The Wild Irishman

For all practical purposes, and in spite of everything that can be brought against her, Ireland may be justly described as a moral country, even as Scotland is essentially an im...

It might reasonably be supposed that the last drop in Ireland’s cup of bitterness was Mr. William Butler Yeats. An emotional and misfortunate people with the tyrant’s heel on it...

In _The Treasury of Irish Poetry in the English Tongue_, edited by Messrs. Stopford A. Brooke and T. W. Rolliston, Thomas Moore is represented by eleven pieces, to wit, “The Son...

The tourist is the curse of Ireland, as he is the curse of most places. When one comes to consider the enormous number of grievances the Irish and their political figure-heads h...

Are there too many priests in Ireland? Yes. Is Dublin “black with them”? Yes. Do they appear to be as frequent on the country side as crows? Yes. Are they extorting from the Iri...

A gentleman who is universally applauded as a handler of the pencil and a smart after-dinner speaker lately remarked that if he were compelled to give up one of two things, to w...

The real truth about Irish humor as a thing to itself and apart is that it is based either on ignorance or on a certain slowness of mind. The Dublin car driver who on being told...

Blarney has come to mean a certain adroitness and winningness of speech supposed to be peculiar to the Irish. If an Irishman open his mouth, the English and Scotch insist on ass...

When Ireland desires to sup the sweeter drops out of the cup of sorrow, she has a way of babbling about exiles from Erin, and that kind of thing. That her population has been gr...

The person who invented the Irish question may or may not deserve well of his species. In a sense, of course, there has been an Irish question since the beginning of history. Bu...

I have no desire to offer in the present pages a re-hash of a former work of mine, which is said to have provoked the Scotch to the point of laughter. But I do desire to assert...

The women of England, not to say of Scotland, have of late years lain under the reproach that they are ceasing to be possessed of the fatal gift of beauty. I am well aware that...

In Ireland the pig has long been understood to pay the rent. Hence, no doubt, it comes to pass that Irish rents are not always paid up. That an animal such as the pig, a gruntin...

As the Yorkshireman is said to sport on his escutcheon a flea, a fly, and a flitch of bacon, so in the popular imagination an Irishman of the real old sort is usually conceived...

In matters Irish it is quite usual to talk of aiming at the manifestly impossible. If we could get rid of the priests, say some, Ireland would be a happy country; but nobody sug...

The Universe as we know it abounds in enigmas. And perhaps the most stupendous enigma of all of them is called whisky. In Scotland whisky is the universal ichor and panacea. In...

I suppose that next to the Scotch, the Irish are out and out the dirtiest people on the earth. But whereas Scotch dirt is a crude and gross affair, Irish dirt has still a pathet...

It has been remarked by a certain hawker of platitudes that humor is that which makes a man laugh. There have been several definitions of wit, one of them by Sydney Smith, and a...

Ireland has produced more patriots than any other country under the sun. The names of them are legion, and from Wolfe Tone down to Dr. Tanner they have all been men of reasonabl...

The Irishman in London appears to lose a great deal of his luster. If you wish to see him at his best in this Metropolis you must go to the Bar. If you wish to see him at his wo...

people. Yet one has distinct qualms about it when one considers it as a means for provoking the laughter of the twentieth-century person. The fact is that humor has been made so...