Note 41 — III GEORGE FARQUHAR 1677-1707

The not altogether foolish censure has been cast upon the rogue Teague in The Twin Rivals that he speaks an impossible brogue, which might as well be Welsh. Farquhar did not succeed in transferring to paper the weird and unlovely Ulster dialect with which he was familiar in boyhood, and which had figured already in the third act of Henry the Fifth, in Jonson’s Irish masque, in Shadwell’s Lancashire Witches; which was simultaneously being used in his farce The Committee, by Dryden’s friend Howard, and which was afterwards to have good corroboration in Aytoun’s Massacre of the MacPherson. Farquhar employs it twice elsewhere, passably well in the case of Torlough Macahone of the parish of Curroughabegley (the personage who built a mansion-house for himself and his predecessors after him), and with lamentable flatness in that of Dugard in his last comedy. Dugard is a rival of the nursery-maid dear to almanac humorists, who is wont to exclaim: “Can’t ye tell boi me accint that ’tis Frinch Oi am!” It was one of Farquhar’s inartistic mistakes that he made no loving study of this or of anything touching nearly his own people. His Irishmen, with the exception of Roebuck, are either rascals or characterless nobodies. The name Teague, or Teig, which Howard had also employed, is old and pure North Irish; and no less pleasant an authority than George Borrow reminds us in the Romano Lavo-Lil that it is Danish in origin.