I suppose that next to the Scotch, the Irish are out and out the dirtiest people on the earth. But whereas Scotch dirt is a crude and gross affair, Irish dirt has still a pathetic and almost tender grace about it. “Dear, dirty Dublin” sigh the emotional in such matters—though you never catch anybody shedding a tear for remembrance of dear, filthy Glasgow. Dublin is indubitably a dirty city, just as Ireland is a dirty country, and for Irishmen, at any rate, the Government is a dirty Government. And it is not because Dublin or Ireland is dirty of necessity, or in the way that the Black Country or the East End of London are dirty. Not a bit of it: Dublin and Ireland are dirty simply and solely because the Dublin and Irish people steadfastly[152] refuse to keep them clean. To all intents and purposes the Irish people have lost, if indeed they ever possessed, that gift of punctilious domesticity, which insists first and last and always on cleanliness. In Dublin you will come upon more dirty hotels and more dirty houses than in pretty well any other city of its size in Europe. True, the dirt has the merit of not being too obvious, and falling short of the scandalous; but it is still there, and you cannot get away from it. Properly looked into, it recommends itself to you as the dirt of a happy-go-lucky, neglectful, behind-hand and poverty-stricken people, rather than of a people who are flagrantly given over to dirt for its own sake. It is the dirt of the slattern who is forever dusting things with her apron, rather than of the stout idleback for whom dust and grime and sloppiness have no terrors, and no reproach. It is a dirt which is the direct consequence of bad seasons, the decay of trade, monetary stringency, and public and private listlessness[153] and apathy. It is the kind of dirt which one associates with the boarding-houses of elderly ladies who have seen “better days.” Ireland’s better days have been few and far between, and they would seem to be all past. Hence, no doubt, the dustiness and dinginess and shabby gentility of her parlors. In an Irish hotel dirt and its common concomitant, tumbledownness, are ever before you. The floors clamor to be swept, the furniture would give a day of its life for a polishing, the wall papers are faded and fly-blown, there are cobwebs in the top corners and dust in the bottom corners, the windows are rickety and perfunctorily cleaned, the carpets infirm and old, the linen worn and yellow with age, the crockery cracked and chipped, the cutlery dull and greasy, and the general air of the place shabby and forlorn. I do not say that there are no cleanly and spick-and-span hotels in Dublin; for there is at least one such establishment. But, in the main, what one may term the semi-clean, semi-dirty, used-to-be[154] kind of hotel prevails. Even the waiters, though their hair be greased and their faces shine by virtue of vigorous applications of soap, wear frayed and threadbare swallow-tails and a sort of perennial yesterday’s shirt-front. And what is true of the hotels is true of the houses. There is a district between Sackville Street and the ? Railway Station which contains a very large number of the somberest, most forbidding, and dirtiest-looking domiciles it has ever been my lot to come across. Formerly these houses were the homes of the e............