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the return of her master with his new wife, the servant inquired with cold resignation' whether it was the day after to-morrow:

"It is, me poor woman, it is," replied Charlotte in the tone of facetious intimacy that she reserved for other people's servants. "You'll have to stir your stumps to get the house ready for them."-" The house is cleaned down and ready for them as soon as they like to walk into it," replied Eliza Hackett with dignity, "and if the new lady faults the drawing-room chimbley for not being swep, the master will know it's not me that's to blame for it, but the sweep that's gone dhrilling with the Mileetia."

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Each of the members of the Dysart family is hit off in some memorable phrase; Sir Benjamin, the old and irascible paralytic, 'who had been struck down on his son's coming of age by a paroxysm of apoplectic jealousy'; the admirable and unselfish Pamela with her pleasant anxious voice'; Christopher, who believed that, if only he could read the "Field" and had a more spontaneous habit of cursing,' he would be an ideal country gentleman; and Lady Dysart, who was a clever woman, a renowned solver of acrostics in her society paper, and a holder of strong opinions as to the prophetic meaning of the Pyramids. With her 'a large yet refined bonhomie took the place of tact, but being an Englishwoman she was 'constitutionally unable to discern perfectly the subtle grades of Irish vulgarity.' Sometimes the authors throw away the scenario for a whole novel in a single paragraph, as in this compressed summary of the antecedents of Captain Cursiter:

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'Captain Cursiter was "getting on" as captains go, and he was the less disposed to regard his junior's love affairs with an indulgent eye, in that he had himself served a long and difficult apprenticeship in such matters, and did not feel that he had profited much by his experiences. It had happened to him at an early age to enter ecstatically into the house of bondage, and in it he had remained with eyes gradually opening to its drawbacks, until, a few years before, the death of the only apparent obstacle to his happiness had brought him face to face with its realisation. Strange to say, when this supreme moment arrived, Captain Cursiter was disposed for further delay; but it shows the contrariety of human nature, that when he found himself superseded by his own

subaltern, an habitually inebriated viscount, instead of feeling grateful to his preserver, he committed the imbecility of horsewhipping him; and finding it subsequently advisable to leave his regiment, he exchanged into the infantry with a settled conviction that all women were liars.'

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Nouns and verbs are the bones and sinews of style; it is in the use of epithets and adjectives that the artist is shown; and Miss Martin and Miss Somerville never make a mistake. An episode in the life of one of Charlotte's pets-a cockatoo-is described as occurring when the bird was 'a sprightly creature of some twenty shrieking summers.' We read of cats who stared with the expressionless but wholly alert scrutiny of their race'; of the difficult revelry' of Lady Dysart's garden party, where the men were in a hopeless minority and the more honourable women sat on a long bench in 'midge-bitten dulness.' Such epithets are not decorative, they heighten the effect of the picture. Where adjectives are not really needed Miss Martin and Miss Somerville can dispense with them altogether and yet attain a deadly precision, as when they describe an Irish beggar as 'a bundle of rags with a cough in it,' or note a characteristic trait of Roddy Lambert by observing that he was a man in whom jealousy took the form of reviling the object of his affections, if by so doing he could detach his rivals' —a modern instance of 'displiceas aliis, sic ego tutus ero.' When Roddy Lambert went away after his first wife's funeral we learn that he 'honeymooned with his grief in the approved fashion.' These felicities abound on every page; while the turn of phrase of the peasant speech is caught with a fidelity which no other Irish writer has ever surpassed. When Judy Lee, a poor old woman who had taken an unconscionable time in dying, was called by one of the gossips who had attended her wake'as nice a woman as ever threw a tub of clothes on the hill,' and complimented for having battled it out well,' Norry the Boat replied sardonically:

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'Faith thin, an' if she did die itself she was in the want of it; sure there isn't a winther since her daughther wint to America that she wasn't anointed a couple of times. I'm thinkin' the people th' other side o' death will be throuncin' her for keepin' them waitin' on her this way.'

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Humour is never more effective than when it emerges from a serious situation. Tragedy jostles comedy in life, and the greatest dramatists and romancers have made wonderful use of this abrupt alternation. There are many painful and diverting scenes in The Real Charlotte,' but none in which both elements are blended so effectively as the story of Julia Duffy's last pilgrimage. Threatened with eviction from her farm by the covetous intrigues of Charlotte, she leaves her sick bed to appeal to her landlord, and when half dead with fatigue falls in with the insane Sir Benjamin, to be driven away with grotesque insults. On her way home, she calls in at Charlotte's house only to find Christopher Dysart reading Rossetti's poems to Francie FitzPatrick, who has just timidly observed, in reply to her instructor's remark that the hero is a pilgrim, 'I know a lovely song called "The Pilgrim of Love"; of course it wasn't the same thing as what you were reading, but it was awfully nice too.' This interlude is intensely ludicrous, but its cruel incongruity only heightens the misery of what has gone before and what follows.

'The Silver Fox,' which appeared in 1897, need not detain us long, though it is a little masterpiece in its way, vividly contrasting the limitations of the sport-loving temperament with the ineradicable superstitions of the Irish peasantry. Impartial as ever, the authors have here achieved a felicity of phrase to which no other writers of hunting novels have ever approached. 'Imagination's widest stretch' cannot picture Surtees or Mr Nat Gould describing an answer being given with that level politeness of voice which is the distilled essence of a perfected anger.'

