would be better able to understand
Shakespeare's birthday--and Shakespeare's poetry.

In conjecturally referring this negative side of the man, his lack of
the smaller charities of our common childhood, to his birth in the
dominant Irish sect, I do not write without historic memory or reference
to other cases. That minority of Protestant exiles which mainly
represented Ireland to England during the eighteenth century did contain
some specimens of the Irish lounger and even of the Irish blackguard;
Sheridan and even Goldsmith suggest the type. Even in their
irresponsibility these figures had a touch of Irish tartness and
realism; but the type has been too much insisted on to the exclusion of
others equally national and interesting. To one of these it is worth
while to draw attention. At intervals during the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries there has appeared a peculiar kind of Irishman. He
is so unlike the English image of Ireland that the English have actually
fallen back on the pretence that he was not Irish at all. The type is
commonly Protestant; and sometimes seems to be almost anti-national in
its acrid instinct for judging itself. Its nationalism only appears when
it flings itself with even bitterer pleasure into judging the foreigner
or the invader. The first and greatest of such figures was Swift.
Thackeray simply denied that Swift was an Irishman, because he was not a
stage Irishman. He was not (in the English novelist's opinion) winning
and agreeable enough to be Irish. The truth is that Swift was much too
harsh and disagreeable to be English. There is a great deal of Jonathan
Swift in Bernard Shaw. Shaw is like Swift, for instance, in combining
extravagant fancy with a curious sort of coldness. But he is most like
Swift in that very quality which Thackeray said was impossible in an
Irishman, benevolent bullying, a pity touched with contempt, and a habit
of knocking men down for their own good. Characters in novels are often
described as so amiable that they hate to be thanked. It is not an
amiable quality, and it is an extremely rare one; but Swift possessed
it. When Swift was buried the Dublin poor came in crowds and wept by the
grave of the broadest and most free-handed of their benefactors. Swift
deserved the public tribute; but he might have writhed and kicked in his
grave at the thought of receiving it. There is in G. B. S. something of
the same inhumane humanity. Irish history has offered a third inst