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 “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