Read "Penelope's Irish Experiences" by Kate Douglas Wiggin online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
'I found in Innisfail the fair, In Ireland, while in exile there, Women of worth, both grave and gay men, Many clerics, and many laymen. ' James Clarence Mangan.
Mrs. Delany, writing from Dublin in 1731, says: 'As for the generality of people that I meet with here, they are much the same as in England -- a mixture of good and bad. All that I have met with behave themselves very decently according to their rank; now and then an oddity breaks out, but never so extraordinary but that I can match it in England. There is a heartiness among them that is more like Cornwall than any I have known, and great sociableness. ' This picturesque figure in the life of her day gives charming pictures in her memoirs of the Irish society of the time, descriptions which are confirmed by contemporary writers. She was the wife of Dr. Delany, Dean of Down, the companion of duchesses and queens, and the friend of Swift. Hannah More, in a poem called 'Sensibility,' published in 1778, gives this quaint and stilted picture of her: --