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20 LEINSTER
Gaudens designed to commemorate Parnell. The
famous American sculptor has set his bronze figure,
of heroic size, on a low pedestal; but behind it rises
an obelisk of brown Galway granite, inlaid with
bronze and crowned with tripod and leaping flame.
Thus Dublin possesses the only work by this artist
(Dublin born, of a French father and an Irish mother)
which the United Kingdom can show, save for the
small medallion of Stevenson in Edinburgh. In
America, where he lived and worked, his fame is
established by many examples.
Moore, a national hero hardly less popular in his
day than even O'Connell or Parnell, has been much
less happy in his statue. It faces the Bank of Ireland
in Westmorland Street, and is, in truth, very absurd
and ugly. But Moore's volatile charm of countenance,
which a hundred contemporaries describe, did not lend
itself to reproduction in bronze. More interesting by
far is the tablet in Aungier Street, which marks the
little shop where he was born and bred, and from
which he issued forth on the most amazing career
of social conquest recorded in the annals of society.
The earliest and best of the Irish Melodies were
written in Dublin about 1810; but Moore's parents
had before then moved to a little house near the
Phoenix Park, where the son's influence procured his
father a sinecure.