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18, Lake Hill, Lone,
Kawaha,
Belfast.
27th Feb. '39.
My dear Father Sman,
It was very thoughtful and kind of you to send me the note about my novel — thank you very much. I hope the little book will sufficiently to balance its budget: the publishers have been very generous (the New York connection especially) but it is will attack me for not digging deeper into the intolerable shambles which was the daily life of bathelics here in 1930 - 1932. With good intention I have only skimmed it — made a few slipples in a whistleroal of bloody dissensions. A friend of mine has already told me that there is not enough bitterness — not enough blood — in the book, and that I should have told the whole truth. But for me the ultimate unity of Ireland and the consequent civilization of a horbaric section one of more importance than the creations of an embittered writer. There are times, however, when I feel that bitterness has a privilege; even the most quietent
2.
amongst we have limits to their endurance: and a time may come when Belfast must be shown with all its injustices to the world — there is as much basical here as wanded from the hands of a dozen heads. I have clearly commenced a second novel, but I wish to exchange the political corners.
You asked me, Father, about suggestions for your next annual. What about this? make a special feature of contributions from Allstes, Wunster, Lewis, Conracht. each provise represented
by short - stones; rene, historical article, lankets relating to customs, and lastly pages of photographs. If course this is only a suggestion, but I can imagine the photographic section alone wanded be very interesting: T. Wallay and Kevin Wall Wanes, int'l sene, would help there. There is a young friend of mine in the West who canded, I think, contribute a fine short - stony in Western Frish: his name is flushly McGuinners, Gustmore, Rommer.
I shall return the photos in a few days.
Thank you once again for your hindans,
Yours very sincerely
Wallay Wall
N.B. Lodd wishes to all the Staff.

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MISS Elizabeth Bowen is very popular as a writer just now. In her recent book, "Bowen's Court," she tells the story of her family in North Cork since the days of the seventeenth century when Colonel Henry Bowen came over with Cromwell. It is quite a readable book but chiefly interesting as affording even further proof of the fickleness and corruption of Anglo-Ireland. "It was a nerveless, ruthless, sink-or-swim society, no doubt a bit silly," she says. But the book is of further value in that it affords an opportunity to contrast this almost stage-Ireland with the hidden, the submerged, the real nation. "Meanwhile the Gaelic culture ran underground, with its ceaseless poetry of lament. (Gaelic was spoken in the kitchens and fields and in untouched country the settlers did not know)" says Miss Bowen. Ay, kitchens and fields, indeed! For the ascendancy never lacked sufficient menials to till their stolen lands and to hew and cut away the lovely woods of Ireland. They must have held converse with their impoverished servants by means of signs or perhaps through a debased dialect. And at night-time, the weary labourers went home to their cabins, to these dreary mud structures, oozing moisture in winter-time, an aperture in the roof to emit the smoke and a spluttering rush light as their only illumination. Their mal was off salt and potatoes.
This then in a few words was the material condition of the vast majority of the Irish people at this time. But one may perhaps wonder if there were any ray of hope, any light however, dim, to be thrown on that seat of desolation. Was this leaderless, downtrodden mob to dwell henceforth, like Satan and his companions after their fall.
In adamantine chains and penal fire?
And it is here where Daniel Corkery's masterly "Hidden Ireland" illumines the scene. For he clearly demonstrates that if blind, silly Anglo-Ireland had but eyes to see it might slowly realize that this language of the kitchen and the field was to the real Irish a lantern in the night, a beacon in
the storm. There the seeker after truth might see something of that inner and deeper life which is the core and nerve-centre of a nation. And ascendancy Tralee was just as blind to this hidden culture as was Corcaigh or Luimneach or Baile Atha Cliath. These Anglo-Irish in Ballyscedy or Ballymacelligott, in Ardfert or Fenit, in Tralee or Blennerville, little dreamed of the beauty of those lyrics on the lips of their spailpini. For though the floods at winter-time might sweep away their frail dwellings, yet had not the dispossessed multitude the sweet litting lines of Sean Clerach, with their ever-ringing hope:
Ag taisteal dom tri na criocha ar cuaird 1
O Chaisil na Ri go Laoi na scuab.
"S i mBarrachaibh aoibhne taoibh le cuam
Is fearadh do fuaras sgeala.
Everywhere they waited for aid to come over the sea, aid for the downtrodden against might and tyranny, against robbery and confiscation. And the poet continues:
Go rabhadar milte taoiseach sluagh
D' arad-fhuil Ghaoidhil na loing-seach luath
"S a leabhair bharc lionta dhiobh ar luadhaill
"S a mbratacha ar luasgadh i n-einfheacht.
Alas how little do they know of Ireland who only Anglo-Ireland know!
And now this same Daniel Corkery, who has done more to unearth this hidden treasure than any living Irishman, is to come to lecture us in Tralee. The lecture is entitled "The Heart's Desire" and will be given at 8.30 p.m. on Monday next. Sept. 28th in the C.Y.M.S. Hall. It will be in English and there is no charge for admission.
Agus ni gadh moran eile a radh libhse a chairde Gaedheal. Tuigeann Dibh go maith go dteastuigheann i bhfad nios mo connradh-thoiri uainn i gConnradh na Gaedh-ilge annso i dTraigh-li Teastuigheann uainn an Ghaodhluinn a chur da labhairt aris o Bhothar Buidhe go Bothar na Tragha agus o Shraid na Chairge go Baile Ard. Mar sin, a chairde ionmhaine. taimid ag brath oraibhse le gach cabhair is congnamh a trabhairt duinn.

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PEADAR O'DONNELL.

