half a million words crowd the disconcerting paginal
result, for the form and scale of which Balzacian' and
'Zolaesque' would be appropriate but insufficient epi-
thets. But in the matter of psychology or realism Balzac
is beggared and Zola bankrupted. It may sound amazing
to say so, but neither of those remorseless and unflinch-
ing writers, one the revealer of the human mind, the /
other the painter of sordidness, ever dared to go to the
lengths that this alumnus of an Irish College has care-
lessly and floridly gone. And all this effort has been
made, not to make any profound revelation or to deliver
a literary message, but to bless the wondering world
with an accurate account of one day and one night
passed by the author in Dublin's fair City, Lord Dudley
being Viceroy (the account of his driving through the
streets of Dublin is probably one of the few passages
intelligible to the ordinary English reader). The selected
day and night are divided into the following series of
episodes, if we may quote what appears to be a summary
given towards the close of the book:

'the preparation of breakfast, intestinal congestion, the bath,
the funeral, the advertisement of Alexander Keyes, the un-
substantial lunch, the visit to Museum and National Library,
the book-hunt along Bedford Row, Merchants' Arch, Wel-
lington Quay, the music in the Ormond Hotel, the altercation
with a truculent troglodyte in Bernard Kieran's premises, a
blank period of time including a car-drive, a visit to a house
of mourning, a leave-taking,... the prolonged delivery of Mrs
Nina Purefoy, the visit to a disorderly house . . . and subse-
quent brawl and chance medley in Beaver Street, nocturnal
perambulation to and from the cabman's shelter, Butt Bridge.'
The advertisement of Alexander Keyes covers a chapter,
tedious beyond recapitulation, in the office of the Free-
man's Journal.' The visit to the National Library ex-
pands into a Shakespearean discussion.

The thesis reads like that of a novel from the Mud and Purple school of Dublin novelists, who prefer to lay emphasis on the second adjective in the familiar phrase 'dear dirty Dublin.' Of all literary movements the semiGaelic Renaissance, or Anglo-Irish outburst, has had the most varied and chequered existence. Whether it began with surreptitious keening for Parnell, or with the love songs and ballads which Douglas Hyde rescued from the

lips of the last rhymers and gleemen, its literature always offered the first promise of a channel of escape from the tremendous political and theological conventions which bind all Irish life, whether Catholic or Protestant. Though the Catholic strand ran through what was most Irish in reminiscence and expression, the movement was never guided by religious influences or decoyed into political uses. There were plays which raised both Protestant and Catholic points of interest like Yeats' 'The Countess Kathleen' or St John Ervine's 'Mixed Marriage.' But as the movement became less antiquarian and Celtic, and more modernised and Europeanised, the names of George Moore and Synge alone attained a first rank and stood in London or Paris for the Irish literary movement. Enough may be said in asserting that each wrote a tolerable masterpiece, and that their minor works made the rest of the Irish writers look small fry. George Moore wrote French novels in English on Ireland. Synge wrote Shakespearean-looking stuff, which proved to be a fancy kind of Anglo-Irish rhodomontade. In Ulysses' he is amusingly alluded to as 'the fellow that Shakespeare wrote like!' There was no other writer except James Stephens near them. Then James Joyce, with Patrick MacGill for his modest Mercury, joined the group. There can be no doubt that Moore and Synge have been two main influences on his writing. But he has certainly outdone them and incidentally outdone himself. George Moore is the easiest of the Irish novelists to read. The suave, writhing, well-chopped sentences follow each other, leaving a sense of perfect English and stylish grammar (though Susan Mitchell has written strongly in the other sense). Every now and again, the gentle current of his prose is rippled or broken by an unpleasant word or by a suggestive phrase. It is his chief artifice. His second artifice was to introduce people, still living, by name into his novels. This secured him the double audience of his victims' enemies and friends. In any case, enough has been written about him. Synge, his co-star, set the Irish school something very different from the Parisian models and the boulevard touch. He took Elizabethan English and County Wicklow grammar with the slang of the Irish cross-roads, and deftly put together a lingo

which made the everlasting richness and originality of the 'Playboy.' Its theme, which distressed the patriotic pious and interested the alien problem-play-goer, was beside the point. It was real literature. It was pseudoShakespearean in parts, but the critic could not be certain that he was not making game of Irish audiences and English readers. But it was great game. To him came no dramatic successors. A hundred plays have been written in Ireland since, but the genre and school of Synge died with him. Not so his influence, which can be detected in Ulysses.' ' One whole chapter describing a Lying-in Hospital in Dublin and the birth of a child is written not in mock-Elizabethan, but in the pseudo-style of English and Norse Saga which William Morris affected. What is the following, then?

