Evening Republican, Volume 23, Number 217, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 8 September 1920 — CULTURED DUBLIN. [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

CULTURED DUBLIN.

IT HAS been said that Dublin has more the character of a continental than an English city; this Is true in a way, but It Is not the first thing that strikes the visitor from across the Irish fiea. The most striking thing about Dublin Is that its architecture bears traces of being all of one time, says a writer In the Christian Science Journal. To us who are used to the extraordinary hotchpotch of London, deriving its characteristics of brick and stone from every conceivable century, there is something peculiarly attractive about the street upon street of square Georgian houses. London always seems to be In a state of violent reaction against everything which is called “eighteenth century,” so that those parts of London which most" resemble Dublin seem most foreign to our conception of London Itself. Perhaps It is because it is Georgian that Bloomsbury attracts a particular type of inhabitant, as often as not a cultured foreigner, not to be found in the urbanity of Mayfair, nor In the banality of Maida Vale. And if you imagine a city where all the streets are like Great Ormond street and the squares like the Bloomsbury squares, you have an honest conception of Dublin.

Nor does the eighteenth century appear in tne houses alone; there are those In Dublin who carry on the tradition of old world courtliness which has long become rare enough to be remarkable even in Bloomsbury; it Is true that they are few in number even here, but they are sufficient to leave a certain fragrance of other days in drawing room and coffee house. Clad in Romance. Before getting on board the boat at Holyhead, Great Britain will leave memories of abject Anglesea In the traveler’s mind, and when the waste of sea reveals ahead of him the first contours of Ireland, the mountains rise up to greet him with a very different face from that of the flat and cheerless little Island he has just crossed. They are almost blatantly green, so that he must perforce murmur platitudes beneath his breath about the “emerald isle.” Dubliners are forever conscious of those mountains near by; they escape to them as often as they can and endow them with a symbolical meaning. The Dublin mountains seem to have got misplaced from the far west; they are that pirt’of primeval Connacht which has set Itself at the door of Dublin In order to turn the heart of the Gael west rather than east In the Dublin mountains there travel' to and fro the old with whom lingers the memory of a Celtic poetry and from whom Synge and Teats and the rest have gathered so much local , color.

In Dublin Itself this old culture lingers alongside of the modern and English industrialism of the Liffey. and the quaysides, and in the dirty streets on the north side one can still come across a ballad singer with a little group round him. Charles Lever, when he was at Trinity college, dressed as a ballad singer and earned 80 shillings in the Dublin streets, and another and even mon famous Trinity college student earned a crown every now and then for a street soqg. This young man was Oliver Goldsmith, whose statue now graces the entrance to the university, than whom no man could be found more typical of the best period of Dublin's prosperity. The Bohemian Quarter. Today all the varied energies, political, literary, social, are concentrated into a space bounded by Grafton street, Stephen's green. Trinity college railings and Merrion square; within these limits there is scarcely a - house that does not conceal some enthusiasm. Not the least. Interesting sedc to tarn business into an art; the “Sod ©f Turf," where you can —vir ud eat and drink in Gaelic, where the fire is a real toirf fire; and the waitress • real KerryJhe so somber eighteenth century Dublin mat Nkae With color that would delight a post-im-pressionist; then there Is the Irish

bookshop which, like all the rest, has come Into being through a wider enthusiasm than the mere desire to sell books. There Is an Arts club of the most respectable type, so respectable, indeed, that the bohemians who do not belong to It will tell you that it has only once had a real artist within Its doors and he was expelled at the end of a week. Stephen’s green is the great center of the whole city; here, as he tells us in that most fabulous of histories, ' “Ave Atque Vale,” Mr. George Moore lingered to meet Mr. Yeats on the occasion of their founding the Irish dramatic movement; here live Mme. Gonne, the Irish Joan of Arc,- and Mrs. John Richard Green, Ireland’s historian, and many others of the best loved of Ireland’s children. And in those most tragic days of April, 1916, Mme. Marcievics held Stephen’s green with a troop of boy scouts. A story is told which shows the amazing muddle of those days. Some English lady visitors had just looked at the Shelburne hotel and, looking out of the window, they saw some bare-kneed, 'red-cheeked children digging trenches In the green. “We highly approve of the scout movement,” they said. “Let us take them some plates of bread and jam.” Judge of their surprise a quarter of an hour later to find them selves prisoners of war In the middle of the green.

Sackville Street, Dublin.