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LAST DAYS OF JAMES JOYCE
"A Nightmare To Which I Hope Never To Awaken"
The following article appears in the American weekly, Time, of February 10th, 1941:—
LAST week a little group of people got together in Manhattan in an atmosphere of unaccustomed awe. They were friends of James Joyce—Editor Eugene Jolas (transition) and his wife; Poet Padraic Colum and his wife; Robert Nathan Kastor, brother of Joyce's daughter-in-law; others. Fortnight before, a terse cable had announced that the author of "Ulysses" and "Finnegan's Wake" was dead in Zurich. Joyce's friends were forming a committee to aid his widow, daughter and son.
To many a baffled reader of "Finnegan's Wake" the death of Joyce meant merely that the "cult of unintelligibility" had lost its chief prophet. To his admirers, it meant the loss of the greatest figure in European letters since Marcel Proust. To his friends Joyce's death seemed like some simple lapse in nature, grandly tragic and fitting. Joyce's writings had been the most massive, inclusive, eloquent statement of Europe's intellectual and moral chaos, a chaos now audible and visible in the falling walls of Europe's cities. And Joyce had died in the midst of this downfall—perhaps because of it. There was something about his death that suggested the great Bishop of Hippo, St. Augustine, dying at the close of the Roman world to the echo of Vandal swords against the city gates.
Monstrous Ironies
Bit by bit, Joyce's friends in Manhattan pieced together a picture of his last months. The young man who monstrous ironies. Joyce, the war picture of freedom from Ireland to live by "silence, exile and cunning," died a destitute refugee from Paris. The mind that hope never history "was mare to which I hope never to awaken" was caught in the fall of France. The man who resented even minor Government interference with his affairs, was government in the war time red tape of three caught in the mind that created the Miltonic rhetoric, the subtle architecture, the poly-portmanteau language of "Ulysses" and "Finnegan's Wake," found its last peace in talking to an eight-year-old child.
The Joyces (wife Nora, son Giorgio) lived in Paris. His daughter Lucia was in a sanatorium near St. Nazaire. A devoted father, Joyce worried much about Lucia, spent a good part of the income left him by Admirer Harriet Weaver on Lucia's doctor and sanatorium bills. When war broke out he hurried to St. Nazaire to see her.
Giorgio's son Stephen was at Mrs. Jolas' school at St. Gérand-le-Puy, some eleven miles north of Vichy. The Joyces were invited there for Christmas, 1939, had a big poorty. Even then Joyce was suffering a good deal of pain. For ten or twelve years he had had a mysterious intestinal ailment, which did not trouble him as long as life went, smoothly, caused him agony when life did not. During the last year, friends claim. Joyce "ate practically nothing."
The Author's Birthday
After Christmas the Joyces rushed back to Paris. Mrs. Joyce hated the Paris alertes, but Joyce could not return to St. Gérand-le-Puy for Joyce's birthday (February 2nd); remained until the end of March. Joyce took long walks, read the march. Joyce took Eckermann; occasionally went to a movie. He also read all the newspapers, though he would discuss politics only with close friends. Shortly before the time the Nazis moved to Norway the Joyces moved to Vichy.
On June 11th Mrs. Jolas 'phones Joyce that she had found a two-room flat in St. Gérand-le-Puy, urged him to rove there for safety. Joyce refused. He added: "Have you heard anything about that book" that I asked you to get me from the Gotham Book Mart?" Mrs. Jolas said she hadn't. "Well," said Joyce, "it wouldn't hurt to drop a postal card into the box." The Nazis crossed the Marne.
Two days later, Mrs. Jolas 'phoned Joyce again to say that the Gare de Lyon in Paris was closed. Joyce said that couldn't possibly be true, because his friend, Irish Poet Samuel Beckett, had just come from Paris. He added: "Have you heard anything about that book that I asked you to get me from the Gotham Book Mart?" Next day Paris fell. Day after that Mrs. Jolas ran into Giorgio Joyce on the street in St. Gérand-le-Puy, with
all the Joyce luggage, looking for a place to stay. So, by then, were hundreds of others. At 8, the following morning the Joyces, forced out of Vichy when the army took over, arrived at St. Gérand-le-Puy. Joyce was indignant; he was not in the habit of the general situation. "Did Mrs. Joyce of the general situation?" Two hours ever hear of such nonsense?" Two hours later friends found Joyce happily listening to the radio. The Nazis occupied the village disturbed when the Nazis occupied the village for six days. Joyce was a British subject, but they did not arrest him. Friends urged him to go to the Irish Minister in Vichy and change his citizenship. Joyce refused: "It would not be honourable."
Proof-reading
A fellow refugee was Paul Léon, who had worked with Joyce for ten years. Every afternoon at 4 sharp Joyce and Léon reread "Finnegan's Wake." Joyce would sit with his long thin legs wrapped inextricably around each other while he held the book close to his eyes, studied it through a thick lens. Léon read aloud. They would then make corrections. When Mrs. Jolas reached the U.S. last fall, she took 30 pages of typographical corrections for a possible second edition of "Finnegan's
JOYCE AND HIS GRANDSON.
Wake." As she was saying good-bye for the last time, Joyce paused, said: "Have you heard anything about that book I asked you to get me from the Gotham Book Mart?"
Joyce made frantic efforts to get an exit visa so that he could take his family to Switzerland, scene of his World War I exile, birthplace of "Ulysses." Thanks to influential friends (precursally in the U.S. Embassy), the Swiss Government was fussier. At one point it refused to admit Joyce on the claim that he was a Jew. Then it demanded a $7,000 bond. The Mayor of Zurich got the sum reduced to $3,500, which some Swiss friends got together. But on the day the Swiss entrance visa arrived the French exit visa expired.
When Vichy finally granted a second visa, there was no gasoline for the drive from St. Gérand-le-Puy to Vichy. Defying police regulations, Giorgio Joyce conculated to Vichy, line. Finally a bank clerk gave his last gallon of gas, which was enough to take the Joyces to the train.
Bitter Day Dreams
In Zurich the Joyces put up at a small pension. They had almost no money. None of Joyce's cables to London for money was answered (even air mail from London to Zurich now takes a month). Moreover, the Germans had cancelled the permission (obtained through the Irish Minister at Vichy) to remove Lucia from occupied France. Friends say that the thought of his daughter's spending Christmas in a bombed area intensified Joyce's intestinal pains.
He brooded over what he considered the poor reception of "Finnegans Wake." More and more his bitter day dreams took on the prolonged, chaotic misery of the hundred dreams in his last great book. (A there one who understands me? One in a thousand of years of the nights?) And as the voices of the awakening children humanise the nightmare in "Finnegans Wake," the voice of his eight-year-old grandson, Stephen, became Joyce's chief solace. All day he would sit telling the boy (the child we all love to place our hope in for theyr stories from Greak and Roman mythology, the Norse sages, Shakespeare. But when only a small sum of money arrived from the United States—soarcely enough to pay a part of Joyce's collapsed from worry.
An X-ray showed a malignant ulcer on his duodenum. Joyce at first refused an operation because he would be too expensive. After the operat

