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South down Nicholas and Patrick streets from the Guild Hall is St Patrick's Cathedral (April-Oct Mon-Fri 9am-6pm, Sat 9am-5pm; Nov-Mar Mon-Fri 9am-6pm, Sat 9am-4pm, Sun 10am-4.30pm; GBP2.30/?2.92; bus #50, #54A, #56A from Eden Quay) the national cathedral of the Church of Ireland and a much more elegant place inside than the grey tank-like exterior leads you to expect. Legend has it that St Patrick baptized converts within its grounds; however, its most famous association is with the writer Jonathan Swift, who was dean of St Patrick's in the eighteenth century . At the west end of the church is the former chapter door of the south transept with a hole roughly hewn into it. Local legend has it that, in 1492, the feuding earls of Kildare and Ormonde met here, and with Ormonde's supporters barricaded inside the cathedral, Kildare, eager to end the struggle, cut a hole in the door and put his arm through it, inviting Ormonde to shake hands. He did, peace was restored, and the phrase "chancing your arm" was born. There are plenty of interesting tombs and memorials in the cathedral. One of the most elaborate, at the west end of the church, is a seventeenth-century monument to the Boyle family , earls of Cork, which is teeming with painted figures of family members. The tomb originally stood beside the altar, but only a year after being installed in 1632 it was moved. Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford and the British Viceroy in Dublin, had objected that churchgoers were forced to pray "crouching to an Earl of Cork and his lady? or to those sea nymphs his daughters, with coronets upon their heads, their hair dishevelled, down upon their shoulders." This was not the end of the argument, and it was the Earl of Cork who won: he later had Wentworth executed. Robert Boyle - who, as the only son, has pride of place in a niche of his own in the centre of the lowest tier - went on to become a scientist who established the important relationship, still known as Boyle's Law, between the pressure, volume and temperature of a gas. At the east end of the church a series of three Elizabethan brasses tells the plaintive stories of some of the early English settlers in Ireland. There's a small, plain monument in the north transept to one Alexander McGee, a servant of Swift, erected by the dean in what was clearly an unusual gesture as all the other tablets are to people of property. Finally, near the entrance, it comes as a surprise, among all the relics of the Anglo-Irish, to find an inscription in Irish dedicated to Douglas Hyde, founder of the Gaelic League, first president of Ireland and son of a Church of Ireland clergyman. The plaque commemorates him by using his Gaelic pen name "An Craoibhin Aoibhinn" meaning "the delightful little branch"
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