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LEINSTER II
day—there has been a great movement out along
the shore of the bay. But the building has been
mostly of houses for people with small means and
narrow ambitions. The great houses of great men
that clustered within a short radius of College Green
are great houses no more. South of the river they
have become public buildings: Lord Castlereagh's a
Government office in Merrion Street, "Buck" Whalley's
the old University College, and so on. But on the
north side, Lord Moira's mansion, once a marvel of
splendour, is to-day a mendicity institution; and few
of the fine houses of that period have had even so
lucky a fate. With their elaborate, plaster-moulded
ceilings, their beautiful entrance fanlights, and all the
other marks of that admirable period in domestic
architecture, they house squalid poverty to-day, each
room a tenement. The growth of Dublin is illusory.
In Grattan's time it was one of the great capitals of
Europe. To-day it is something between a hope and
a despair.
But this is history. I return to topography.
From your height on the Dublin hills you can look
over two-thirds of Leinster. Southward, the mountains
hide Wicklow and Wexford, Carlow and Kilkenny.
But over all that vast plain, stretching in champaign
north and west, your eye can travel till it reaches far
into Ulster on the north, and westward there is nothing