proceed from his lips, but an absurd congeries of brogue and blunder.
The habit of looking upon him in a ludicrous light has been so strongly
impressed upon the English mind, that no opportunity has ever been
omitted of throwing him into an attitude of gross and overcharged
caricature, from which you might as correctly estimate his intellectual
strength and moral proportions, as you would the size of a man from his
evening shadow. From the immortal bard of Avon down to the writers
of the present day, neither play nor farce has ever been presented to
Englishmen, in which, when an irishman is introduced, he is not drawn as
a broad, grotesque blunderer, every sentence he speaks involving a
bull, and every act the result of headlong folly, or cool but unstudied
effrontery. I do not remember an instance in which he acts upon the
stage any other part than that of the buffoon of the piece uttering
language which, wherever it may have been found, was at all events
never heard in Ireland, unless upon the boards of a theatre. As for the
Captain O'Cutters, O'Blunders, and Dennis Bulgrudderies, of the English
stage, they never had existence except in the imagination of those who
were as ignorant of the Irish people as they were of their language and
feelings. Even Sheridan himself was forced to pander to this erroneous
estimate and distorted conception of our character; for, after all, Sir
Lucius O'Trigger was his Irishman but not Ireland's Irishman. I know
that several of my readers may remind me of Sir Boyle Roche, whose bulls
have become not only notorious, but proverbial. It is well known now,
however, and was when he made them, that they were studied bulls,
resorted to principally for the purpose of putting the government and
opposition sides of the Irish House of Commons into good humor with each
other, which they never failed to do--thereby, on more occasions than
one, probably, preventing the effusion of blood, and the loss of life,
among men who frequently decided even their political differences by the
sword or pistol.