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engine. When his friend asked, 'Why did not you change places with your vis-à-vis?' the baron replied, 'How could I? I had no vis-à-vis.' Lover's heroes 'liked action, but they hated work': the philosophy of thriftlessness is summed up to perfection in 'Paddy's Pastoral':

'Here's a health to you, my darlin',
Though I'm not worth a farthin';
For when I'm drunk I think I'm rich,
I've a featherbed in every ditch!'

For all his kindliness Lover laid too much stress on this happy-go-lucky fecklessness to minister to Irish selfrespect. His pictures of Irish life were based on limited experience; in so far as they are true, they recall and emphasise traits which many patriotic Irishmen wish to forget or eliminate. An age which has witnessed the growth of Irish Agricultural Co-operation is intolerant of a novelist who for the most part represents his countrymen as diverting idiots.

The case of Le Fanu is peculiar. His best-known novels had no specially characteristic Irish flavour. But his sombre talent was lit by intermittent flashes of the wildest hilarity, and it was in this mood that the author of Uncle Silas' and 'Carmilla' wrote "The Quare Gandher' and 'Billy Malowney's Taste of Love and Glory,' two of the most brilliantly comic extravaganzas which were ever written by an Irishman, and which no one but an Irishman could ever have written.

There is no Salic Law in letters, and since the deaths of Lever and Le Fanu the sceptre of the realm of Irish fiction has passed to women. But the years between 1870 and 1890 were not propitious for humorists, and the admirable work of Miss Emily Lawless, who had already made her mark in Hurrish' before the latter date, does not fall within the present survey. The same remark applies to Mrs. Hartley, though there is a fine sense of humour in Flitters, Tatters and the Counsellor' and in the delicate idylls of Miss Jane Barlow. In both the serious note predominates, and the atmosphere is autumnal.

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The literary partnership of Miss Edith Somerville and Miss Violet Martin-the most brilliantly successful example of creative collaboration in our times-began

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Published over the

with An Irish Cousin' in 1889. pseudonyms of Geilles Herring' and 'Martin Ross,' this delightful story is remarkable not only for its promise, afterwards richly fulfilled, but for its achievement. The writers proved themselves the possessors of a strange faculty of detachment which enabled them to view the humours of Irish life through the unfamiliar eye of a stranger without losing their own sympathy. They were at once of the life they described and outside it. They showed a laudable freedom from political partisanship; a minute familiarity with the manners and customs of all strata of Irish society; an unerring instinct for the 'sovran word,' a perfect mastery of the Anglo-Irish dialect; and an acute yet well-controlled sense of the ludicrous. The heroine accurately describes the concourse on the platform of a small Irish country station as having all the appearance of a large social gathering or conversazione, the carriages being filled, not by those who were starting, but by their friends who had come to see them off.' When she went to a county ball in Cork she discovered to her dismay that all her partners were named either Beamish or Barrett:

Had it not been for Willy's elucidation of its mysteries, I should have thrown my card away in despair. "No; not him. That's Long Tom Beamish! It's English Tommy you're to dance with next. They call him English Tommy because, when his militia regiment was ordered to Aldershot, he said he was 'the first of his ancestors that was ever sent on foreign service.'" . . . I carried for several days the bruises which I received during my waltz with English Tommy. It consisted chiefly of a series of short rushes, of so shattering a nature that I at last ventured to suggest a less aggressive mode of progression. "Well," said English Tommy confidentially, "ye see, I'm trying to bump Katie! That's Katie," pointing to a fat girl in blue. "She's my cousin, and we're for ever fighting.'

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As a set-off to this picture of the hilarious informality of high life in Cork twenty-five years ago there is a wonderful study of a cottage interior, occupied by a very old man, his daughter-in-law, three children, two terriers, a cat, and a half-plucked goose. The conversation between Willy Sarsfield-who foreshadows Flurry Knox in 'Some

Experiences of an Irish R.M.' by his mingled shrewdness and naïveté-and Mrs Sweeny is a perfect piece of reproduction.

'Mrs Sweeny was sitting on a kind of rough settle, between the other window and the door of an inner room. She was a stout, comfortable-looking woman of about forty, with red hair and quick blue eyes, that roved round the cabin, and silenced with a glance the occasional whisperings that rose from the children. "And how's the one that had the bad cough?” asked Willy, pursuing his conversation with her with his invariable ease and dexterity. "Honor her name is, isn't it?"-"See, now, how well he remembers!" replied Mrs Sweeny. "Indeed, she's there back in the room, lyin' these three days. Faith, I think 'tis like the decline she have, Masther Willy.”—“Did you get the doctor to her?" said Willy. "I'll give you a ticket if you haven't one."-"Oh, indeed, Docthor Kelly's afther givin' her a bottle, but shure I wouldn't let her put it into her mouth at all. God knows what'd be in it. Wasn't I afther throwin' a taste of it on the fire to thry what'd it do, and Phitz! says it, and up with it up the chimbley! Faith, I'd be in dread to give it to the child. Shure if it done that in the fire, what'd it do in her inside?"-"Well, you're a greater fool than I thought you were," said Willy politely.-"Maybe I am, faith," replied Mrs Sweeny, with a loud laugh of enjoyment. "But if she's for dyin', the crayture, she'll die aisier without thim thrash of medicines; and if she's for livin', 'tisn't thrusting to them she'll be. Shure, God is good, God is good-"-"Divil a betther!" interjected old Sweeny, unexpectedly. It was the first time he had spoken, and having delivered himself of this trenchant observation, he relapsed into silence and the smackings at his pipe.'

