ad enough of this; I'm smothering and
can't hear a word of all they're saying of the deceased.' 'God
bless you, and lie still and quiet a bit longer,' says I, 'for my
sister's afraid of ghosts, and would die on the spot with fright if
she was to see you come to life all on a sudden this way without
the least preparation.' So he lays him still, though well-nigh
stifled, and I made haste to tell the secret of the joke,
whispering to one and t'other, and there was a great surprise, but
not so great as he had laid out there would. 'And aren't we to have
the pipes and tobacco after coming so far to-night?' said some one;
but they were all well enough pleased when his honour got up to
drink with them, and sent for more spirits from a shebeen house
where they very civilly let him have it upon credit. So the night
passed off very merrily; but to my mind Sir Condy was rather upon
the sad order in the midst of it all, not finding there had been
such great talk about himself after his death as that he had always
expected to hear."

In the end Sir Condy died, not by special arrangement. "He had but a
poor funeral after all," is Thady's remark; and you see with the kindly
double vision of the humorist Thady's sincere regret for the
circumstance that would most have afflicted the deceased, as well as the
more obviously comic side of Thady's comment and Sir Condy's lifelong
aspiration. Indeed, the whole narrative is shot with many meanings, and
one never turns to it without a renewed faculty of laughter.

If it were necessary to compare true humour with the make-believe, a
comparison might be drawn between Thady and the servant in Lady Morgan's
novel _O'Donnell_. Rory is the stage Irishman in all his commonest
attitudes. But it is better to go straight on, and concern ourselves
solely with the work of real literary quality, and Carleton falls next
to be considered.

Of genius with inadequate equipment it is always difficult to speak.
Carleton is the nearest thing to Burns that we have to show; and his
faults, almost insuperable to the ordinary reader, are the faults which
Burns seldom failed to display when writing in English. But to Burns
there was given an instrument perfected by long centuries of use--the
Scotch vernacular song and ballad; Carleton had to make his own, and the
genius for form was lacking in him. Some day there may come a man of
pure