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James Joyce
For twenty years the fercest literary controversy of modern times has been raging round the figure of James Joyce; and now he has died, an exile in Zürich. Opinions always will differ regarding the quality of his work; but, whatever may be said of him, it must be admitted that Joyce probably was the most important English prose-writer of the present century. His place in the history of English prose will be greater than that of Yeats in the history of English poetry; for Joyce had an influence on world literature that Yeats never had, and his influence was the result of a single book. James Joyce was an Irishman of the Irish. He also might be described as the complete Dubliner. Although he had not set foot on Irish soil for more than twenty years, he hardly ever wrote a line that was not steeped in the atmosphere of his native city; and even in that queer, incoherent, unintelligible rigmarole of formless fantasy, "Finnegans Wake," one almost can smell the tang of the Liffey on every page. If Joyce never had written "Ulysses," he must have ranked among the Irish masters of English prose. Even at a time when the Irish literary movement was at the height of its flowering—when Yeats and Synge, O'Sullivan and Colum, Stephens, Moore and the rest were producing much of their most notable work, "Dubliners" and "The Portrait of an Artist" attracted immediate and respectful attention. Here, indeed, was an artist in words—a writer who, with the delicate touch of a musician, could create an atmosphere, or evoke a mood in a few sentences, even in a few words. "Chamber Music" revealed Joyce as a poet as well as a writer of beautiful prose, and in years to come these early works will bear witness to the genius of their author. Inevitably, and very properly, Joyce's contribution to the world's literature will be judged by "Ulysses," one of the most remarkable books ever written. It has been hailed as a work of consummate genius, fit to be included in the first rank of the masterpieces of human thought. It has been condemned as
unworthy of an Irish writer, the product of a diseased mind, and fit to be read—if, indeed, it could be read at all—only by persons as depraved as the author himself. The fact is that "Ulysses" has had a bigger influence on contemporary literature than any other single work of modern times. It has been translated into most of the cultivated languages—including Czech. Virtually every prose-writer of the last twenty years, certainly every novelist, has been influenced to a greater or less extent by this astonishing book, which, whatever may be its faults or its crudities, is a magnificent monument to the Dublin of thirty-five years ago—a monument, aere perennius, which will survive while the English language is spoken. It is easy to exaggerate the position of Joyce in world literature; to place him, as so many of his less intelligent admirers seek to place him, on the pinnacle that is occupied by the immortal few. It is far easier to howl with the wolves, as the Germans say; to spurn Joyce as a decadent, as a pervert, even as a kind of literary anti-Christ. Ireland in modern times has produced some outstanding men of letters. Yeats, Shaw and Moore, to mention only three, have towered above their contemporaries; but we venture to predict that, when the cold, searching light of literary history is brought to bear upon them, none of them will survive the ultimate test more brilliantly than James Joyce. We print to-day tributes to Joyce's memory by Irishmen who knew him well even in his later days. They all agree that he had a passionate love for this country, and, above all, for his own city of Dublin. Like so many other Irishmen—like Yeats—this wayward, yet gentle, genius has died in a foreign land at a moment when the very foundations of culture seem to be rocking. His death will be mourned by men of letters throughout the civilised world; of Ireland's attitude towards one of its most highly-gifted sons it may be said, as it has been said so often in the past, "a prophet is not without honour save in his own countr

