“Gentlemen, gentlemen, will yez never get to bed? Yez know as well as I do that every light on the boat is out at twelve o’clock. It’s now a quarter to wan, and out goes the lights in ten minutes.”

There is what the Englishman calls an Irish bull in this speech; but the Irish bull usually means that something is left to the imagination. I will leave you to discover for yourself the hiatus which would have made the steward’s remark a sober English statement.

These things make an Irish heart bound up as exultantly as the lark springs to the sky of a day of April—that is to say, of an Irish exile home-returning—for the dweller in Ireland grows used to such pearls of speech.

At first, unless you have a very large sense of humour—and many English people have, though the Irish who do not know anything about them deny it to them en bloc—you will be somewhat bewildered. Apropos of the same little dog, we asked a policeman at the North Wall, one wintry morning of arrival, if the muzzling order was in force in Dublin.

After you’ve had a few peeps at Ireland, you won’t want the jokes explained to you, perhaps, or the picturesqueness of speech demonstrated.

In the first place, there is Dublin Castle, which was built by King John. Of the four original towers, only one now remains. The castle has been the town residence of the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland since Sidney established himself there in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. For the rest, it is a congerie of Government offices of one sort or another.

Those were the Irish clans that used to make the English burghers of Dublin shake in their shoes. While they sold their silks or woollens, or sat at meals or exchange, or said their prayers in their churches, they never could be sure that the wild Irish cry would not come ringing at their gates. The O’Byrnes and O’Tooles would swoop down at intervals, and raid the cattle from the fat pastures of the pale, sweeping back again with their spoil to their impregnable fastnesses. Some years ago a Father O’Toole published a book on the Clan of O’Toole, which contained the genealogical tree of the O’Tooles, tracing their descent without a break from Noah. This is a matter of interest to me, as I myself am an O’Toole.

He was a fighting saint, despite his many gentlenesses. At Downpatrick, where he built his cathedral, he took a little fawn which his men would have killed, and carried it in his breast. I like the description of him by his friend St. Evan of Monasterevan, which tells us how he was sweet to his friends, but terrible to his enemies.

Christ Church presents an effect of lightness and brightness very different from St. Patrick’s, in which it seems to me it is always afternoon, and winter afternoon. Patrick is in a particularly picturesque slum of the city, in the Earl of Meath’s liberty, hard by the Coombe, which was once a pleasant dell, no doubt, but is now the raggedest of slums. To the Earl of Meath’s liberty came the French silk-weavers expelled from France after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, and established the industry of poplin-weaving there.

The man with whom St. Patrick’s Cathedral is associated is Jonathan Swift, and for his sake it is perpetually dark. It is haunted by the tragedy of his life and death. Here Esther Johnson is buried; and over yonder, in the Deanery House, Swift, a sick man, lay in bed and watched the torches in the great church when they were making ready her grave. The strange bitterness of the terrible inscription which commemorates that most unhappy great man seems to colour the atmosphere of St. Patrick’s. “Where fierce indignation can no more lacerate his heart,” he rests by the side of the woman who was faithful to him with a long patience, whose death left him to loneliness and madness.

What ghosts meet one in the Dublin streets! There is Wesley. He was visiting the Countess of Moira at Moira House, which now, docked of its upper story, is the Mendicity, or, as the Irish put it, the “Mendacity” Institution. It was a splendid mansion when Wesley was there. One room with a bay-window was lined with mother-o’-pearl. “Alas,” said Wesley prophetically, “that all this must vanish like a dream!” The Moiras were not only religious: they were cultivated, refined, patriotic in the truest sense—altogether noble and generous. They received poor Pamela, Lady Edward Fitzgerald, with kindly open arms when that romantic hero, Lord Edward, lay dying of his wounds.

If I were to talk to you of the ancient history of Dublin, this book would become, not “A Peep at Ireland,” but “A Peep at Dublin.” You will see for yourself the ancient houses of the nobility, the Lords and Commons of Ireland. Some of them have come to strange uses. Aldborough House is a barracks; Powerscourt House was in my day a wholesale draper’s; Marino, the splendid residence of the Earls of Charlemont at Clontarf, is in the hands of the Christian Brothers. Many of these old houses are turned into Government offices.

“Alas, that all this must vanish like a dream!” To be sure, many of the most illustrious of the Anglo-Irish, more Irish than the Irish, refused to be either danced or drunk into good-humour. The brilliant viceroyalty lasted not quite four years, and the gay and handsome Duke left Ireland in the saddest way, carried high on men’s shoulders.

Afterwards there were other things than dancing. There was the Rebellion of 1798. There was the Legislative Union with Great Britain, which meant for Ireland the absence of her Lords and gentry, and the spending in London of revenues derived from Ireland.

Dublin is full of memories, of associations, of ghosts: no city in Europe is richer in such. There is hardly a stone of her streets which is not storied.

She is the greenest country ever was seen. England may think she wears the green; but as compared with Ireland her green is rust-coloured and dust-coloured. I have gone over from London in May and have found a green in Ireland that absolutely made me wink.

When the Irish go away they are always lonely for the mountains. No other mountains are so soft-bosomed and so mild. They have wisps of cloud lying along the side of them and the blue peak showing above. I have seen a rainbow, one end of the arch planted in the sea, the other somewhere behind the mountains, “over the hills and far away.” Seeing that incomparable sight, I understood why the Irish peasant imagines fairy treasures hidden at the foot of the rainbow. I, too, have been in Arcadia.

Get into Irish Ireland and the manners have a graciousness which is like a blessing. I asked the way in Ballyshannon town once. The woman who directed me came out into the street and a little way with me, and when she left me called to me sweetly, “Come back soon to Donegal!” which left a sense of blessing with me all that day. There was a certain curly-haired “Wullie,” who drove the long car from Donegal to Killybegs. I can see “Wullie” yet helping the women on and off the car with their myriad packages, can see the delightful grief with which he parted from us, his shining face of welcome when he met us again a fortnight later. To set against “Wullie” were the car-drivers, who certainly are unpleasant if the “whip-money” does not come up to their expectations. We say of such that they are “spoilt by the tourists,” yet I remember some who were not spoilt by the tourists, although they were perpetually in touch with them—boatmen and pony-boys at Killarney; and a certain delightful guide, whose winning gaiety was not at all merely professional.

On the other hand, the farmers grow thriftier and thriftier. Sir Horace Plunkett and men like him, truly patriotic Irishmen, are showing them the way. Successive Land Acts lift them more and more into a position of security from one of precariousness. They have more money now to put in the savings-banks. Their prosperity does not mean a higher standard of living, although that is badly needed. It means more money in the banks—that is all.

The Irish are very like the French. If the day should come when they should learn, like the French, to be thrifty and usurious, I hope I shall not be there to see it. Better—a thousand times better—that they should remain royal wastrels to the end.

As yet we need not fear it. Still, if you ask a drink of water at a mountain cabin in the poorest parts of Ireland, you are given milk; and do not offer to pay for it, lest you sink to the lowest place in the estimation of these splendid givers.

In England, when people are poor, or comparatively so, or feel the need of retrenchment, they “do not entertain.” It is almost the first form of retrenchment which suggests itself to the Englishman; whereas to curtail his hospitalities would be the last form of retrenchment to an Irishman, and you will be entertained generously and lavishly by people you know to be poor. The Englishman’s different way of looking at the matter is no doubt partly due to the fact that he is a much more domestic person than the Irishman, and depends mainly on his family life for his happiness and pleasure. Now, the French do not give hospitality at all outside the large family circle, so that in that regard at least the Irish will have a long way to travel before they touch with the French.