=Irene Lapham.= Second daughter of a self-made man; wonderfully beautiful, unsophisticated, and beginning to have social ambitions, founded upon acquaintance with the Bromfield Coreys. She is quite sure and naively glad that Tom Corey admires, perhaps loves her, until undeceived by his declaration to her sister. Then she gives him up and goes away for a while. Hearing of her father’s failure in business, she rushes back and takes her place in the family as an energetic spinster. William Dean Howells, _The Rise of Silas Lapham_ (1884). =Ire´nus.= Peaceableness personified. (Greek, _eirênê_, “peace”). Phineas Fletcher, _The Purple Island_, x. (1633). =Iris=, a messenger, a go-between. Iris was the messenger of Juno. Wheresoe’er them art in this world’s globe, I’ll have an Iris that shall find thee out. Shakespeare, _2 Henry VI_, act v. sc. 2 (1591). =Iris and the Dying.= One of the duties of Iris was to cut off a lock of hair (claimed by Proserpine) from those devoted to death, and till this was done, Death refused to accept the victim. Thus, when Dido mounted the funeral pile, she lingered in suffering till Iris was sent by Juno to cut off a lock of her hair as an offering to the black queen, but immediately this was done her spirit left the body. Than´atos did the same office to Alcestis when she gave her life for that of her husband. In all sacrifices, a forelock was first cut from the head of the victim an an offering to Proserpine.—See Euripides, _Alcestis_; Virgil, _Æneid_, iv. _Iris._ Daughter of an old Latin tutor. Of her mother it is said—“Seated with her companion at the chess-board of matrimony, she had but just pushed forward her one little white pawn upon an empty square, when the Black Knight, who cares nothing for castles, or kings or queens, swooped down upon her and swept her from the larger board of life.” The child’s father lingered but a little while longer, and the little Iris lived with a village spinster and went to a village school. All the same, the artistic principle grew and prevailed with her, and she became painter and poet.—Oliver Wendell Holmes, _The Professor at the Breakfast-Table_ (1853). =Irish Whiskey Drinker= (_The_), John Sheehan, a barrister, who with “Everard Olive of Tipperary Hall,” wrote a series of pasquinades in verse, which were published in _Bentley’s Miscellany_, in 1846, and attracted considerable attention.