Blarney has come to mean a certain adroitness and winningness of speech supposed to be peculiar to the Irish. If an Irishman open his mouth, the English and Scotch insist on assuming that they are being treated to blarney. The persons who affect Messrs. Cook’s tours hang on to the words of every Irishman they meet, particularly if he be a jarvey, and wait lovingly and with bated breath for the same phenomenon. There are no snakes in Ireland, and, sad to relate, there is very little blarney. Broadly speaking, the people seem too poverty-stricken and too apathetic for talk of any kind, much less for that sprightly loquacity and skilfulness of retort which we call blarney. The Irish jarvey, who is commonly believed to be an adept in the art, is just as much a disappointment as the London cabby. Even in “the noble city of Dublin” you find, as a rule, that you are being driven by a dull, flea-bitten, porter-full person, who has really not two words to say for himself. That he is a daring and reckless driver I am quite willing to admit; that he has a passion for stout and whisky goes without saying; but that he is a wit, or a humorist, or a wheedling talker, or in any sense gifted above ordinary hack-drivers, I deny. In the smaller centers of population and in the country districts he is even duller and more flea-bitten and more taciturn. When he tries to charge you treble fare, which is his usual practise, he does it with a snap and gracelessly; as a pointer-out of local monuments he lacks both salt and information; he has no gift for entertainment, and he drinks sullenly and with a careful eye on the clock. As for the Irish waiters, grooms, handy men, railway porters, and kindred creatures, of whose powers of humorous persuasion and repartee so much has been written, I have no hesitation in pronouncing them to be a sad, uncertain, curt, fiddle-faced company, with scarcely a smile or the materials for a smile among them. Their conversation is monosyllabic, their manner barely civil, their apprehension slow, and their habit slack and perfunctory. And they are about as blarnified as the Trafalgar Square lions. Of the peasantry I can only say that cheerfulness, whether of notion or word, is not nowadays their strong point. They have a great way of saying “your honor” to you if you are a man, and “your ladyship’s honor” if you are a woman; but after that the amount of blarney to be got out of them is infinitesimal. Grinding poverty, short-commons, a solitary life on some dreary mountain-side, and a fine view of the workhouse, do not tend to sharpen the Irish tongue any more than they sharpen the Irish wit. On the whole, therefore, I am inclined to think that nearly all the blarney that should be in Ireland has for some reason or other taken unto itself wings and flown away. The people are no longer racy of the soil. Even the gentry, who once had the credit of being roguish and devil-may-care to a fault, are become sad and somber and flat of speech.