"bull" is a heroic and
sometimes successful attempt to sit upon two stools at once, or, as
an Irishman put it, "Englishmen often make 'bulls,' but the Irish
'bull' is always pregnant."

Though no names of such outstanding distinction as those of Goldsmith
and Sheridan occur in the early decades of the nineteenth century,
the spirit of Irish comedy was kept vigorously alive by Maria
Edgeworth, William Maginn, Francis Mahony (Father Prout), and William
Carleton. Sir Walter Scott's splendid tribute to the genius of Maria
Edgeworth is regarded by some critics as extravagant, but it is
largely confirmed in a most unexpected quarter. Turgenief, the great
Russian novelist, proclaimed himself her disciple, and has left it on
record that but for her example he might never have attempted to give
literary form to his impressions of the classes in Russia
corresponding to the poor Irish and the squireens and the squires of
county Longford. Maginn and Mahony were both scholars--the latter
happily called himself "an Irish potato seasoned with Attic
salt"--wrote largely for English periodicals, and spent most of their
lives out of Ireland. In the writings of all three an element of the
grotesque is observable, tempered, however, in the case of Mahony,
with a vein of tender pathos which emerges in his delightful "Bells
of Shandon." Maginn was a wit, Mahony was the hedge-schoolmaster _in
excelsis_, and Carleton was the first realist in Irish peasant
fiction. But all alike drew their best inspiration from essentially
Irish themes. The pendulum has swung back slowly but steadily since
the days when Irish men of letters found it necessary to accommodate
their genius to purely English literary standards. Even Lever, though
he wrote for the English public, wrote mainly about Ireland. So, too,
with his contemporary Le Fanu, whose reputation rests on a double
basis. He made some wonderful excursions into the realm of the
bizarre, the uncanny, and the gruesome. But in the collection known
as _The Purcell Papers_ will be found three short stories which for
exuberant drollery and "diversion" have never been excelled. That the
same man could have written _Uncle Silas_ and _The Quare Gander_ is
yet another proof of the strange dualism of the Irish character.

The record of the last fifty years shows an uninterrupted progress in
the invasion of English _belles lettres_ by Irish writers. Outside
literature, perhaps the most famous sayer of good thi