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The Perfect Essayist: Robert Lynd
WITH the death of E. V. Lucas, Britain lost one of its most engaging and much-loved essayists, for, at his best, Lucas was the compleat essayiste. His wide-ranging interests, his wit, his urbanity and his learning were the materials which his pleasing, light and allusive style converted into the most seductive of writing. The essay, discursive, rambling, conversational and button-holing as it is, looks easy to write. Indeed, it looks as easy to write as it is easy to write one. But have you ever tried to write one? It is in no wise so easy as it looks.
Many great writers have been unable to write an essay. Carlyle, for example, was one such. It were less difficult for an elephant to dance a minuet than for that craggy old heroworshipper to write an essay. I suspect that it was sheer envy of Lamb's unsurpassed ability in this sort that made the old dyspeptic Carlyle seek to underrate him as he did.
Gibbon couldn't write an essay, either. Nor could Macaulay. Their literary talents were great, of course, but they could not sufficiently unbend—if that is the word—to write an essay proper. Nor could Emerson, though people will call many of his writings essays. They are not essays. They are sermons—and pretty poor ones at that, some of them. Ralph Waldo had a gift of phrase, of epithet. But he must preach. Thoreau should have taken him into Walden Wood and lost him.
DOES NOT UNBEND
I said "unbend"—if it were the word.
It isn't.
For the essayist born does not unbend. He never bends, in the first place. He takes you on even terms. Patronage or affectation is the last quality he exhibits. He is companionable, easy, familiar, likable, chatty, a friend and a complete and understanding one. He stands in complete accord with your mood, but he never stands upon ceremony.
Perhaps the most urbane and likable living essayist—for he is surely that if he is nothing else—is Robert Lynd, that brilliant Ulsterman and good Irishman. . . . Lynd is not only a genuine and lovable essayist. He is one of the best of living literary critics. His consistent urbanity of mood and his ease and tranquillity of manner mask a remarkable felicity and effectiveness of phrase, of understanding, learning and grip.
That is as remote from him as is Arcturus. He gossips at the feast amusingly, amicably, charmingly; but
ROBERT LYND
he never bores and he never acts as the mentor, judge or hector. What he does, really, is to talk on paper—wisely, wittily, urbanely, but never professorially, dictatorially or dominatingly.
Perhaps I had better qualify that last remark. For there is one essayist at least, a genuine, blown-in-the-glass essayist he is, too, who cannot be said not to write "dictatorially" or "dominatingly." For Belloc would not be Hilaire if he did not do this. He must, even into his essays, import that trenchancy and forthrightness that brings so sharp and brumal an air into his larger and more con-
siderable writings. But a sworded, Gallic-tinctured spirit like Belloc—so rich in satire, so splendid in restrained, but devastating, irony—must be way, Belloc succeeded Lucas as the essayist in the London "Sunday Times." I haven't seen a copy of it for some time. But I suppose it is still going.)
A BRILLIANT ULSTERMAN
Perhaps the most urbane and likable living essayist—for he is surely that if he is nothing else—is Robert Lynd, that brilliant Ulsterman and good Irishman, who contrasts so admirably with that other brilliant Ulsterman, the bilious, sneering, choleric and jaundiced Ervine, who is so humorless as to attempt to deride Sean O'Faolain to spelling his name that way, while he himself pronounced his undeserved name, St. John, as Sinjun.
Lynd is not only a genuine and lovable essayist. He is one of the best of living literary critics. His consistent urbanity of mood and his ease and tranquillity of manner mask a remarkable felicity and effectiveness of phrase, of understanding, learning and grip. For example, he writes of the diary of Pepys—"the diary of one of the godliest and most lecherous of men."
Lynd's essay on "Mr. Pepys"—it may be found in his "The Art of Letters"—is a splendid affair. So sharply drawn, so accurately depicted is that so remarkable hypocrite who is its subject that I question whether there is a better wordportrait of Pepys in all English
biographia—for Pepys' superb (if unconscious) portrait of himself is, of course, part of autobiographia.
WONDERFUL PORTRAITURE
"In temperament," says Mr. Lynd, "he (Pepys) . . . seems to me to have been more Scottish than the very Scottish Boswell. He lived double life with the same simplicity of heart. He was Scottish in the way in which he lived, with one eye on 'the lassies' and the other on 'the meenister.' He was notoriously hard-working spectable, notoriously hard-working a judge of sermons, fond of the bottle, cautious, thrifty. He had the virtues of a K.C.B."
I don't care what anyone says that is splendid portraiture.
And look at his summing up of much greater man than Pepys, John Donne, the divine and the amorous, the believer and the scoffer in one—John Donne, the poetical and spiritual father of so many of the young, and not so young, poets and poeticules of our day. "Among all his fantasies none remains in the imagination more despotically than this last fanciful game of dying. Donne, however, remained in all respects a fantastic to the last, as we may see in that hymn which he wrote eight days before the end, tricked out with queer geography, and so anciently egotistic amid its worship, as in the verse:
Whilst my physicians by their love are grown Cosmographers, and I their map, who lie Flat on this bed, that by them may be shown That this is my south-west discovery Per fretum febris, by these straits to die.
Donne was the poet-geographer of himself, his mistresses and his god. Other poets of his time dived deeper and soared to greater altitudes, but none travelled so far, so curiously, and in such out-of-the-way places, now hurrying like a nervous fugitive, and now in the exultation of the first man in a new-found land."
That whets your appetite for good Robert Lynd, doesn't it?
Seek him out, wise reader!
—P. I. O.L.

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IRISH AUTHORS : 5
TEMPLE LANE
Temple Lane is the pen-name of Dr. Mary Isabel Leslie, a clergyman's daughter born on the Waterford-Tipperary border.
She had a brilliant course at Dublin University, where she carried off every prize open to a woman including the Vice-Chancellor's Prizes in English Prose and English Verse and graduated in Modern Literature at the head of her year. A recent addition to her academic laurels is the degree of Ph.D., granted to her for a thesis on Felicia Hemans, of whom she hopes to publish a popular Life in the near future.
While still at College, Temple Lane was writing stories, but before taking up literature as a career she travelled abroad, lived in various parts of the Continent, and was for some time a lecturer in the University of Besançon.
She had already to her credit several successful novels published in London, when in 1932 she won the Tailteann Gold Medal for fiction with The Little Wood. It is an open secret that the scenery of this book is that of her birthplace. The story is remarkable both for its beautiful prose and for its portrayal of a sensitive girl's affection for an old and memoried house set in a loved countryside, her groping after happiness and self-expression, and her passage through intense suffering to serenity of spirit.
The Talbot Press of Dublin in 1939 published Fisherman's Wake, a collection of poems that enhanced Temple Lane's literary reputation and brought her many new readers. One of the poems, "The Fairy Tree," was already widely known, for it had been set to music by Dr. Vincent O'Brien and sung on many occasions by Count McCormack. For this book she received the year's award of the Women Writers' Club, of which she is now President.
In 1941 her Irish publisher followed up her book of poems with a novel, House of My Pilgrimage, the moving story of Saive Comerford and Robert Devereux, full of romantic stir and incident, and a most skilful and penetrating revelation of a woman's heart. Two years later came another fine novel, Friday's Well, involving three women and an attractive adventurer. Autumn 1945 sees the publication of Come Back, the love story of Aurelia Weir, a dramatic tale that shows once more the writer's confident power to handle complexities of character and situation and her unfailing sense of style.
Temple Lane is an interested and interesting member of the P.E.N. Club, a practised public speaker, and a keen student of the Irish language. She loves dogs, especially Aberdeens—her present companion bears the generic name of Jock. She loves country life ; it is her ambition to buy a place on the Waterford-Tipperary border and there farm and write.
In writing, poetry is her first love ; she is much more interested in poetry than in prose. But whatever she happens to be doing at the moment is for her the most important thing in the world. That, no doubt, is one of the secrets of her success.
The following Temple Lane titles are still available : Friday's Well, 6/- Fisherman's Wake (poems), 2/6.

