Scotchman.—“I have heard the same remarked of the Hebrew. I am told that the Hebrew and Irish idiom are much alike.”
Irishman (laughing).—“That is a great comfort to us, certainly, particularly to those amongst us who are fond of tracing our origin up to the remotest antiquity; but still there are many who would willingly give up the honour of this high alliance to avoid its inconveniences; for my own part, if I could ensure myself and my countrymen from all future danger of making bulls and blunders, I would this instant give up all Hebrew roots; and even the Ogham character itself I would renounce, ‘to make assurance doubly sure.’”
Englishman.—”‘To make assurance doubly sure.’ Now there is an example in our great Shakspeare of what I have often observed, that we English allow our poets and ourselves a licence of speech that we deny to our Hibernian neighbours. If an Irishman, instead of Shakspeare, had talked of making ‘assurance doubly sure,’ we should have asked how that could be. The vulgar in England are too apt to catch at every slip of the tongue made by Irishmen. I remember once being present when an Irish nobleman, of talents and literature, was actually hissed from the hustings at a Middlesex election because in his speech he happened to say, ‘We have laid the root to the axe of the tree of liberty,’ instead of ‘we have laid the axe to the root of the tree.’”
Scotchman,—“A lapsus linguae, that might have been made by the greatest orators, ancient or modern; by Cicero or Chatham, by Burke, or by ‘the fluent Murray.’”
Englishman,—“Upon another occasion I have heard that an Irish orator was silenced with ‘inextinguishable laughter’ merely for saying, ‘I am sorry to hear my honourable friend stand mute.’”
Scotchman.—“If I am not mistaken, that very same Irish orator made an allusion at which no one could laugh. ‘The protection,’ said he, ‘which Britain affords to Ireland in the day of adversity, is like that which the oak affords to the ignorant countryman, who flies to it for shelter in the storm; it draws down upon his head the lightning of heaven:’ may be I do not repeat the words exactly, but I could not forget the idea.”
Englishman.—“I would with all my heart bear the ridicule of a hundred blunders for the honour of having made such a simile: after all, his saying, ‘I am sorry to hear my honourable friend stand mute,’ if it be a bull, is justified by Homer; one of the charms in the cestus of Venus is,
‘Silence that speaks, and eloquence of eyes.’”
Scotchman.—“Silence that speaks, sir, is, I am afraid, an English, not a Grecian charm. It is not in the Greek; it is one of those beautiful liberties which Mr. Pope has taken with his original. But silence that speaks can be found in France as well as in England. Voltaire, in his chef-d’oeuvre, his Oedipus, makes Jocasta say,
‘Tout parle centre nous jusqu’à notre silence.’” [59]