C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Irony
Irony is an insult conveyed in the form of a compliment * * * placing its victim naked on a bed of briars and bristles, thinly covered with rose-leaves; adorning his brow with a crown of gold, which burns into his brain; teasing, and fretting, and riddling him through and through with incessant discharges of hot shot from a masked battery; laying bare the most sensitive and shrinking nerves of his mind, and then blandly touching them with ice, or smilingly pricking them with needles.
