Peeps at Many Lands by Katharine Tynan

There is something of rich and racy association about the very name of Cork -- something that suggests joviality, wit, a warm southern temperament. Corkmen only out of all Ireland hold together. The rest of Ireland may be fissiparous, disunited. Corkmen cleave closer than Scotsmen to one another, and to be a Corkman is to another Corkman a cloak that covers a multitude of sins. A Corkman in Dublin will have friends in all sorts of unlikely places. What matter though a man be in a humble rank of life -- a cabman, a policeman, a postman, even a scavenger! So he be a Corkman, he has an appeal to the heart of his brother Corkman. It is a Freemasonry. There is nothing else like it in Ireland, nor anywhere else, so far as I know; for the Scotsman coming into England may draw other Scotsmen to follow him, but in the Scotch sticking together there is less real affection than there is in the case of the Corkman. To be able to exchange memories of the Mardyke, of the River Lee, of Shandon and Sunday's Well, is to make Corkmen brothers all the world over. Cork looks on itself as the real capital of Ireland, and has always its eye on a day when Dublin will be dispossessed.

It has a most excellent situation on the River Lee, and is surrounded by all manner of natural beauties. There is plenty of business stirring, and there is a good deal of opulence in Cork, where, Corkmen being men of taste, they display it in their houses, their way of living and on the persons of their beautiful women, with the irresistible Cork brogue to crown all their other charms. Cork is nothing if not artistic. She has produced artists of all descriptions -- poets, painters, great newspaper men (was not Delane of the _Times_ a Corkman? ), musicians, sculptors, orators, preachers. The words roll off the Cork tongue sweet as honey. There is something extraordinarily rich, gay and alluring about Cork and Cork people. They were always audacious. They set up Perkin Warbeck as a Pretender to the English Crown, clad him in silks and velvets, and demanded his acknowledgment at the hands of the Lord Deputy. I do not know that as a city Cork took a great part in any of the many Irish rebellions. It would make a city of diplomatists because of its honeyed tongue. Queen Elizabeth, they say, was the first one to talk of Blarney, which is a Cork commodity. There was a certain McCarthy, Lord of Blarney, who would not come in and submit to the Queen's forces, though week by week he promised to come and kept the Queen's anger off by cozening words. "It is all Blarney," the Queen came to say of fair words that meant nothing; but that is a derivation I somewhat suspect. I do not know what Cork was doing in the Desmond Rebellion, of the results of which Spenser has left us so harrowing a description.