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FIRST CHRISTMAS
FIVE KINGS there were in Eirinn,
And blood was on their swords,
When far away on Christmas Day
Was born the Lord of lords.
They did not raise their eyes from strife
To see the mystic Star
That from the East drew Melchoir,
Gaspar and Balthasár,
Bearing their royal gifts of gold
And frankincense and myrrh ;
And yet I think that through our land
There passed a secret stir—
As when the days grow longer
There runs a silent thrill
To waken in the frozen earth
The golden daffodil :
The beasts and the birds of Eirinn
And the children (surely they)
Knew by a sudden gladness
That this was Christmas Day :
The black, fine kine of Kerry
In the folded rath were blest,
Because a far-off cattle byre
Had given Our Lady rest :
Then first in Kevin's empty glen
The blackbird fluted clear
The song that someday wondering monks
Would pause in prayer to hear ;
And like the altar lantern
The Western sun bung red
Where snow upon a mountain rock
As altar cloth was spread ;
Children in many a woodland
Saw crystal water swell
That waited but a blessing
To be a holy well :
And a shepherd boy on Slemish
Thought that the air grew kind ;
For a sound like murmuring prayer was
there,
And incense on the wind.
Hoth de Blacam

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FROM MRS CECIL CHESTERTON.
TEL. NO.
MUSEUM 7788.
16A, TORRINGTON PLACE,
W. C. 1.
For twenty five years Hugh Martin, political writer and special correspondent, has been a notable Fleet Street figure. Always a champion of every progressive and humane cause, his sensitive sympathy and unfailing generosity have inspired innumerable people. And now, after a brilliant and strenuous career, he has fallen so gravely ill that he is quite unable to work. His savings have been absorbed by medical fees and the cost of living, and he is rapidly coming to the end of his resources.
To help him in this most undeserved crisis we, with others of his friends, are trying to raise a sum of money sufficient to carry him over this cruel period and give the peace of mind essential to recovery. Hugh Martin's name is so widely known and respected that we feel his many friends and admirers will rally to his assistance.
May we appeal to you for help? The difficulties of the situation are serious and for a man of his fastidious sense of honour almost unbearable.
Will you please send all you can at the earliest possible opportunity? Cheques should be made payable to Mrs. Cecil Chesterton and crossed No. 2 A/c.
Yours sincerely,

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Honouring A Gallant Ulsterwoman
MORE than fifty years ago, in one of the darkest periods of our history, a girl in her early twenties was one of a small band of workers who were striving to allay the bitter passions of the time and to set up ideals which would inspire and unify every section of our people. She was an Ulster Protestant, one of those who, inheriting the '98 tradition, were in the direct line of thought from Ulster patriots such as Orr, Russell and McCracken. Her name was Alice Milligan.
FROM the Parnell split up to the present day, Alice Milligan has been a worker in Ireland's cause, a cause to which she brought great and varied gifts. Poet, playwright, historian, journalist—she was all of these. She founded, with her comrade, Ethna Carbery, papers like the Northern Patriot and the Shan Van Vocht and she helped to make them, in the very citadel of Orangeism, organs of opinion that stood for flowed from her pen, some of them laments for a glorious past, others songs of hope for a brighter future. Like those of Davis, they were often written in haste for printing-presses that would not wait, but—again like those of Davis—they often achieved a lyrical beauty that has stood the test of time. She wrote, to mark the centenary year of '98, the first Life of Wolfe Tone that had appeared since Tone's own Autobiography. Before the Abbey Theatre was founded she had a play produced by the Irish Players—The Last Feast of the Fianna.
I have a copy of this play in
By M. J. MacM.
which there is a note in Miss Milligan's hand saying that it was acted at the Gaiety Theatre, Dublin, in February, 1900, and another note written by Douglas Hyde saying "it would be very tempting to me to try and enter into a literary partnership with you, so that we might produce something creditable to the Gael."
HER poems are—or ought to be—known to every Irish schoolboy and schoolgirl. "A.E." edited one collection of them and some are to be found in every Irish anthology. Padraic Column, when compiling his anthology in America, chose her poignant "Dark Palace," which begins:
There beams no light from thy hall to-night,
O House of Fame;
No mead-vat seethes and no smoke up-wreathes
O'er the hearth's red flame.
My own favourite is "Cavan of Little Lakes," with its haunting last verse:
To Ara of Connacht's Isles,
As I went sailing o'er the sea,
The wind's word, the brook's word,
The wave's word, was plain to me—
'As we are, though she is not,
As we are, shall Bamba be;
There is no king can rule the wind,
There is no fetter for the sea.'
Recently some of her friends and admirers considered compiling a definitive edition of Alice Milligan's poems and publishing it by subscription. They were baulked by the
fact that Miss Milligan, who has been writing for fifty years, "has kept no copies of her work, nor even records of the time and place of publication, so indifferent was she to self-interest." They have, however, done something better: they have formed a committee, representative of all classes and creeds, to organise a National Testimonial to this noble and patriotic Ulster-
Miss Alice Milligan.
woman. "We believe," they say, "that Alice Milligan will be remembered long after our generation shall have passed away. . . . While she is still alive we think something should be done to show our appreciation of her work. We feel there is a more definite obligation on us of making to her some return, however slight, for a lifetime's work that brought no income, no royalties, but left her much poorer in worldly goods."
TO share in such a testimonial is an honour. To those of this generation who are not familiar with Alice Milligan's life-story it should be made known that her contribution to the making of the new Ireland was not merely that of a poet writing in seclusion and looking on at the battle from afar. Wherever there was work of national importance to be done that a woman could do, she was eager and ready to help. To every project, political, social or cultural, that had for its object the achievement of national progress or the betterment of the plain people of the land, she has devoted herself tirelessly and selflessly. In times of bitterness and dissension her spirit of broad tolerance and her winning personality have been national assets. To-day she lives in her native Ulster, unchanged through all the changing years, her dearest ideal the same that animated her half a century ago—that of a free and united Ireland.
Alice Milligan, most probably, will take a poor view of what I have written about her. She may even be amused and say "Why all this fuss? Is somebody trying to write my epitaph before I am dead?" For her sense of humour is always with her. But whatever she may say, she will have to endure the ordeal of this testimonial. Those who have known her work and held her in affection are determined to pay a tribute that, happily, is not posthumous to one who has helped to shed the light of sanity and tolerance over the darkness of the years.

