casting off her fetters and pointing to the liberator as if to say, “He told me to do it.” Father Mathew is represented by a marble figure with a noble pose and an unusually expressive face. It was made by a woman, a Miss Redmond. There are also statues of Grattan, Curran, Edmund Burke, Thomas Moore, Oliver Goldsmith, Sir Robert Stewart the musician, Smith O’Brien, Sir John Grey, William of Orange, George I., George II., George III.; and Queen Victoria sits in bronze upon a massive pedestal, surrounded by famous figures representing the various colonies of the British Empire upon which it has been frequently stated that the sun never sets. Of modern men, Sir Benjamin Guinness, the brewer, his son, Lord Ardilaun, and the late Archbishop Plunkett are honored, and some of the figures, particularly the latter, are very good.

At the “top” of O’Connell Street, as they say here, corresponding to the O’Connell monument, will soon stand a tall shaft surmounted by a statue of the late Charles Stewart Parnell. The money was raised in America by John E. Redmond and Daniel Tallon, recently Lord Mayor of Dublin, and the monument was designed and the figure cast by the late Augustus Saint Gaudens. It was his latest and one of his most effective works. It was quite appropriate that Saint Gaudens, who was an Irish boy, should have been commissioned for this statue, which many consider the most beautiful of all the many monuments in Dublin.

Parnell’s grave in Prospect Cemetery is not neglected, although I have seen it stated repeatedly that such was the case. It occupies the most prominent place in the cemetery, on the western side of the memorial chapel, on a spot corresponding with that occupied by the towering monument of Daniel O’Connell on the eastern side. The grave is in the center of a large circle, surrounded by an iron fence, shaded by beautiful trees, and large foliage plants which were in full bloom. The turf is well kept, and here and there are memorial wreaths preserved under glass globes. In the center of the circle is a high mound, protected by a hedge of arbor vitæ, and ornamented by several rose bushes. The grave is in the center of the mound. At the head is an iron cross six feet high, and at the foot the name “Parnell” is worked out in large letters of box.

The Customs House, Dublin

One of the employees of the cemetery, who showed us around, said that it was the intention of Parnell’s friends to erect a monument to correspond with that of Daniel O’Connell on the other side of the chapel, but after a discussion of several years they had decided to place the memorial downtown at the site I have already mentioned, where it would always be before the eyes of the public. O’Connell’s body is buried in a crypt underneath the monument. His heart is in a casket in the chapel of the Irish College at Rome.

Several other famous Irish patriots are buried in Prospect Cemetery, and I asked the guide where the body of Robert Emmet was laid.

“That’s a great sacret,” he answered mysteriously, “an’ I wouldn’t tell it to yer honor avin if I knew; with all respict to yer honor. It woul’ be the same as me life is worth. The soul of Robert Emmet has gone to God. His bones is in the hands of the friends of Ireland, but will remain in their prisint sacred hiding place until Ireland is free.”

Michael Davitt is buried in the town of Straid, County Mayo, where he was born and where his parents were evicted from their home during his childhood. The grave is marked with an ordinary stone. There has been no movement thus far for a monument in his honor. His widow lives at Dalkey, the lovely suburb of Dublin by the sea, which I describe elsewhere. She is in excellent circumstances financially, has a comfortable home,—much more comfortable than any she had during her husband’s lifetime,—and is educating her four children, two boys and two girls, at the best schools. The oldest son, now a young man of twenty-two, is studying law, and promises to show much of the ability of his father.

One bright day I made a pilgrimage to the birthplaces and homes of famous Irishmen in Dublin. It is to be regretted that the people of that city feel so little respect for the memory of their heroes as to permit the scenes that were associated so closely with their careers to become filthy whisky dives. Several of these sacred places are among the most disreputable saloons in Dublin.

Henry Grattan was born in 1746 in a house on Fishamble Street, near the old church where Handel first produced his famous oratorio “The Messiah,” and was baptized in the Church of St. John near by. He was educated in Trinity College, Dublin, and the trustees of that institution have erected a statue in his honor outside the old house of parliament, now the Bank of Ireland, which was the scene of his most eminent services. He is represented in the attitude of pleading with uplifted hands for the liberty of Ireland. The figure is the personification of eloquence.

