Did you know that in the early days of the Four Courts there was a practice of circulating in the Round Hall anonymous poems written by or about members of the legal profession? The poems were pasted up or left on handbills lying around the Hall. Often, they ended up being later published in English newspapers.

The first recorded Round Hall poem (above) featured in the Hampshire Telegraph, 28 January 1805. Impromptu or not, it seems to have started the Round Hall tradition of publication by handbill.

The reference to ‘Hell’ is probably not meant to be taken literally, but rather a reference to the well-known nickname for the previous Four Courts at Christchurch, so called because they were reached by a dark, gloomy, low-lying passage on which someone (another Dublin legal wit, perhaps) had placed a statue of the devil taken from a nearby church.

To the extent that the below poem sought to make the new Four Courts a fresh Hell, it was unsuccessful – to this day, the name remains wholly associated with the old Four Courts premises – long demolished, but forever immortalised in verse by the famous lines of Robert Burns in ‘Death and Dr Hornbook’:

“Is just as true’s the Deil’s in hell,

Or Dublin city:”

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