--- Page 12 ---
THE
IRISH ACADEMY OF LETTERS
Academicians :
G. B. Shaw,
President
Elizabeth Rowen,
Vice President
Sean O'Faolain,
Hon. Secretary
Ernest Boyd
Padraic Colum
Lord Dunsany
John Eglinton
St. John Ervine
Stephen Gwynn
Oliver Gogarty
F. R. Higgins
J. M. Hone
Shane Leslie
Robert Lynd
Lord Longford
Brinsley Macnamara
Alice Milligan
Rutherford Mayne
Desmond McCarthy
T. C. Murray
Frank O'Connor
Peadar O'Donnell
Liam O'Flaherty
Ernest O'Malley
Eugene O'Neill
Joseph O'Neill
Seumus O'Sullivan
Forrest Reid
Lennox Robinson
E. O.E. Somerville
Walter Starkie
James Stephens
L. A. G. Strong
Francis Stuart
Helen Waddell
Obierunt :
A.E.
Shan Bullock
T. E. Lawrence
W. B. Yeats
Registered Address:
ABBEY THEATRE
DUBLIN
Telephone 43412
17th January, 1940.
Dear Mrs. Ryan,
I am sure that the enclosed letter will receive your careful and sympathetic attention. I hope that you will accept the invitation set out in it.
Yours very sincerely,
..... Rand Faylan .....
Honorary Secretary.
Sathan Esquire
Chairman.
Please return when finished -
h. R.
IRISH ACADEMY OF LETTERS.
Abbey Theatre,
DUBLIN.
January, 1940.
Dear Sir/Madam,
The Council of the Irish Academy of Letters proposes to establish a Society to be known as THE FRIENDS OF THE IRISH ACADEMY OF LETTERS, and invites you to become a founder-member of the first Council of this Society. This invitation goes, also, to twenty other Irish men and women who, we believe, have a real interest in Irish letters.
It is the belief of the Academy that there cannot be in this, or any country, a live and distinctive literature unless there is within the country an authoritative body such as an Academy, or a body of authoritative literary criticism, to declare constantly for high standards. There is in Ireland no body of this nature other than the Irish Academy of Letters; no group to keep the young writer constantly aware of the stimulus of intelligent public criticism and appreciation. Without such things, the young writer must fall a victim to every powerful influence of passing fashion and alien vulgarity: aware of them he is encouraged to work by the highest ideals of his craft.
Since its inception in 1932, the Irish Academy of Letters has been able, through the generosity of its friends, to bestow £1,040. in literary awards to Irish writers, for work done both in Gaelic and English. It has held social functions and sponsored public lectures. It has not been able to do all that an Academy should do. Being, of its nature, an exclusive body, it suffers from a shortage of manpower; and its sole income is derived from a few hundred pounds collected by W.B. Yeats in the United States. Now, unhappily, owing to world conditions, it has lost the greater part of its financial patronage, and most of its awards must, temporarily, lapse. The Academy will continue to crown works of merit, but its plans to be of practical aid to young writers, to aid indigent authors, to commemorate writers who have died, to sustain and increase interest in Irish literature, must be laid aside unless the public co-operates.
Attached, for your consideration, is the proposed constitution of the SOCIETY OF FRIENDS OF THE IRISH ACADEMY OF LETTERS, of whose first council you are invited to become a member. If you accept this invitation the Council of the Academy invites you to meet it, discuss the details of the proposal, and establish the Society. For this purpose the Council of the Academy will be at the Pit Cafe of the Abbey Theatre, at 4.15 p.m. on January, 24th, 1940. The chair will be taken by Miss Elizabeth Rowen, Vice-President.
Please reply as soon as possible to the Honorary Secretary, at the above address.
Yours sincerely,
On behalf of the Council of the Irish Academy of Letters.
..... Rand Faylan .....
Honorary Secretary
and Treasurer.

--- Page 13 ---
"THE
ANGELUS"
Monthly—
One Penny
Yearly—
1/8 Post Free
Opian O huiginn
PUBLISHER
Stermanstown, Glasnevin, Dublin
Calendars,
Leaflets,
Xmas,
Easter,
Feast Day
and
Patrick's Day
Cards.
mac by uil aon baint in
- sa leis an scéal, ac sin u
ata, aguy air an arbar s
ni teastuigeann uaim miann
beiz ins an Record.
mije to cara
brian O Migun
Mina Moolag 4°
1928
O tair acara
Lugas fe noeara
Se raib an beag liom-sa ins
an Record. Caitfir me ideais
ort san an na aon nis
liom-sa to cur ann aris.
briseais as Edgar toireaiz
an Record me se blana o soin,
aguy, rut nios measa na san,
cur an t-ait. Cainneac coir
eigin mo leat aguy bi se coin
direac aguy coin macanta
san ni abrocais se liom-sa
na le oune ar bit eile car
to bi aiza mo coinnib. Rut
eigin "dushonourable" ab eas e,
dar leis. Nior thy oireatois sans
nom me fain to cosant.
Za, fiol agam se mait

--- Page 14 ---
PRESBYTERY,
TARBERT,
CO. KERRY.
24————— I ————— '35
Dear Father Senan:
I am obliged to you for the cheque for £20, which has only just reached me, and which was most unexpected.
Thank you, too, for the good wishes which I much appreciate. I believe that my lecturing career has come to an end, and I have no regrets!
But we are both anxious that the writing should not pease on account of marriage.
Very sincerely yours,
Alice.