Grattan spent his early life in Dublin, was admitted to the bar in 1773, and entered parliament at the age of twenty-nine in 1775. He immediately assumed the leadership of the opposition to the government, and it was through his ability and able management that the king and the British Parliament were compelled to give Ireland free trade and the constitution in 1782. What was called “Grattan’s parliament” lasted nineteen years, and its activity was tremendous and comprehensive, and the results may now be seen in every direction. It conferred innumerable benefits upon the city of Dublin and upon the country at large. During the nineteen years it was in session it made greater public improvement than occurred in any single century before. It built the two greatest edifices in Ireland,—the Four Courts and the customs house,—which are beautiful examples of the classic school of architecture, and each cost several millions of dollars. The Bank of Ireland was founded as the financial agent of the government, but Grattan, when he moved its establishment, little dreamed that it would store its gold and transact its business in the very chamber where the act was passed. The Royal Irish Academy was founded to promote “the study of science and polite learning and antiquities.” Three great hospitals were built; the College of Physicians and Surgeons was incorporated and erected, a dignified and stately building upon Stephen’s Green. The commerce of the country was developed and large warehouses and mercantile establishments were erected to accommodate it. Many new manufactories were established. Highroads were built in every direction, coach lines were inaugurated to accommodate travel, and sailing packets to carry passengers and mails across the sea. The canal was built, one hundred miles long, to bring freight to the city. Penny post was introduced. The Guinness brewery was developed, with a great profit to the proprietors, and began to send to England the beer it had been selling for local customers for half a century.

The Bank of Ireland, Dublin

Grattan was the leader of all this prosperity, and introduced many and advocated all of the laws to encourage it. As an acknowledgment of his services, Parliament voted him a gift of $250,000, which enabled him to settle down as a country gentleman at a seat called “Tinnehinch,” near the town of Enniskerry, a few miles south of Dublin, near the watering-place called Bray. The British government offered him the viceregal lodge, now occupied by the lord lieutenant, in Phœnix Park; but Grattan declined it, for fear the gift might be misinterpreted.

This period of self-government, which might be called “the golden age” of Ireland, lasted nineteen years, when “Grattan’s parliament” fell, as so many other good things have fallen, because it became “vain of its own conceit.” It is not expedient, it is not wholesome, for the same party to remain in control of affairs too long. Its members become corrupt, extravagant, selfish, intolerant, and indifferent to the public welfare, and Grattan’s parliament acquired all of these faults. The great leader—and he was one of the ablest political leaders that ever came upon the theater of public affairs—was unable to control his followers. They became restless, they favored measures that he could not approve, and advocated a radical policy toward the British government that he opposed with all his energy and eloquence.

He was soon displaced from leadership by the extremists, who demanded absolute separation from England and encouraged the revolutions of 1798 and 1803. These movements were undoubtedly encouraged by the example of the French Revolution, when the hot heads came into control. Ireland burst into rebellion, which was put down with the utmost severity, and William Pitt, Prime Minister of Great Britain, introduced the act of union which was adopted by the Irish house through bribery, bulldozing, and other disreputable measures.

Grattan was very ill, but, leaning on the shoulders of two friends, and dressed in his old volunteer uniform, he entered the Irish house of parliament, now the cash-room of the Bank of Ireland, and made the greatest speech of his life. But he failed to change the destiny of his country. He did not change a vote, and the bond which now binds Ireland to Great Britain, and which the Irish people have been trying to dissolve ever since, was passed against his vehement protests. If his advice had been followed by the Irish parliament, if its members had listened to his pleadings, the disturbances, the distress, the bloodshed of a century would have been spared. William Pitt bought a majority of the votes and paid for them with pensions, official positions, titles of nobility, and other forms of reward.

The debate provoked a duel between Grattan and Correy, chancellor of the exchequer. Shots were exchanged and Correy was wounded in the hand.

Grattan pronounced the funeral oration of the Irish parliament in the words that are immortal:

“I do not give up my country,” he said. “I see her in a swoon, but she is not dead. Though in her tomb she lies helpless and motionless there is upon her lips a spirit of life, and on her cheek a glow of beauty—

“‘Thou art not conquered; beauty’s ensign yet

Is crimson in thy lips and in thy cheeks,

And death’s pale flag is not advanced there.’”

It is true, as the man of the cemetery told us, that the burial place of Robert Emmet is unknown. Many people believe that his body was given to the surgeons of Trinity College after his execution, because if it had been given to his friends they would have erected a monument to mark his grave. No one of all the many people who admired and loved him has ever been able to obtain a clew to its disappearance. It is a popular belief, which the leaders of patriotic movements encourage, that the burial place is known and will be disclosed, as the man at the cemetery said, when the flag of freedom floats over “The Ould Sod,” but there is no good reason for such a romantic hope. Several of those who would be informed if there were any foundation for such an expectation have told me that it is all romance; that Emmet’s grave has never been discovered and probably never will be, because it doesn’t exist.

