Page 10 - Gullivers

The fact of English publication is not without reason, it must be said, since the ‘The Legion Club’ is a truly ferocious attack on members of the Irish parliament, whom Swist depicts as diabolic - vain, ill-qualified, self-absorbed madmen, more interested in backhanders than the public good – so that it is not surprising that the pœm was not published at all in Ireland until almost twenty years aster Swist’s death in 1745. What is certain, however, is that Swist expected his readers to be able to recognise the city through which he makes his way as Dublin – and so to be able to pick up on the topographical references that follow: ‘As I stroll the city, ost I/Spy a building tall and losty/Not a bow-shot from the College’. The building that Swist spies as he strolls was, in fact, a new one: the modern parliament house – now the Bank of Ireland – on College Green, designed by Edward Lovett Pearce. Begun in 1729, just seven years before Swist wrote ‘The Legion Club’, the building was occupied by the parliament from 1731, though the colonnade was not completed until 1739; Edward Lovett Pearce was knighted there in 1732. Once we know this, then it is easy to understand the reference to the ‘College’ as being to Trinity College, and specifically to its West Front (this is not the present West Front, which dates only from the 1750s, but the earlier façade it replaced, built around the end of the seventeenth century).
Having in the pœm’s fourth line given a first, mildly satirical glance at the Irish parliament which, though ‘Not a bow-shot from the College’ is ‘Half a globe from sense and knowledge’, Swist continues with four lines that evoke the physical surroundings of the parliament’s new home, in order to exploit them for further comic effect:
By the prudent architect
Placed against the church direct;
Making good my grandam’s jest,
Near the church – you now the rest. (ll. 5-8)
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