--- Page 15 ---
III, Morenhampton Road,
Oomnac Droc,
Donnybrook,
Daile Ata Cliat.
Dublin.
Celephin
Ballabridge 468
12/10/34
Ron Agi Ademan
To leijas an aiste 180. To taicnig a apmop
hom - an cud tofaig at. Ta edag inra cud
fin agur preisainancas coinciom. Ta a lan
pudai ra dapa cud at, ain, agur yr baojal
hom na paib an juap-aigancaice ibadna 'a reupad
muap a bi re 'a repidbad, agur ta pudai paidze
aiste napb peacap do dune go mbead hom
agonaag na cora do baine uaid. An leim a iug
re iap an aiap peadap, an re ir mo agur yr peapp
agur yr tabaicaigt a cpuicuig hepidbaice mua-
gaddige agur daome ap nor o'duinnin, beaplai
An Seabac, etc, etc., cupfidre i gceann daome nid
Eigin do ia nid: gup pud Eigin ata i urajad
na uraome fin aige no gupb ail leif go deugfi
na paib ap Eigean aome ag repidbad Jaeddige
go drainig an Jum. - gup procaypeaice ron
Jum ata ina aigne o iapne, bad puaig hom
go deugfead aome aon ibann ron da ibann
fan o aiste leom lli bpom at ir baojal go
gceappap ceann Eigin ata an rpat addip re i
dradb "Maipe" cup i geaf "Is is the Country's best
writer (pud naic fior) agur na habpuigeann focal
i dradb pladap lli laojaipe! dbupfap gup paradod
ceape o fin fap hom. So-gluaiste incinne re
nsapa o dap hom-ra, doifip iun repitinoup
ngalley cainnee do repidb' d'aon iappaice ni fead
pad re an luat. Epaic arddunn ibadna a peaicaine
iaisfead re pudai naic pipinne juicain a
iup fiof. Ni doig hom go bpeadfad aon
dune lan 9 na ngalley d'ipipinne ieape a
repidb i pic a jaojail - nil an med fin ann
ap.
Peac if maic hom nap ipallap aiste a
repidbad duic ap an gceipe deo, if maic hom
cud d'doap an Jum. If maic hom leon obpom
if maic hom mo juainndap aigne peim.
An Seabac

--- Page 16 ---
BOOK REVIEWS
DUBLIN MAGAZINE — 'OCT. DEC. 1931.
SYNGE AND IRISH LITERATURE.
SYNGE AND ANGLO-IRISH LITERATURE. By Daniel Corkery, M.A. Cork University Press, 78. 6d.
Mr. Corkery's book falls for consideration into two divisions, into what he has to say about the work of Synge, and into his theorems and conclusions about Irish literature in English, or "Anglo-Irish" literature, as he prefers to call it. Other commentators have written about Anglo-Irish literature, with the difference that they were using Anglo-Irish as an identifying label rather than as a definition. Mr. Corkery however, going beyond Ernest Boyd and Thomas MacDonagh, uses it as a definition. For him Anglo-Irish literature is not Irish at all—curiously enough, save Synge. And Synge is admitted to be Irish merely for use as a stick to beat all the rest, from Maria Edgeworth to Mr. Yeats. To most people the phrase Anglo-Irish literature means Irish literature written in English. To Mr. Corkery it means English literature written in an Irish dialect of English. This would be understandable and consistent if his position were that Irish literature can be written only in the Irish language. But it is not. His position is that it is not language but material that matters. Synge's material, in some unknown way, is better than that of Mr. Yeats, and therefore Synge is "a portent" while Mr. Yeats is a minor English poet. Maybe it serves Mr. Yeats right for forcing Synge on the literary world as a genius.
I will come later on to Mr. Corkery's general theory about Irish literature, but it will be convenient first to get Synge out of the way. Mr. Corkery attempts, twenty-five years after the hirty-burly, a re-valuation of Synge, and many of his conclusions will not be quarrelled with by anybody, even though few people will arrive at them in precisely the same way. The amazing thing, considering his bias and his impatience, is that he puts Synge so high, higher for instance than I would. He finds Riders to the Sea "almost perfect," The Well of the Saints "the most Irish of all he wrote," Deirdre of the Sorrows "a ripened artistry," defends In the Shadow of the Glen, mildly rebukes The Tinker's Wedding, says pleasant generalities about Poems and Translations, and has a high opinion of the Aran and Wicklow essays—"Sometimes I have the idea that the book on the Aran Islands will outlive all else that came from Synge's pen." Even for The Playboy he has only very mild reproof.
Mr. Corkery is under the very great disadvantage, in dealing with Synge, of starting out with a theory. His theory is that Synge is the only "Ascendancy" writer who became a Nationalist (culturally, not politically), that he lived with the people, put himself en rapport with their consciousness, and that his writings are the result of that. Having adopted that theory to start with he must necessarily make the best of his exemplar and belabour all the other "Ascendancy" writers, which he does. He tells us that the Irish language was the key to it all. But in Synge's case it does not seem to have been the key. He learned Irish at Trinity. Mr. Corkery, in chronicling that, permits himself a cheap sneer at Trinity. But he utterly fails to realise the significance of it to his own argument. Synge learned Irish, and so little did that fact open up his consciousness to Ireland, so little did it move him, that he promptly left Ireland and became what, in other people, arouses Mr. Corkery's contempt "an expatriate." He went to the Continent to study music, just as Goldsmith went there to play music. And he stayed there, wasting his time on music, and reading French poetry
until Mr. Yeats said to him "Give up Paris, you will never create anything by reading Racine, and Arthur Symons will always be a better critic of French literature. Go to the Aran Islands. Live there as if you were one of the people themselves, express a life that has never found expression." Mr. Corkery quotes this, but is so engrossed with his theory that he misses the significance of it. Synge went, and he found in Aran what he had been looking for, material suitable to his peculiar gift and temperament.
Synge was a dark, silent, shy, sensitive, solitary, and brooding spirit. He was aloof and abnormal, with an affinity for the vagrant and the primitive. He found in Aran and in Wicklow the material which freed his impulse to write, and the fact which makes his writing so much better than others is the fact that he had a better intellect. To read Mr. Corkery, one would imagine that material and —isms were the things that made a writer.
In Riders to the Sea Synge was handling a theme which is at once simple and universal and the natural mould of which restrained and disciplined his exuberance and his riotousness, and it is the only work of his where these qualities of his are disciplined. It is easily first in his writings. The Well of the Saints, I agree with Mr. Corkery, is his next best writing. There is more of the abnormal Synge in it and it is by that more a lesser piece of writing. Parts of it are undisciplined, exuberant and riotous. Of The Tinker's Wedding there is nothing whatever to be said, nor of the Poems and Translations. In The Shadow of the Glen is a tragedy turned into a comedy difficult to accept. Daniel Burke is real, but neither Nora nor Michael Dara nor the tramp is—with their mists and their mountain ewes and Patch Darcy. A play might have been made of it if the tragedy of the original story had been kept. Deirdre of the Sorrows seems to me to be, on the whole, a failure. It is not that there is not vigour in it, and force, but that Synge's language and treatment do not suit the theme. Deirdre is a heroic tragedy and should be told either in poetry or in heroical prose. Mr. Synge has made of the characters modern men and women.
Now look at The Playboy. His fame as a world dramatist Synge owes altogether to it, or rather to the accident that it caused a riot and a controversy. Riders to the Sea and The Well of the Saints made no noise amongst the critics, but the row's the thing, and those who made the disturbance at the first performances made Synge famous. The Playboy holds the boards as an extravagant comedy, and Mr. Corkery's chiding of one or two expressions in it is very mild. No critic now would defend it as a serious play. But it must be remembered that Synge wrote it in order to shock the sensibilities of the Irish people, or at the best deliberately put in things for this purpose, and that at its first performances Christy Mahon was played by W. G. Fay as a moral degenerate, by the express directions of the author. Later productions, with Fred O'Donovan as Christy, turned it into the rollicking extravagant comedy we know. The truth about the Playboy is that Synge wrote it while he was smarting at the coldness with which The Well of the Saints was received, and that when he was rehearsing the play his comment was "Now I've got something to shock them" [I have this on the authority of the late Frank Fay. And indeed it is much to be desired that W. G. Fay should put down somewhere his recollections of this and other things]. Not that there is not good stuff in the play. There is. Christy and Fegeen, seriously treated, would have made a good play, but the Widow Quins and the Shawneen Keoghs are perilously like caricatures.