'Her he asked if O'Hare Doctor tidings sent from far coast and she with grameful sigh him answered that O'Hare Doctor in heaven was. Sad was the man that word to hear, that him so heavied in bowels ruthful. All she there told him, ruing death for friend so young, algate sore unwilling God's rightwiseness to withsay. She said that he had a fair sweet death through God His goodness with masspriest to be shriven, holy housel and sick men's oil to his limbs. The man then right earnest asked the nun of which death the dead man was died and the nun answered him and said that he was died in Mona island through bellycrab three year agone come Childermas and she prayed to God the Allruthful to have his dear soul in his undeathliness. He heard her sad words, in held hat sad staring. So stood they there both awhile in wanhope sorrowing one with another.'

Reams of such-like follow, to ring even falser when the Dublin medical students eat sardines and drink whisky thus,

. . . strange fishes withouten heads though misbelieving man nie that this be possible thing without they see it, natheless they are so. And these fishes lie in an oily water brought there from Portugal land because of the fatness that therein is like to the juices of the olive press. And also it was a marvel to see in that castle how by magic they make a compost out of fecund wheat kidneys out of Chaldee.

In this curious jargon the most modern questions in medico-eugenics are discussed. The medieval view Vol. 238.-No. 473.

against restriction of the race finds medieval expression and almost beautiful form in the words,

'Murmur, Sirs, is eke oft among layfolk. Both babe and parent now glorify their Maker, the one in limbo gloom the other in purge fire. But, gramercy, what of those Godpossibled souls that we nightly impossibilise, which is the sin against the Holy Ghost, Very God, Lord and Giver of Life.'

The language becomes interesting as the chart of Astrology is set in the heavens.

... 'on the highway of the clouds they come muttering thunder of rebellion, the ghosts of beasts. . . Elk and Yak, the bulls of Bashan and Babylon, mammoth and mastodon, they come trooping to the sunken sea Lacus Mortis. Ominous revengeful zodaical host! They moan, passing upon the clouds, horned and capricorned, the trumpeted with the tusked, the lion maned, the giant antlered, snouter and crawler, rodent, ruminant and pachyderm, all their moving moaning multitude, murderers of the sun. Onward to the Dead sea they tramp to drink, unslaked and with horrible gulpings, the salt somnolent inexhaustible flood. And the equine portent grows again, magnified in the deserted heavens, nay to heaven's own magnitude till it looms vast over the House of Virgo.

How serene does she now arise a queen among the Pleiades, in the penultimate antelucan hour, shod in sandals of bright gold, coifed with a veil of what do you call it gossamer! It floats, it flows about her starborn flesh and loose it streams emerald, sapphire, mauve, and heliotrope sustained on currents of cold interstellar wind, winding, coiling, simply swirling, writhing in the skies a mysterious writing, till after a myriad metamorphoses of symbol, it blazes, Alpha, a ruby and triangled sign upon the forehead of Taurus.'

But on the next page, money is being lost in backing Sceptre, a once-famous racehorse, and the tale winds up with a visit of Mr Dowie to Merrion Square and a parody of American Revivalism, which seems taken literally from one of Mr Billy Sunday's sermons,

'Come on you wine-fizzling, gin-sizzling, boose-guzzling existences! Come on you dog-gone, bull-necked, beetle-browed, hog-jowled, peanut-brained, weasel-eyed, four-flushers, false alarms and excess baggage! Come on you triple extract of infamy. Alexander J. Christ Dowie that's yanked to glory most half this planet ..' etc.

Parody is so discernible in the book that of itself it should convince the reader that a gigantic joke has been played on the French, English and Irish public, and, except for the last-named, with fair success. The French and

many of the English have taken it seriously. From Dublin as yet we have only heard jocular contempt. Dublin has had a way, however, of rejecting her best writers as well as her politicians; her prophets and her procurers.

The Catholic reader will close the volume at the parodies of the Creed and of the Litany of the Virgin; the Puritan will resent even an adaptation of the Pilgrim's Progress,' though outside the book it does not read too ill, 'then wotted he nought of that other land which is called Believe-on-me, that is the land of promise which behoves to the King Delightful and shall be for ever where there is no death and no birth, neither wiving nor mothering at which all shall come as many as believe on it. Yes Pious had told him of that land and Chaste had pointed him to the way, but the reason was that in the way he fell in with a certain whose name is Bird-in-the-Hand

The writer has little care for the sacra of Catholic or Protestant Christianity. He writes to vilify and ridicule them both, and does not hesitate to introduce the venerable names of Archbishop Alexander and Cardinal Logue into one of his witches' Sabbaths. The practice of introducing the names of real people into circumstances of monstrous and ludicrous fiction seems to us to touch the lowest depth of Rabelaisian realism. When we are given the details of the skin disease of an Irish peer, famous for his benefactions, we feel a genuine dislike of the writer. There are some things which cannot and, we should like to be able to say, shall not be done.

From any Christian point of view this book must be proclaimed anathema, simply because it tries to pour ridicule on the most sacred themes and characters in what has been the religion of Europe for nearly two thousand years. And this is the book which ignorant French critics hail as the proof of Ireland's re-entry into European literature! It contains the literary germs of that fell movement which politically has destroyed the greater part of Slavic Europe. If it is a summons or inspiration to the Celtic end of Europe to do likewise, it