I went to the home of Robert Emmet in Marchalsea Lane, near the debtor’s prison, where he used to meet his fellow conspirators while organizing the insurrection of the United Irishmen in 1803. Emmet was a brilliant, eager boy, only twenty-four, and had been expelled from the University of Dublin for sympathy with the revolution of 1798. He went to Paris, remained there for a while until things had quieted down, and then returned to Dublin, where he conceived a rash project to seize the castle and the fort. The authorities were taken entirely by surprise, but the country contingent which had been promised to support him failed to arrive, and Emmet, with less than a hundred men, armed with pikes—simply spearheads mounted on the ends of poles—marched against the castle and, of course, were immediately overcome. Many of his followers, who fled to their homes, were killed at their own doors, and Emmet became a fugitive.

Robert Emmet was born in Dublin in 1778 and was a playmate and schoolfellow of Thomas Moore, the poet. His brother, Thomas Addis Emmet, born in 1764, was involved in the revolution of 1798 and fled to America, where he became eminent at the bar of New York, serving at one time as attorney-general of that State. He left several sons and grandsons.

When Robert Emmet escaped, after the failure of his foolish attack upon the castle, he took refuge among friends in the Wicklow Hills, south of Dublin, to await an opportunity to cross over to France. Against their protests he went at night to say good-by to his sweetheart, Sarah Curran, daughter of the famous advocate, was arrested and tried for high treason. He conducted his own defense with extraordinary ability. His closing speech stands as one of the greatest examples of eloquence in the English language. He was condemned to death and hanged outside of St. Catherine’s Church, upon the spot where Lord Kilwarden, an eminent judge of the highest integrity, was killed by some of Emmet’s men while returning with his nephew and daughter from a visit to the country.

Emmet, in his farewell speech, asked that his epitaph should not be written until Ireland was free, and that undoubtedly suggested the popular belief that his burial place is known and will be disclosed in due time.

Sarah Curran died soon after in Sicily of a broken heart, and Tom Moore, one of Emmet’s most beloved friends and also devoted to Miss Curran, enshrined the pathetic story in a touching ballad:

“She is far from the land where her young hero sleeps,

And lovers are round her sighing;

But coldly she turns from their gaze and weeps,

For her heart on his grave is lying.

“She sings the wild songs of her native plains,

Every note which he loved awaking;

Ah! little they think, who delight in her strains,

How the heart of the minstrel is breaking.”

Near by the place where Emmet and his fellow conspirators planned the revolution of 1803, is No. 151 Thomas Street, the house in which Lord Edward Fitzgerald, leader of the insurrection of 1798, was captured after desperate struggle, and it is a curious coincidence that he and Emmet should both have been arrested by the same man, a certain Major Sirr, in command of a regiment at the castle. Lord Edward’s refuge was the house of a tailor who sympathized with the insurrection, as almost every other artisan in Ireland did, and sheltered him for several days before the arrest. The house is marked with a tablet and an appropriate inscription. Lord Edward was wounded in the shoulder by Major Sirr and carried away to prison, where he died before he could be brought into court.

The Corn Market of Dublin is just beyond the house, and the name of the thoroughfare is there changed to Thomas Street, which is customary in Dublin. Sometimes there is a different name for every block, and it is very puzzling to a stranger. You walk from Clare Street into Merrion Street and from Merrion Street into some other; from Dame Street into the Corn Market, and from the Corn Market into Thomas Street, all unconscious, but the names are plainly posted on the walls of the corner houses both in English and Gaelic, so that he who runs may read.

Thomas Street is very wide, and that is understood when you know it was formerly an open market-place outside the city walls for the sale of country produce. The octroi tax levied by the corporation on the farmers who brought in vegetables, butter, chickens, and eggs was paid in kind, a measure of corn from each sack, a pound of butter from each firkin, and one egg from every twelve, which was the origin of a proverb that eleven eggs make a dozen in Ireland. The taxes were farmed out to the highest bidder, who exacted every penny possible from the farmers and used every means of extortion that could be devised to increase his profit. The most odious of all the Dublin tax contractors in history was a woman named Kate Strong, and they hated her so that after her death the farmers erected a gross caricature of her person holding a large toll dish in her hand. It stood for several years.

James Street succeeds Thomas Street on the same thoroughfare and runs down upon the river quay, where the enormous brewery establishment of the Guinness Company begins.

