e subject.

Young Denis's display of controversial talents was so remarkably
precocious, that he controverted his father's statements upon all
possible subjects, with a freedom from embarrassment which promised well
for that most distinguished trait in a controversialist--hardihood of
countenance. This delighted old Denis to the finger ends.

"Dinny, if he's spared," he would say, "will be a credit to us all yet.
The sorra one of him but's as manly as anything, and as longheaded as a
four-footed baste, so he is! nothing daunts or dashes him, or puts him
to an amplush: but he'll look you in the face so stout an' cute, an'
never redden or stumble, whether he's right or wrong, that it does one's
heart good to see him. Then he has such a laning to it, you see, that
the crathur 'ud ground an argument on anything, thin draw it out to a
norration an' make it as clear as rock-water, besides incensing you
so well into the rason of the thing, that Father Finnerty himself 'ud
hardly do it betther from the althar."

The highest object of an Irish peasant's ambition is to see his son a
priest. Whenever a farmer happens to have a large family, he usually
destines one of them for the church, if his circumstances are at all
such as can enable him to afford the boy a proper education. This youth
becomes the centre in which all the affections of the family meet. He
is cherished, humored in all his caprices, indulged in his boyish
predilections, and raised over the heads of his brothers, independently
of all personal or relative merit in himself. The consequence is,
that he gradually became self-willed, proud, and arrogant, often to
an offensive degree; but all this is frequently mixed up with a lofty
bombast, and an under-current of strong disguised affection, that render
his early life remarkably ludicrous and amusing. Indeed, the pranks of
pedantry, the pretensions to knowledge, and the humor with which it is
mostly displayed, render these scions of divinity, in their intercourse
with the people until the period of preparatory education is completed,
the most interesting and comical class, perhaps, to be found in the
kingdom. Of these learned priestlings young Denis was undoubtedly
a first-rate specimen. His father, a man of no education, was,
nevertheless, as profound and unfathomable upon his favorite subjects as
a philosopher; but this profundity raised him mightily in the opinion of
the people, who admired him the more the less t