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.
E. P. Whipple.
Irony is jesting hidden behind gravity.
John Weiss.
Clap an extinguisher upon your irony, if you are unhappily blessed with a vein of it.
Lamb.