This is very plausible; but it may still be doubted, whether the greater part of an Athenian audience, with all their native acuteness and practical criticism, would, at the moment, detect this subtile irony.

" Mrs. Hill was quite incapable of understanding the irony of her cousin's last remark, and was inclined to be well pleased with the reception her news had met with.

No fine gentleman in a drawing-room, no sensitive girl, shrinks more from what Meredith calls "the comic laugh," none feels irony more keenly than your ordinary American pioneer.

But, after all, 'tis my best irony quite thrown away; for the foolish boy will believe me quite in earnest, and will still be making love to that jade, Mistress Fame, although he knows well enough how many she has jilted.

The Kymrians, perceiving the irony of his tone, burst out into threats, telling Marius that he should suffer for it at their hands first, and afterwards at those of the Teutons when they arrived.

"I trust the face of an old customer is not likely to defeat our bargain, Hosea?" demanded the profligate heir of the senator, scarce concealing the irony in which the question was put.

[I wonder if the modest inventor appreciated the irony of this juxtaposition.]

That cold and cutting irony of which he was master, that haughty carriage and air which he assumed, that selfish and unsympathetic nature, that exacting slavery to his will, must have been intolerable to well-bred women who believed in affection and friendship, of which he was incapable, and which he did not even comprehend.

But Mr Baildon, whether from hasty reading or natural difference of taste, cannot in the least comprehend the rich and romantic irony of Stevenson's London stories.

A true-born Englishman's a contradiction, In speech an irony, in fact a fiction; A banter made to be a test of fools, Which those that use it justly ridicules; A metaphor invented to express A man akin to all the universe.

His impulses towards self-confession, towards brotherhood, towards vice, towards cynicism, towards his belief in God and his scorn of Him, come out of this world; and beyond it he sees his fellow-men as trees walking, and the Mountain of God as a distant peak, placed there only to emphasise his irony.

He employs his characteristic irony in ridiculing those who think that "one man could do the thought and another the style": "We read in Persian travels of the way in which young gentlemen go to work in the East, when they would engage in correspondence with those who inspire them with hope or fear.

Oh, no; I'm goin' ter leave it right here," grinned Joey, enjoying his own irony hugely.

" "The grace of the speaker may well excuse the irony!

No actor that I have seen expresses so well that scholarly irony of the Renaissance permeating the whole play.

We find a succession of colourless, unemphatic sentences; we find cold reasoning and exact narrative; we find polite irony and dry wit.

But there was something more; and that something more gave to the scene in Phillips' eyes a very startling irony.

What grotesque irony that men like these, who in times when war was man's normal business might have fought their way through, must now, with all the diseased and hopeless bodies encumbering the earth, be cut off by a mere wad of unthinking lead!

" "That's good of you," he said, and she heard no irony in his voice.

There was a robust innocence about him that ignored the doctor's irony.

A brilliant speech by the god, preceding the first measure, illustrates the strange but yet not infrequent irony of fate by which it has happened that the most puritanical of poets have thrown the full weight of their best work into the opposing scale, and clothed vice in magic colours to outdo the richest fancies of the libertine.

He stood, facing Lambert, with arms folded across his chest, whilst a smile of insulting irony curled his thin lips.

Right on the threshold, then, of the great new German literature another mixture of styles sprang up, and we see, for example, Klopstock strangely transplanting his pathos into the field of theoretical researches on grammar and metrics, and Wieland not always keeping his irony aloof from the most solemn subjects.

Some things were laid to his charge: it was even reported that Rhadamanthus was very angry with him, and threatened to turn him out of the island if he continued to play the fool, and would not leave off his irony and sarcasm.

Alan asked after a pause during which he let the full irony of the man's confession sink into his heart and turn there like a knife in a wound.