Why the Pirate Earl? Because both his houses are on the sea; because his claret, which is of the best and poured forth like water, is brought in his own yacht from the Isle of Man, without troubling the excise; because the founder of the family--Sir Amorey Crosbie, who dislodged the Danes in 1177--was a pirate by calling; and because the Crosbies of Glandore have dutifully exhibited piratical proclivities ever since. Not that the present earl looks like a sea-faring evil-doer, with his sallow effeminate countenance and coquettish uniform. He is a high-bred, highly-polished, devil-may-care, reckless Irish peer, who, at a moment's notice, would pink his enemy in the street, or beat the watch, or bait a bull, or set a main of cocks a-spurring, or wrong a wench, or break his neck over a stone wall from sheer bravado--after the lively fashion of his order at the period. Before he came into the title he was known as fighting Crosbie. The tales told of his vagaries would set your humdrum modern hair on end--of how he pistolled his whipper-in because he lost a fox, and then set about preparing an islet of his on the Atlantic for a siege; of how he sent my Lord North a douceur of five thousand pounds as the price of pardon, and reappeared in Dublin as a hero; of how, when the earldom fell to him, he settled down by eloping with Miss Wolfe, or rather by carrying her off _vi et armis_, as was the amiable habit of young bloods. It was a singular Irish custom, since happily exploded, that of winning a bride by force, as the Sabine maidens were won. Yet it obtained in many parts of Ireland by general consent till the middle of the eighteenth century. Abduction clubs existed whose object was the counteracting of unjust freaks of fortune by tying up heiresses to penniless sparks. Some of the young ladies (notably the two celebrated Misses Kennedy) objected to the process, while most of them found in the prospect of it a pleasing excitement. Irish girls have always had a spice of the devil in them. It is not surprising that they should have looked kindly upon men who risked life and liberty for their sweet sakes.