Excerpt from Irish Literature, Vol. 6 Irish humor is mainly a store of merriment pure and simple, without much personal taint, and it does not pro fess to be philosophical. Human follies or deformities are rarely touched upon, and luckily Irish humorous writers do not attempt the didactic. In political warfare, how ever, the bitterest taunts are heard, and it is somewhat regrettable that Irish politics Should have absorbed so great a part of Irish wit, and turned what might have been pleasant reading into a succession of biting sarcasms. The Irish political satirists of the eighteenth and nine teenth centuries have often put themselves out of court by the ephemeral nature of their gibes no less than by the ex tra-ferocious tone they adopted. There is no denying the verve and point in the writings of Watty Cox, Dr. Brenan, J. W. Croker, and so on, but who can read them to-day with pleasure? Eaton Stannard Barrett's 'all the Talents, ' after giving a nickname to a ministry, destroyed it; it served its purpose, and would be out of place if resurrected and placed in a popular collection, where the student of political history - to whom alone it is interesting and amusing - will hardly meet with it. His The Heroine, ' however, which deals with an evil as familiar in our day as when he wrote, may well be quoted as an example of his style. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.