'He stamped and he cursed and he swore he would fight, And I saw the _ould_ devil between his two eyes.'
Sometimes the devil is taken as the type of excellence or of great proficiency in anything, or of great excess, so that you often hear 'That fellow is as old as the devil,' 'That beefsteak is as tough as the devil,' 'He beats the devil for roguery,' 'My landlord is civil, but dear as the divil.' (Swift: who wrote this with a pen dipped in Irish ink.)
A poor wretch or a fellow always in debt and difficulty, and consequently shabby, is a 'poor devil'; and not very long ago I heard a friend say to another--who was not sparing of his labour--'Well, there's no doubt but you're a hard-working old devil.' { 58}
Very bad potatoes:--'Wet and watery, scabby and small, thin in the ground and hard to dig, hard to wash, hard to boil, and _the devil to eat them_.'
'I don't wonder that poor Bill should be always struggling, for he has the devil of an extravagant family.'
'Oh confusion to you Dan,' says the T. B. C., 'You're the devil of a man,' says the T. B. C.
(But this form of expression occurs in Dickens--'Our Mutual Friend'--'I have a devil of a temper myself'). An emphatic statement:--'I wouldn't like to trust him, for he's the _devil's own_ rogue.'
'There's no use in your trying that race against Johnny Keegan, for Johnny is the very devil at running.' 'Oh your reverence,' says Paddy Galvin, 'don't ax me to fast; but you may put as much prayers on me as you like: for, your reverence, I'm very bad at fasting, but I'm the divel at the prayers.' According to Mr. A. P. Graves, in 'Father O'Flynn,' the 'Provost and Fellows of Trinity' [College, Dublin] are 'the divels an' all at Divinity.' This last expression is truly Hibernian, and is very often heard:--A fellow is boasting how he'll leather Jack Fox when next he meets him. 'Oh yes, you'll do the _devil an' all_ while Jack is away; but wait till he comes to the fore.'
In several of the following short stories and sayings the simpleton side of Satan's character is well brought out.
Damer of Shronell, who lived in the eighteenth century, was reputed to be the richest man in Ireland--a sort of Irish Croesus: so that 'as rich as { 59} Damer' has become a proverb in the south of Ireland. An Irish peasant song-writer, philosophising on the vanity of riches, says:--