FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF DUBLIN.

Thames Star, Volume IX, Issue 3034, 5 November 1878, Page 2

FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF DUBLIN.

(fbom thb ieisubb hotjb.)*

To the great majority of English tourist the only gate of approach to the city is a water-gate. Of Dublin Bay and its beauties so much has been written and so many loose "omparisons hazarded with Naples, Lisbon, Palermo, Bio Janeiro, ! New York, and other seaside cities, that we may pass them over as matters of coarse. Still it is only bare justice to remark that to steam into JLingstown Harbor with the morning sun lighting up the crests of the Dublin and'Wicklow mountains, and stretching a silvery haze on sea and land as the mist slowly lifts off, and the shore line is seen dotted with buildings around a sweep of come ten or twelve miles, is to enjoy one of the most striking bits of bay scenery to b» had anywhere. It is impossible for the eye to take it all in at once, and almost before its full beauty has broken on us from the bridge of the mail steamer we are already helm hard-a-porfc, steaming round the pier head, ana in another minute or two we are ashore. Landed at the Carlisle Pier, the modern traveller has no time to make reflections on what he has seen, but is whirled into Dublin in a few minutes by express train. I am old' enough to remember the " ould Ireland " of one-horse jingles or jaunting-cars, with wells almost as deep as the boot of a mail-coach. Many changes, and all for the better, have been made since then in the approaches to j the Irish metropolis. The railway from Dublin to Kingstown was for many years the only line of rail in Ireland then.laid out, but for the last half century it has superseded the jarvies, carrying six outside and two on the well, which used to make a drive along Dublin Bay not unlike that from Naples to Pausilip or Pompeii. As we skim along past Blackrook and through a short tunnel with ornamental gardens on either side, we pass under the marine residence of the late Lord Clon-,

curry who is credited with one of the broadest but best descriptions of the Dublin of his time, and in some respects the picture is unchanged to this day* " Dear, dirty Dublin," he called it, "it ii tay-drinkingest, car-drivingest, say-bath-ingest place in the world. Och I iti flogf the world for divarsion." .Next to Naples, Dublin is the city where there is more locomotion between city and suburb than in any other city in Europe. Londoners move up and down in a steady stream onoe a day, like the tide rmning east and west, six hours up and six hours down. Other large cities have their periodical daily ebb and flow of the tide of population, but Dublin it all day long and all the year round the car-drivingest town, and, in fact, flogs creation in the sense that poor horses are driven off their legs. The impression which Dublin produces on the tourist is that it is a city of contrasts, so much meanness and magnificence are huddled together, that in this respect it is a halfAsiatic city, like Calcutta, with its palaces and its hovels placed side by side. It is not as in London, with a St. Giles's and a St. James's quarter, or as Paris with a Faubourg St. Antoine and St. Germaine, standing apart at a re* spectful distance from each other, with a solid block of middle-class habii tations between the wind and their nobility. But in Dublin the contrasts between splendour and' squalor are more startling, the transition more abrupt between the best and the worst quarters of the city. A single turn out of Stephen's Green, a square almost as large as a park, and surrounded by some of the most stately houses in Dublin, and the tourists is in the Liberties. This quarter was once a busy hive of industry, where thousands of weavers, principally French refugees, plied their looms, but now tenanted chiefly by a pauperised class of sick and indigent innkeepers, servants out of place, and other dependents of a nobility and resident gentry who have long since removed their town residence from Dublin to London.