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 ]