"Grand metropolis" or "the anus of the world"? The cultural life of eighteenth-century Dublin.

LAETITIA PILKINGTON FONDLY RECALLED the society kept by Mrs Philip Perceval in the Dublin of the 1720s. ‘This belle assembly engaged the company of all the learned and polite world; every night was a drawing-room, and the ingenious and curious of both sexes went home delighted and improved.’1 Another Dublin resident retained similar memories from the 1730s. Thomas Rundle, the bishop of Derry, had installed himself in the same Dublin location as the Percevals: St Stephen’s Green. There he maintained a consciously cultivated establishment. To it came motley types, ‘who bring learning into chit-chat’. ‘Gentlemen and ladies, old and young, rich and poor, soldiers and bishops’ repaired regularly to the prelate’s elegant library, ‘and find something in the conversation pleasing’.2 Common to the recollections of both Mrs Pilkington and Bishop Rundle were not just the locale—the smartest square of the city—but the hosts and guests. Mrs Perceval’s husband, younger brother of an absent Irish peer, was a government functionary. Although Philip Perceval owned property outside the city, neither in manner of life nor in source of livelihood can he be regarded primarily as a country gentleman. His world was not bounded by Ireland or, indeed, Britain, but stretched out into continental Europe. Passionate about the arts, he schemed to reform the public performance of