Beauties and Antiquities of Ireland: Being a Tourist's Guide to Its Most Beautiful Scenery & an Archæologist's Manual for Its Most Interesting RuinsRussell, Thomas O'Neill
History
Beauties and Antiquities of Ireland: Being a Tourist's Guide to Its Most Beautiful Scenery & an Archæologist's Manual for Its Most Interesting Ruins
Russell, Thomas O'Neill
Ireland -- Antiquities; Ireland -- Description and travel
The buildings that have been recently erected in Kildare Street, Dublin,
the Library and the Museum, would be considered chaste and elegant in any
city in the world; and it is questionable if any buildings of their kind
can be found in any city to surpass them in architectural beauty. Even the
Picture Gallery and the Natural History Gallery, close to them in Leinster
Lawn, are very handsome buildings. If the front of Leinster House, facing
Kildare Street, were brightened up and made to look like its rear, the
whole group of buildings, including Leinster House itself, would form an
architectural panorama hardly to be surpassed anywhere; and if Dublin
contained nothing else worthy of being seen, it would make Dublin worth
travelling hundreds of miles to see.
But it is the Museum of Irish Antiquities that is, or that ought to be,
the glory of this splendid group of buildings, and it is the only one of
them with the management of which fault can be justly found. The way it
has been managed ever since the articles it contains were removed from the
Royal Irish Academy in Dawson Street is a disgrace to all Ireland, and a
blot on the Irish people. There is not room to show the public much more
than half the objects of antiquity. They are stowed away in drawers, and
have been so for nearly ten long years. They might as well be in the earth
from which they were recovered as be packed into drawers in a back room
where none but officials can see them. If there was a decent and proper
national spirit among the Irish people, such treatment of Ireland's
wonderful and unique antiquities would not be tolerated for a single week.
Her antiquities are among the chief glories of Ireland. In monuments of
the past she stands ahead of almost all countries save Greece and Egypt.
It is not alone in her ruined fanes, round towers, gigantic _raths_,
sepulchral mounds, and Cyclopean fortresses that she can boast of
antiquarian curiosities more numerous and more unique than those of almost
any other country, but also in her multitudinous articles in gold, bronze,
and iron. A good many of these--the greater part of them, perhaps--are in
positions where they can be seen; but thousands of them are where no one
but an official can see them. If the Irish antiquarian department were
properly arranged, and if _all_ the objects it possesses that have been
dug up from Irish soil were properly exhibited, Ireland could boast of an
exhibition of national antiquities greater, more entirely her own, and
more unique than that possessed by any other country in Europe.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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