The Cambridge History of English and American Literature in 18 Volumes (1907–21).
Volume XIV. The Victorian Age, Part Two.
§ 21. Griffin
Gerald Griffin, who has caught much of the quality of Oliver Goldsmith’s style, though his work is more consciously Irish, stands midway between Anglo-Irish and Irish-Irish writers. He was the author of The Collegians, perhaps the best of Irish novels written in the nineteenth century. He also wrote a successful play, Gisippus, and some charming ballads. He had a quiet sense of humour, and carried this into his novels and Irish stories, and his musical ear and deft use of unusual metres give him an enduring place among our lyrical writers. He has a leaning towards Gaelic works, and introduces them freely into the refrains to his songs; but he neither attempts the Hiberno-English vernacular cultivated by Lover, nor the form of Gaelic-English adopted by Walsh and Ferguson, and, while his milieu is essentially, though not obtrusively, Irish, his phraseology is distinctly English, or, at any rate, Anglo-Irish.