But the tragic note is sounded in the close of 'An Irish Cousin'-Miss Martin and Miss Somerville have never lost sight of the abiding dualism enshrined in Moore's verse which tells of the tear and the smile in Erin's eye --and it dominates their next novel, 'Naboth's Vineyard,' published in 1891, a sombre romance of the Land League days. Three years later they reached the summit of their achievement in The Real Charlotte,' which still remains their masterpiece, though easily eclipsed in popularity by the irresistible drollery of 'Some Experiences of an Irish R.M.' To begin with, it does not rely on the appeal to hunting people which in their later work won

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the heart of the English sportsman. It is a ruthlessly candid study of Irish provincial and suburban life; of the squalors of middle-class households; of garrison hacks and 'underbred, finespoken,' florid squireens. But secondly and chiefly it repels the larger half of the novel-reading public by the fact that two women have here dissected the heart of one of their sex in a mood of unrelenting realism. While pointing out the pathos and humiliation of the thought that a soul can be stunted by the trivialities of personal appearance, they own to having set down Charlotte Mullen's many evil qualities ' without pity.' They approach their task in the spirit of Balzac. The book, as we shall see, is extraordinarily rich in both wit and humour, but Charlotte, who cannot control her ruling passion of avarice even in a death chamber, might have come straight out of the pages of the Comédie Humaine. Masking her greed, her jealousy and her cruelty under a cloak of loud affability and ponderous persiflage, she is a perfect specimen of the fausse bonne femme. Only her cats could divine the strange workings of her mind:

'The movements of Charlotte's character, for it cannot be said to possess the power of development, were akin to those of some amphibious thing whose strong, darting course under the water is only marked by a bubble or two, and it required almost an animal instinct to note them. Every bubble betrayed the creature below, as well as the limitations of its power of hiding itself, but people never thought of looking out for these indications in Charlotte, or even suspected that she had anything to conceal. There was an almost blatant simplicity about her, a humorous rough and readiness which, joined with her literary culture, proved business capacity, and her dreaded temper, seemed to leave no room for any further aspect, least of all of a romantic kind.'

Yet romance of a sort was at the root of Charlotte's character. She had been in love with Roddy Lambert, a showy, handsome, selfish squireen, before he married for money. She had disguised her tenderness under a bluff camaraderie during his first wife's lifetime, and hastened Mrs Lambert's death by inflaming her suspicions of Roddy's infidelity. It was only when Charlotte was again foiled by Lambert's second marriage to her own Vol. 219.-No. 436.

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niece, that her love was turned to gall and she plotted to compass his ruin.

The authors deal faithfully with Francie FitzPatrick, Charlotte's niece, but an element of compassion mingles with their portraiture. Charlotte had robbed Francie of a legacy, and compounded with her conscience by inviting the girl to stay with her at Lismoyle. Any change was a godsend to poor Francie, who, being an orphan, lived in Dublin with another aunt, a kindly but feckless creature whose eyes were not formed to perceive dirt nor her nose to apprehend smells, and whose idea of economy was 'to indulge in no extras of soap or scrubbing brushes, and to feed her family on strong tea and indifferent bread and butter, in order that Ida's and Mabel's hats might be no whit less ornate than those of their neighbours.' In this dingy household Francie had grown up, lovely as a Dryad, brilliantly indifferent to the serious things of life, with a deplorable Dublin accent, ingenuous, unaffected and inexpressibly vulgar. She captivates men of all sorts: Roddy Lambert, who lunched on hot beefsteak pie and sherry; Mr Hawkins, an amorous young soldier, who treated her with a bullying tenderness and jilted her for an English heiress; and Christopher Dysart, a scholar, a gentleman, and the heir to a baronetcy, who was ruined by self-criticism and diffidence. Francie respected Christopher and rejected him; was thrown over by Hawkins whom she loved; and married Roddy Lambert, her motives being 'poverty, aimlessness, bitterness of soul and instinctive leniency towards any man who liked her.' Francie had already exasperated Charlotte by refusing Christopher Dysart: by marrying Lambert she dealt a death-blow to her hopes and drove her into the path of vengeance.

But the story is not only engrossing as a study of vulgarity that is touched with pathos, of the vindictive jealousy of unsunned natures, of the cowardice of the selfish and the futility of the intellectually effete. It is a treasure-house of good sayings, happy comments, ludicrous incidents. When Francie returned to Dublin we read how one of her cousins, Dottie, unfailing purveyor of diseases to the family, had imported German measles from her school.' When Charlotte, nursing her wrath, went to inform the servant at Lambert's house of

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