Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 2: Great Britain and Ireland, Part 2
General
Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume 2: Great Britain and Ireland, Part 2
Great Britain -- Description and travel; Ireland -- Description and travel
The papers being read, it became my duty to discover the town; and a
handsomer town, with fewer people in it, it is impossible to see on a
summer's day. In the whole wide square of Stephen's Green, I think there
were not more than two nursery-maids, to keep company with the statue of
George I., who rides on horseback in the middle of the garden, the horse
having his foot up to trot, as if he wanted to go out of town too. Small
troops of dirty children (too poor and dirty to have lodgings at
Kingstown) were squatting here and there upon the sunshiny steps, the
only clients at the thresholds of the professional gentlemen whose names
figure on brass-plates on the doors. A stand of lazy carmen, a policeman
or two with clinking boot-heels, a couple of moaning beggars leaning
against the rails and calling upon the Lord, and a fellow with a toy and
book stall, where the lives of St. Patrick, Robert Emmet, and Lord
Edward Fitzgerald may be bought for double their value, were all the
population of the Green.... In the courts of the College, scarce the
ghost of a gyp or the shadow of a bed-maker. In spite of the solitude,
the square of the College is a fine sight--a large ground, surrounded by
buildings of various ages and styles, but comfortable, handsome, and in
good repair; a modern row of rooms; a row that has been Elizabethan
once; a hall and senate-house, facing each other, of the style of George
I.; and a noble library, with a range of many windows, and a fine manly
simple façade of cut stone.
The bank and other public buildings of Dublin are justly famous. In the
former may still be seen the room which was the House of Lords formerly,
and where the bank directors now sit, under a clean marble image of
George III. The House of Commons has disappeared, for the accommodation
of clerks and cashiers. The interior is light, splendid, airy, well
furnished, and the outside of the building not less so. The Exchange,
hard by, is an equally magnificent structure; but the genius of commerce
has deserted it, for all its architectural beauty. There was nobody
inside when I entered, but a pert statue of George III. in a Roman toga,
simpering and turning out his toes; and two dirty children playing,
whose hoop-sticks caused great clattering echoes under the vacant
sounding dome.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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