Mixed with keen satire, the Irish often show a sort of cool good sense and dry humour, which gives not only effect, but value to their impromptus. Of this class is the observation made by the Irish hackney coachman, upon seeing a man of the ton driving four-in-hand down Bond-street.
“That fellow,” said our observer, “looks like a coachman, but drives like a gentleman.”
As an instance of humour mixed with sophistry, we beg the reader to recollect the popular story of the Irishman who was run over by a troop of horse, and miraculously escaped unhurt.
“Down upon your knees and thank God, you reprobate,” said one of the spectators.
“Thank God! for what? Is it for letting a troop of horse run over me?”
In this speech there is the same sort of humour and sophistry that appears in the Irishman’s celebrated question: “What has posterity done for me, that I should do so much for posterity?”
The Irish nation, from the highest to the lowest, in daily conversation about the ordinary affairs of life, employ a superfluity of wit and metaphor which would be astonishing and unintelligible to a majority of the respectable body of English yeomen. Even the cutters of turf and drawers of whiskey are orators; even the cottiers and gossoons speak in trope and figure. Ask an Irish gossoon to go early in the morning, on an errand, and he answers,
“I’ll be off at the flight of night.”
If an Irish cottager would express to his landlord that he wishes for a long lease of his land, he says,—
“I would be proud to live on your honour’s land as long as grass grows or water runs.”