Across the river from the big brewery is No. 12 Arran Quay, named for the son of the Duke of Ormonde, where Edmund Burke was born in 1729 of a Protestant barrister and a Catholic mother. He was educated at a Quaker school at Ballitore, County Kildare, and at Trinity College, where in 1747 he organized a debating club, which still exists.

After finishing his course in 1750 he went to London “to keep terms at the Temple,” that is, to finish his law studies and prepare for his examinations; but suddenly, owing to some disappointment, he conceived a strong distaste for his profession, and plunged into a wild career of dissipation. He was introduced by Goldsmith to that circle of Bohemians which gathered nightly at the Cheshire Cheese Inn and similar resorts. He was a close companion of Garrick, Johnson, and others, and became one of the many devoted attendants of his beautiful countrywoman, Peg Woffington, the famous actress.

His dissipation gave his family great distress and caused his father to cut off his allowance. This compelled him to do something for himself. He went into politics, and soon made a reputation as a speaker and writer and political manager. He wrote a great deal that was serious and even sublime, and, mending his ways, secured the patronage of the Marquis of Buckingham, the prime minister, who opened the doors of the House of Commons for him. In a very short time he became the most effective debater and the most influential leader of his party. Then his abilities were fully recognized and his fame encircled the world.

He was the ablest friend of the American colonies in England during the Revolution, and harassed Lord North more than any other man. He reached the summit of his influence at the impeachment of Warren Hastings for misgovernment and treason while viceroy in India; and then Burke’s sun began to set. He retired upon a pension, and passed from history with the eighteenth century. One of his eulogists has said that “notwithstanding some eccentricities and some aberrations, he made the tide of human destiny luminous.”

Near Burke’s birthplace is the oldest and the quaintest church in Dublin, built by the Danes before the English came to Ireland and consecrated to St. Michan, a Danish saint. Within its walls is the penitential stool, where “open and notorious naughty livers” were compelled to stand and confess their sins in public and make pledges of repentance and reform. The officiating minister, reciting the fifty-first Psalm, led the offending sinner from the altar to the foot of the pulpit,—barefooted, bareheaded, and draped in a long white sheet,—and placed him upon the stool of repentance to hear a sermon directed at his particular sins.

The tower of St. Michan’s dates from the twelfth century, and is one of the most beautiful things in Dublin. The view from the top of it includes all the city, which is divided into two almost equal parts by the River Liffey and spreads over an uneven surface from the dark green woods of Phœnix Park to the dark blue waters of the Irish Sea.

Handel used to play the organ in St. Michan’s Church, and it was there the public first heard the score of “The Messiah.”

The most remarkable feature of St. Michan’s, however, is a peculiar preservative effect from the soil in the crypt upon the bodies that are buried there. They mummify before decay sets in and turn into a leathery brown, similar to the mummies of Egypt. The vaults are filled with remains that have lain there for centuries. Among them is the body of one of the kings of Leinster, and beside him is the corpse of a baby, from whose tiny wrists white ribbon has been hanging since its funeral in 1679. Every corpse in the crypt is mummified in the same way, and it is the only place in Dublin where this phenomenon occurs. Nor is there any satisfactory explanation of the phenomenon. The vaults are absolutely dry. The popular theory is that a subtle gas arising from the peaty soil suspends nature’s law of decay.

There will always be a controversy among Irishmen as to whether Edmund Burke or Daniel O’Connell was the greater man. They were so different in their characteristics that it is difficult to draw a comparison. O’Connell was not a native of Dublin. He was born at the humble village of Cahirciveen, in County Kerry, one of the most forlorn, impoverished, and hopeless sections of the west coast. He was the son of an exile who fled to escape arrest and entered the service of France, and from him O’Connell inherited an intense prejudice and hatred of everything English and Protestant. He was educated in Cork for the priesthood, but changed his mind and was called to the bar when he was twenty-three years old. He immediately made a reputation, and by the time he was thirty was regarded as the ablest advocate in Ireland, without an equal in oratory. Probably no man ever surpassed him before a jury.

O’Connell is regarded by many as the ablest of all Irishmen, but, as I have said, this claim is disputed in favor of Edmund Burke. He was equally strong as a politician and undertook the cause of Catholic emancipation in his very youth. In those days all Catholics were disenfranchised; they could not hold office or even vote; the schools were closed to them, and a Catholic child could only be taught by a private tutor or governess. Daniel O’Connell organized the parish priests for the movement and was the first to bring the clergy into politics. Through them he organized the people, and regular contributions were collected in the churches to pay the expenses of the campaign.

