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.
The group of poets who succeeded Moore--writers of the Young Ireland Movement in 1848--find their commemoration in the bust of James Clarence Mangan, recently erected in Stephen's Green--almost as unobtrusive as was in life that strange and unhappy genius.
To-day, as the world knows, we have poets neither few nor unremarkable--Mr. Yeats chief among them; and one of the intellectual landmarks of Dublin is the Abbey Theatre, standing obscurely enough, but not obscure in the world. Here have been produced the poetical dramas of Mr. Yeats himself, the still more notable prose dramas of Mr. Synge, together with much work of Lady Gregory, William Boyle, Padraic Colum, and many lesser names; and they have been produced by a company of Irish actors--first formed by Mr. W. G. Fay--who have displayed an amazing range of talent. Any visitor to Dublin who cares for a beauty and an interest wholly unlike that of the usual machine-made play ought to try and see a performance at the Abbey.
For the artistic life of Ireland--past, present, and to come--Dublin is your only ground of study. Among the things which every lover of Ireland should have seen are two--the Book of Kells in the Trinity College Library, the Cross of Cong in the Kildare Street National Museum. The craftsmanship of art was never carried to a higher point than in the marvellous illumination of that manuscript, the equally marvellous inlaying of the famous reliquary. These are only the masterpieces, each in its own kind; they are the index of a civilization which existed before the Norman crossed to Wexford. How far back native Irish civilization stretches is matter for the archæologists; but in Kildare Street is a wonderful collection of the ornaments, weapons, and utensils, from gold fibulæ to flint arrowheads, which are the documents of that research.