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Wendell Phillips, Theodore C. Pease, Speeches, Lectures and Letters of Wendell Phillips: Volume 2, The lost arts (1838). (search)
and the laughable mistakes of the Irish. Even the tale which either Maria Edgeworth or her father thought the best is that famous story of a man writing a letter as follows: My dear friend, I would write you in detail, more minutely, if there was not an impudent fellow looking over my shoulder, reading every word. No, you lie; I've not read a word you have written! This is an Irish bull, still it is a very old one. It is only two hundred and fifty years older than the New Testament. Horace Walpole dissented from Richard Lovell Edgeworth, and thought the other Irish bull was the best,--of the man who said, I would have been a very handsome man, but they changed me in the cradle. That comes from Don Quixote, and is Spanish; but Cervantes borrowed it from the Greek in the fourth century, and the Greek stole it from the Egyptian hundreds of years back. There is one story which it is said Washington has related, of a man who went into an inn, and asked for a glass of drink from the