Here are three good bulls, which fulfil all the conditions we expect in this branch of wit.  We know what the writer means, although he does not exactly say it.  This passage is from the report of an Irish Benevolent Society:  ``Notwithstanding the large amount paid for medicine and medical attendance, very few deaths p 28occurred during the year.’’ A country editor’s correspondent wrote:  ``Will you please to insert this obituary notice?  I make bold to ask it, because I know the deceased had a great many friends who would be glad to hear of his death.’’ The third is quoted in the Greville Memoirs:  ``He abjured the errors of the Romish Church, and embraced those of the Protestant.’’

It is said that the Irish Statute Book opens characteristically with, ``An Act that the King’s officers may travel by sea from one place to another within the land of Ireland’’; but one of the main objects of the Essay on Irish Bulls, by Maria Edgeworth and her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, was to show that the title of their work was incorrect.  They find the original of Paddy Blake’s echo in Bacon’s works:  ``I remember well that when I went to the echo at Port Charenton, there was an old Parisian that took it to be the work of spirits, and of good spirits; `for,’ said he, `call Satan, and the echo will not deliver back the devil’s name, but will say, ``Va-t’en.’’ ’ ‘’ Mr. Hill Burton found p 29the original of Sir Boyle Roche’s bull of the bird which was in two places at once in a letter of a Scotsman—­Robertson of Rowan.  Steele said that all was the effect of climate, and that, if an Englishman were born in Ireland, he would make as many bulls.  Mistakes of an equally absurd character may be found in English Acts of Parliament, such as this:  ``The new gaol to be built from the materials of the old one, and the prisoners to remain in the latter till the former is ready’’; or the disposition of the prisoner’s punishment of transportation for seven years—­ ``half to go to the king, and the other half to the informer.’’ Peter Harrison, an annotator on the Pentateuch, observed of Moses’ two tables of stone that they were made of shittim wood.  This is not unlike the title said to have been used for a useful little work—­``Every man his own Washer-woman.’’ Horace Walpole said that the best of all bulls was that of the man who, complaining of his nurse, said, ``I hate that woman, for she changed me at nurse.’’ But surely this one quoted by Mr. Hill Burton is far superior to Horace p 30Walpole’s; in fact, one of the best ever conceived.  Result of a duel—­``The one party received a slight wound in the breast; the other fired in the air—­and so the matter terminated.’’

After this the description of the wrongs of Ireland has a somewhat artificial look:  ``Her cup of misery has been overflowing, and is not yet full.’’

CHAPTER II.