A few performers have been successful in making reputations as North of Ireland characters, but they are very few. Ferguson and Mack were for a time at the head of this class of variety comedians, but they got lazy, failed to exhibit anything like extensive originality, and carted their old jokes and stale "business" to England and back, until they have fallen pretty much to the rear ranks. Harrigan & Hart, who have a large theatre in New York, and whose play, "Squatter Sovereignty," had a run of almost a year, are now the best known and really the cleverest of the members of the profession who make a specialty of Irish comedy. Billy Barry and Hugh Fay have made fame and money with their laughable "Muldoon's Picnic," and there are probably a score of others whose efforts would be worth mentioning if they could be recalled at this moment. As in all other lines, however, the ranks have been filled up with men and boys who are even more ignorant and ridiculous off the stage than on; who have graduated from newspaper hawking and boot blacking routes to the back door of the stage, and whose limited powers of mimicry, whose retentive memories for old and poor jokes, and whose rhinoceros-hide cheek--absolute "gall" they would call it themselves--are their only recommendations to any consideration. They, like all other really bad actors, look down upon every brother professional and imagine that they alone have attained to the privileged height above which there is no firm foothold for anybody else. It is the pleasing prerogative of all poor artists to have hallucinations of this kind, and to dwell in temples of fame that are built upon the sands of their own imaginations. Nobody ever disabuses them of their egotistical ideas, and if anybody attempted to do so he would be set down as the very gausiest of "guys" for his pains. [Illustration: TONY HART.]