mild. Possibly it is amusing, and calculated to tickle old-fashioned

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 much of a cult in the modern mind that it has to be very humorous indeed, not to say a trifle subtle, if it is to raise a smile. And in considering the examples quoted, we are faced with a further difficulty. Are these anecdotes of unquestionable Irish extraction? I am afraid not. Their authenticity is impeachable. _Mutatis mutandis_, they have been told of Cockneys and Yorkshire men, and Somersetshire men, and even of Scotchmen. Furthermore, there is nothing in them that can be considered peculiarly and exclusively Irish, or indicative of the Irish temperament and character as it exists to-day. Your modern Irishman, as I have pointed out, is a dreary and melancholy wight. Laughter and sprightliness have died out of him, and whether in thought or word he is about as dull and plantigrade as even a sad man can well be. The eminent people who stand for Ireland in this country are all of them afflicted with a similar lack of cheerfulness. Rouse them, and they can be as bitter and vituperative and aboriginal as any Scotchman of them all; but their ordinary habit is sad, uncertain, and inept, and they do not know how to laugh. Here and there one of them at the Bar, or in the House of Commons, or at a greasy journalistic banquet, does his feeble best to keep up the Irish tradition for smartness and wittiness of remark. But the attempt is invariably a failure, because at the back of it there is no real brain and no real flow of spirits. One of the biggest bullies at the Bar is a beefy Irishman who esteems himself a great humorist. I have heard him fire off twenty or thirty idiotic jokes in the course of half an hour or so, and always does he snigger at the beginning of his precious gibe; always does he snigger in the middle; always does he make pretense of becoming apoplectic with chortle at the end. The circumstance that people laugh at him and not with him, does not appear to occur to his small, if legal, mind. His dearest friends call him “the sniggerer,” and it is said that he is in the habit of retiring to his chambers of afternoons for the purpose of having a protracted fit of giggling. Primed with four or five glasses of cheap port, his capacity for low comedy becomes so evident that one trembles lest some enterprising theatrical manager should offer him the Leno-Welch part in next year’s “Little Goody Two-shoes.” Another “witty” Irishman, who shall be nameless, came to these shores with a fair array of good gifts at his disposal. Knowing himself for an Irishman, and having faith in the Irish tradition, he forthwith set up in business as a posturing clown and professional grinner through horse-collars, with the result that his genius is altogether obscured. Irishmen of all degrees will do better if they endeavor to remember that they have really no sense of humor left. The only one of them who has made anything like a satisfactory reputation in London, Mr. W. B. Yeats to wit, has helped himself to it by being as devoid of humor as a bone-yard. Mr. Yeats has never been known publicly to try his hand at the very smallest joke. The sobriety of the hearse is his, and much good sense also. For the eminent Irish, as we know them among us, are by nature neither witty nor humorous; and those who try to be so, succeed in being only fatuous and vulgar. Somebody has said cuttingly that a Frenchman consists of equal parts of tiger and monkey. Of certain of the eminent Irish in London it may be said that they are half jackal and half performing dog; for they are at once hungry and fantastic.