irreverential

Prose: A Lecture delivered in the Museum of Irish Industry, St. Stephen's Green, by the Right Hon. Judge Keogh: The Irish Times, June 1, 1865.2.We print the words of the judge as we find them, though it seems irreverential, not to say worse, to compare a regicide, and a man who denied the divinity of Christ, to the apostle of the nations.

With persons of taste and refinement, there is an almost religious sacredness in the presence of the creations of genius, to desecrate which, is as vulgar as it is irreverential of the beautiful and the good.

As Savage Landor says, he was "irreverential to the great and to God: an ill-tempered, sour, supercilious man, who flattered some of the worst and maligned some of the best men that ever lived."

I shall quote his words as almost a solitary example of his use of picturesque English:—“For a venerable persuasion there is p. 173substituted a rude irreverential confusion of voices; for an earnest acceptance of the form offered by the Priest there is substituted—in my feeling at least—a weary waiting for the end of an unmeaning form.”

He found it difficult to associate rank with unwashed faces and unbrushed clothes; and although he did bow, and flourish his hat, and perform all the other semblances of respect, he always gave one the idea of an irreverential Acolyte at the back of a profoundly impressed and dignified high-priest.