THE ROYAL DUBLIN SOCIETY 101 



places can exhibit, and possessing advantages few city 

 fabrics can obtain by extent of ground both in front 

 and rear ; in front, laid out in a spacious courtyard ; 

 the ground in the rear made a beautiful lawn, with a 

 handsome shrubbery on each side screening the ad- 

 jacent houses from view ; enjoying in the tumult of a 

 noisy metropolis all the retirement of the country. A 

 dwarf wall which divides the lawn from the street 

 extends almost the entire side of a handsome square, 

 called Merrion square. The form of the building is a 

 rectangle, 140 feet long by 70 feet deep, with a cir- 

 cular bow in the middle of the north end, rising two 

 stories. Adjoining the west front, which is the 

 principal, are short Doric colonnades communicating 

 to the offices, making on the whole an extent of 210 

 feet, the width of the courtyard. The court is sur- 

 rounded by a high stone wall ornamented with rusti- 

 cated piers, which, after proceeding parallel with the 

 ends of the building as far as a gateway on the western 

 side and another opposite it, the court being uniform, 

 it takes a circular sweep from one gate to the other, but 

 broken in the middle by a large and handsome gateway 

 directly fronting the house, communicating to the 

 street, and exhibits there a plain but not inelegant 

 rusticated front. The house, or rather the gateway 

 of the courtyard, is in Kildare street so named from 

 one of the titles of His Grace, who is Marquis of 

 Kildare and is the termination of a broad, genteel 

 street called Molesworth street. The garden front 

 has not much architectural embellishment : it is plain 

 but pleasing, with a broad area before it the whole 

 length of the front, in order to obtain light to offices 

 in an under story, but which received none to the 

 west, to the courtyard. From the middle of the 

 front, on a level with the ground floor, a handsome 



