The great squares of Dublin are St. Stephen’s Green, Rutland, Mountjoy, Merrion and Fitzwilliam Squares.  The first of these dates from the latter half of the seventeenth century, and is probably in a far more prosperous condition now than it ever was before.  If we are to judge by Whitelaw’s history, it presented in 1819 an aspect such as no public square out of Dublin—­the enclosure of Leicester Square, London, excepted—­could present.  “Of that kind of architectural beauty,” he says, “which arises from symmetry and regularity, here are no traces.”  Some houses were on a level with the streets, others were approached by a grand perron.  The proprietors were of all degrees:  here was the great house of a lord, there a miserable dramshop.  The enclosure consisted of no less than thirteen acres, making Stephen’s Green the largest public square in Europe.  It was simply a great treeless field, with an equestrian statue of George II. stuck in the middle of it.  The principal entrance to the ground is described as “decorated with four piers of black stone crowned with globes of mountain granite, once respectable, but exhibiting shameful symptoms of neglect and decay.”  There had been a gravel walk called the “Beaux’ Walk,” from its having been a fashionable resort, “but,” says Whitelaw, “the ditch which bounds it is now usually filled with stagnant water, which seems to be the appropriate receptacle of animal bodies in a disgusting state of putrefaction.”  At night this charming recreation-ground was illumined by twenty-six lamps, at a distance of one hundred and seventy feet from each other, stuck on wooden poles.  Such an account of the grand square of Dublin does not make one surprised to learn that the main approach to it from the heart of the city was of a very miserable description.

In reading Whitelaw’s history of Dublin it is impossible not to be struck with the fact that it records a degree of neglect and indifference on the part of the people and the local authorities to beauty, decency and order such as could scarcely be found in another country.  In the centre of Merrion Square was a fountain of very ambitious expense and design, erected to the honor of the duke and duchess of Rutland, a lord and lady lieutenant.  The fountain was only finished in 1791, but “from a fault in the foundation, or some shameful negligence in the construction, is already cracked and bulged in several places; and though intended as a monument to perpetuate the memory of an illustrious nobleman and his heroic father (the famous Lord Granby), is, after an existence of only sixteen years, tottering to its fall.”  Mr. Whitelaw continues:  “Unhappily, a savage barbarism that seems hostile to every idea of order or decency, of beauty and elegance, prevails among but too many of the lower orders; and hence the decorations of almost every public fountain have been destroyed or disfigured:  the figure, shamefully mutilated, of the water-nymph in this fountain has been reduced to a disgusting trunk, and the alto relievo over it shows equal symptoms of decay, arising partly from violence, and partly, perhaps, from the perishable nature of the materials.”  Truly a forcible picture of art and the appreciation thereof in Ireland!