The gentlemen and inhabitants of this country are all of them remarkable for their hospitality to strangers, generosity and courteous carriage, which characters, should I refuse them, must be attributed to the highest ingratitude ; and lastly, there are few among them but whose breeding and parts, and I might say learning also, are eminently more conspicuous than in many other places in this kingdom; notwithstanding, Ireland may vie in this respect with most of the civilized countries of Europe. It is well known that classical reading extends itself even to a fault among the lower and poorer kind in this country, many of whom, to the taking them off from more useful works, have greater knowledge in this way than some of the better sort.
The common people are extremely hospitable and courteous to strangers. Many of them speak Latin fluently, and I accidentally arrived at a little hut in a very obscure part of this country where I saw some poor lads reading Homer, their master having been a mendicant scholar at an English grammar school at Tralee.
--Dr. Charles Smith, traveling in County Kerry, Ireland, in 1751. Cited in The Last Colonel of the Irish Brigade: Count O'Connell and the Old Irish Life at Home and Abroad, 1745-1833, by Mrs. Morgan John O'Connell, 1892.
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