affected by English influences or wrote for an English audience.

Anglo-Irish humorous literature was a comparatively late product, but
its efflorescence was rapid and triumphant. The first great name is
that of Goldsmith, and, though deeply influenced in technique and
choice of subjects by his association with English men of letters and
by his residence in England, in spirit he remained Irish to the
end--generous, impulsive, and improvident in his life; genial, gay,
and tender-hearted in his works. The Vicar of Wakefield was Dr.
Primrose, but he might just as well have been called Dr. Shamrock. No
surer proof of the pre-eminence of Irish wit and humor can be found
than in the fact that, Shakespeare alone excepted, no writers of
comedy have held the boards longer or more triumphantly than
Goldsmith and his brother Irishman, Sheridan. _She Stoops to Conquer,
The Rivals, The School for Scandal_, and _The Critic_ represent the
sunny side of the Irish genius to perfection. They illustrate, in the
most convincing way possible, how the debt of the world to Ireland
has been increased by the fate which ordained that her choicest
spirits should express themselves in a language of wider appeal than
the ancient speech of Erin.

On the other hand, English literature and the English tongue have
gained greatly from the influence exerted by writers familiar from
their childhood with turns of speech and modes of expression which,
even when they are not translations from the Gaelic, are
characteristic of the Hibernian temper. The late Dr. P.W. Joyce, in
his admirable treatise on English as spoken in Ireland, has
illustrated not only the essentially bilingual character of the
Anglo-Irish dialect, but the modes of thought which it enshrines.
There is no better known form of Irish humor than that commonly
called the "Irish bull," which is too often set down to lax thinking
and faulty logic. But it is the rarest thing to encounter a genuine
Irish "bull" which is not picturesque and at the same time highly
suggestive. Take, for example, the saying of an old Kerry doctor who,
when conversing with a friend on the high rate of mortality,
observed, "Bedad, there's people dyin' who never died before." Here a
truly illuminating result was attained by the simple device of using
the indicative for the conditional mood--as in Juvenal's famous
comment on Cicero's second Philippic: _Antoni gladios potuit
contemnere si sic omnia dixisset_. The Irish