Peeps at Many Lands by Katharine Tynan

I must warn you, before proceeding to write about the Irish people, that I have tried to explain them, according to my capacity, a thousand times to my English friends and neighbours, and have been pulled up short as many times by the reflection that all I have been saying was contradicted by some other aspect of my country-people. For we are an eternally contradictory people, and none of us can prognosticate exactly what we shall feel, what do, under given circumstances; whereas the Englishman is simple. He has no mysteries. Once you know him, you can pretty well tell what he will say, what feel, and do under given circumstances. You have a formula for him: you have no formula for the Irish. The Englishman is simple, the Irish complex. The Anglo-Irish, who stand to most English people for the Irish, have had grafted on to them the complexity of the Irish without their pliability. It makes, perhaps, the most puzzling of all mixtures, and it may be the chief difficulty in a proper estimate of the Irish character.

They will tell you in Ireland that you have to go some forty or fifty miles from Dublin before you get into Irish Ireland. There are a good many Irish in Anglo-Ireland, usually in the humbler walks of life, whence you shall find in Dublin servants, car-drivers, policemen, newspaper-boys, and so on, the raciness, the vivacity, the charm, which in Irish Ireland is a perpetual delight. Dublin drawing-rooms are not vivacious, nor are the manners gracious, although the Four Courts still produce a galaxy of wit, and Dublin citizens buttonhole each other with good stories all along the streets, roaring with laughter in a way that would be regarded as Bedlam in Fleet Street.