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But the atmosphere of The Silver Fox' is sombre, and a sporting novel which is at once serious and of a fine literary quality must necessarily appeal to a limited audience. The problem is solved to perfection in 'Some Experiences of an Irish R.M.,' a series of loosely-knit episodes which, after running a serial course in the 'Badminton Magazine,' were republished in book form towards the close of 1899. There is only one chapter to cloud the otherwise unintermittent hilarity of the whole recital. The authors have dispensed with comment, and rely chiefly on dialogue, incident, and their intimate and

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precise knowledge of horses, and horse-copers of both sexes. An interested devotion to the noble animal is here shown to be the last infirmity of noble minds, for old Mrs Knox, who combined the culture of a grande dame with the appearance of a refined scarecrow, went cubhunting in a bath chair. In such a company a young sailor whose enthusiasm for the chase had been nourished by the hirelings of Malta, and whose eye for points had probably been formed on circus posters, had little chance of making a good bargain at Drumcurran horse fair: "The fellow's asking forty-five pounds for her," said Bernard Shute to Miss Sally; she's a nailer to gallop. I don't think it's too much."-" Her grandsire was the Mountain Hare,” said the owner of the mare, hurrying up to continue her family history, "and he was the grandest horse in the four baronies. He was forty-two years of age when he died, and they waked him the same as ye'd wake a Christian. They had whisky and porther-and bread-and a piper in it.""Thim Mountain Hare colts is no great things," interrupted Mr Shute's groom contemptuously. "I seen a colt once that was one of his stock, and if there was forty men and their wives, and they after him with sticks, he wouldn't lep a sod of turf.”—“Lep, is it!" ejaculated the owner in a voice shrill with outrage. "You may lead that mare out through the counthry, and there isn't a fence in it that she wouldn't go up to it as indepindent as if she was going to her bed, and your honour's ladyship knows that dam well, Miss Knox."— "You want too much money for her, McCarthy," returned Miss Sally, with her little air of preternatural wisdom. "God pardon you, Miss Knox! Sure a lady like you knows well that forty-five pounds is no money for that mare. Fortyfive pounds!" He laughed. "It'd be as good for me to make her a present to the gentleman all out as take three farthings less for her! She's too grand entirely for a poor farmer like me, and if it wasn't for the long weak family I have, I wouldn't part with her under twice the money."—" Three fine lumps of daughters in America paying his rent for him," commented Flurry in the background. "That's the long

weak family!"'

The turn of phrase in Irish conversation has never been reproduced in print with greater fidelity, and there is hardly a page in the book without some characteristic Hibernianism such as Whisky as pliable as new milk,' or the description of a horse who was a nice flippant

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jumper,' or a bandmaster who was 'a thrifle fulsome after his luncheon,' or a sweep who 'raised tallywack and tandem all night round the house to get at the chimbleys.' The narrative reaches its climax in the chapter headed 'Lisheen Races. Second-hand.' Major Yeates and his egregious English visitor Mr Leigh Kelway, an earnest Radical publicist, having failed to reach the scene, are sheltering from the rain in a wayside public-house where they are regaled with an account of the races by Slipper, the dissipated but engaging huntsman of the local pack of hounds. The close of the meeting was a steeplechase in which Bocock's owld mare,' ridden by one Driscoll, was matched against a horse ridden by another local sportsman named Clancy, and Slipper who favoured Driscoll, and had taken up his position at a convenient spot on the course, thus describes his mode of encouraging the mare:

"Skelp her, ye big brute!' says I. What good's in ye that ye aren't able to skelp her?' ... Well, Mr Flurry, and gintlemen ... I declare to ye when owld Bocock's mare heard thim roars she sthretched out her neck like a gandher, and when she passed me out she give a couple of grunts, and looked at me as ugly as a Christian. 'Hah!' says I, givin' her a couple o' dhraws o' th' ash plant across the butt o' the tail, the way I wouldn't blind her, 'I'll make ye grunt!' says I, 'I'll nourish ye!' I knew well she was very frightful of th' ash plant since the winter Tommeen Sullivan had her under a sidecar. But now, in place of havin' any obligations to me, ye'd be surprised if ye heard the blaspheemious expressions of that young boy that was ridin' her; and whether it was over-anxious he was, turnin' around the way I'd hear him cursin', or whether it was some slither or slide came to owld Bocock's mare, I dunno, but she was bet up agin the last obstackle but two, and before you could say 'Shnipes,' she was standin' on her two ears beyon in th' other field! I declare to ye, on the vartue of me oath, she stood that way till she reconnoithered what side Driscoll would fall, an' she turned about then and rolled on him as cosy as if he was meadow grass!" Slipper stopped short; the people in the doorway groaned appreciatively; Mary Kate murmured "The Lord save us!"-"The blood was dhruv out through his nose and ears," continued Slipper, with a voice that indicated the cream of the narration, "and you'd hear his bones crackin' on the ground! You'd have pitied the poor boy."—"Good

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