O’Connell was the first Catholic to enter parliament, and the Duke of Wellington confessed that this was permitted only to avert a civil war. In 1828 he was elected to the British House of Commons, but was not admitted because he refused to take the anti-Catholic oath. He came back to his constituents and was elected again, and they continued to elect him, just as the merchants and bankers in the city of London continued to elect Baron Rothschild, who was refused admission for the same reason,—because he would not take the oath. He was the first Jew, as Daniel O’Connell was the first Roman Catholic, to obtain a seat upon the floor.

O’Connell was elected lord mayor of Dublin in 1841 and was the first Catholic to hold that office. At the height of his fame and power he might have been a lord protector or the king of Ireland, but he advocated peaceful revolutions, and, like Grattan, lost his influence because he would not consent to the policy and the methods of the radical and revolutionary element. In 1847 he went to address a meeting of his sympathizers at Clontarf, a suburb of Dublin, where Brian Boru won his great victory over the Danes in the last battle between Christianity and heathenism upon the soil of Ireland. The meeting had been forbidden by the authorities, and O’Connell was arrested, convicted, and sentenced to prison for two months. This broke him down. When he was released he left Dublin, started for Rome, and died at Genoa on his way. He is buried in Prospect Cemetery under a lofty tower. His will may be seen in the public records office in the Four Courts. He married his cousin, Mary O’Connell, and had four sons, all of whom were men of character and ability and have served in the British parliament.

The anniversary of the birth of Thomas Moore is celebrated in Dublin every summer, and a programme of his “Irish Melodies” is sung by local musicians—sweet old-fashioned ballads like “The Harp That Once through Tara’s Halls,” “Believe Me, if All Those Endearing Young Charms,” and others like them. The proceeds of the concert are devoted to a fund which is to be raised to erect a monument in memory of this most popular of Irish poets, whose songs are heard in every cottage in Ireland. His most pretentious poem, a Persian epic called “Lalla Rookh,” brought $15,000,—the highest price ever paid for a poem. Scott’s “Lady of the Lake” and some of Tennyson’s and perhaps Kipling’s poems and other poets’, have received larger sums in royalties, but no other man was paid so much for his verses in advance of their publication.

Moore was born in a little house on Aungier Street, Dublin, which is unfortunately now a filthy saloon. He was educated in a little grammar school in Johnston’s Court, off Grafton Street, near the Shelbourne Hotel, where Richard Brinsley Sheridan was also a pupil. Petty, the first great Irish scientist, who was also a physician and surveyor, was educated there. His book of surveys made for Oliver Cromwell is still used by the authorities.

Tom Moore was a chum of Robert Emmet at Trinity College. After graduation he entered journalism and was connected with the London Times and the London Chronicle. He went to Bermuda as British consul in 1803, and visited the United States before he returned. He was lionized everywhere because his plaintive Irish ballads, which he set to the music of the oldest peasant airs, were in the portfolio of every musician in the civilized world, and his social attractions made him a welcome guest. When he returned to England he was given a pension of $1,000 a year until his death.

Volumes might be written concerning the literary reminiscences of Dublin. Addison was private secretary to the notorious viceroy Wharton, and the evidence indicates that his behavior was not so blameless as the readers of Macaulay’s sketch of his life would infer. His official correspondence shows that he was not exempt from the usual weaknesses of humanity and not above making an honest penny out of his office. He seemed to be avaricious, and, although holding a position of the closest confidence to the lord lieutenant, took an interest in several commercial ventures that were not entirely beyond criticism.

Samuel Lover and Charles Lever, those two greatest of all delineators of Irish character, were both born and educated in Dublin and did most of their work there. Their graphic sketches of Irish life may have been accurate in their day, and now and then, I am told, appears one of the rollicking types of the Irishman they describe; but, while the character of the race may not be changed, its habits and customs are quite different from those of the period they describe. There’s a grammar school at which Tom Moore and Richard Brinsley Sheridan both received their education. Sheridan was born on the same block, and the house is marked by a tablet. Another tablet near the entrance of a house only a few steps distant shows where Sir William Hamilton, the great Irish mathematician, lived. Mrs. Hemans, that gentle hymn writer, whose lines were much more familiar to the reading public half a century ago than they are to-day, lived and died in the same neighborhood, and was buried in St. Anne’s Church, near by. Her epitaph, taken from one of her own serene poems, reads:

“Calm on the bosom of thy God,

Fair spirit, rest thee now!

Even while with us thy footsteps trod,

His seal was on thy brow.”