He is just the sort of old man that we should imagine the hero would develop into.
We may, of course, be wrong; but that is our idea.
THE IRISHMAN.
He says "Shure" and "Bedad" and in moments of exultation "Beghorra." That is all the Irish he knows.
He is very poor, but scrupulously honest. His great ambition is to pay his rent, and he is devoted to his landlord.
He is always cheerful and always good. We never knew a bad Irishman on the stage. Sometimes a stage Irishman seems to be a bad man—such as the "agent" or the "informer"—but in these cases it invariably turns out in the end that this man was all along a Scotchman, and thus what had been a mystery becomes clear and explicable.
The stage Irishman is always doing the most wonderful things imaginable. We do not see him do those wonderful things. He does them when nobody is by and tells us all about them afterward: that is how we know of them.
We remember on one occasion, when we were young and somewhat inexperienced, planking our money down and going into a theater solely and purposely to see the stage Irishman do the things he was depicted as doing on the posters outside.
They were really marvelous, the things he did on that poster.