"ENGLISH BULLS."
[To THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR:1 Snt,—Your correspondent, " Milesian," has given an amusing and, what is far rarer, a really truthful description of Irish- peculiarities of speech. The Irishman, as he appears in English novels and on the English stage, is as mythical a creature as the unicorn. He is not, as the writers flatter them- selves, "80 truly Hirish." He is truly Henglish,—a cockney, with cockney grammar, and a brogue and diction which never came from Irish lips.
" Ifilesian," on the other hand, has described him exactly. He is rarely ungrammatical, having learned his English from his betters. But he is often grotesque in speech, and greatly given to the use of big words. He has, besides a reputation to keep up for blundering and funny speech with English tourists,. which he is shrewd enough to know pays, and which he supplies accordingly ; while he specially delights in cramming some guile- less Englishman who has come over, notebook in hand, to " study the Irish question "—from one side of an Irish jaunting- car—" with his own eyes," and, unhappily for Ireland, with his- own ears too, which are sometimes quite long enough, at any rate, for that purpose.
As for Irish "balls," of which "Milesian " gives some- capital specimens, they are often only a way of saying some- thing which can hardly be expressed so well as by a bull,—a sort of half-disguised, half-blundering thought, that sets the hearer laughing first and thinking afterwards. Of bulls in the sense of blunders pure and simple, I have heard as good, specimens in England as I have ever heard in Ireland. Take,. for instance, the three following:—
• 1. An English Peer, when speaking some years ago in the- House of Lords on the necessity for passing some Coercion Bill for Ireland, and reproaching the Government of that day for their delaying to do so, observed that "this delay might be very convenient for the Ministers, but that it was not quite- so convenient for those Irish landlords who were meanwhile being frequently murdered."
2. An English clergyman, pleading earnestly with his parishioners for the construction of a cemetery for their parish, asked them to consider "the deplorable condition of 30,000' Christian Englishmen living without Oltristian burial."
3. Another English clergyman, waxing sarcastic in the pulpit over the enormities of the age, exclaimed : "And these things,. my brethren, are done in the so-called nineteenth century."
Here are three prize bulls, and all of them of pure English breed,—not a drop of "Hirish" "blood in one of them.—I am,. P. C. W.-
Sir, &o.,
Previous page