--- Page 17 ---
122
Worceston Road.
16 November '41
My dear Father Season,
If I am short and guspin
in my reply to your letter of
Saturday believe it is not thought
want of feeling - but because
of it. I am too unnerved to
say what I think ad it
will take some time before I
am able to start upright
again. You will hear from
me again - maybe from New
York - ad I will then be in
a position to tell you all.
at the moment I am just
too worried.
Yours, withing you every
blessing.
P. divide Kawanagh.

--- Page 18 ---
Maiz Nuadar
6ad Sanian 41
'Atara dil Seanan
Seo inziar cearzuizie pad. Zá cupla
cearn aca portheizie ioni minic pi zo bipul scrupall
orm ina dzaobi. beipear á rád ná deallruizim
leis an d'izieasai Maiz a inzad amai as a
szór nova et vetua. Ai pi orzsa a bi an
form; dá biriz sm, ni izizeam páscad ar mo
inrape-se. Zám budead den onór ina ieann-za som.
pi me doiara
Pásraiz de baún

--- Page 19 ---
TELEPHONE: BELFAST 26548.
P. B. Gregory.
F.R.I.B.A., M.R.I.A.I., Etc.
CHARTERED ARCHITECT AND
STRUCTURAL ENGINEER.
25 GRESHAM STREET,
BELFAST.
25th June, 1942.
PBG/POB
Very Rev. Father Seenan, O.Cap., M.A.,
Franciscan Priory,
Church Street,
Dublin.
Dear Father Seenan:
I gave permission to my big son, Jimmy Campbell, to tell you that the University have signified their intention of conferring the Doctorate upon me, so you know all about that. This note is to ask if you will honour me by coming along to the ceremony. The Degree is to be conferred at Iveagh House, St. Stephen's Green, on Thursday, July, 16th, at 3.30 p.m.
You know as well as I do that I owe this Degree solely and entirely to the church. I owe it to the priests of Down and Connor, Derry and Armagh who, through the years, afforded me opportunities of expressing myself in ecclesiastical architectural and art works. I owe it to the church in another way. I owe it to the reverent editors (men like yourself) of Catholic magazines and periodicals for very frequently guiding my very ignorant and erratic footsteps when I first attempted to write. Father Finbar (now his Grace Most Rev. Dr.) Ryan published my historical ballads in "The Irish Rosary", and Father Darlington, God rest him, opened the pages of "The Irish Monthly" to me. Father George O'Neill, S.J., used to cut the flesh from my bones for everything I wrote, and you yourself, Father, have not been behind in giving me space and publicity in the pages of that wonderful periodical you have called into existence--- "The Capuchin Annual".
Is it to be wondered at that I should like you to come and see me being canonized, beatified, wenerablized and doctorized. Will you try to come?
Believe me, dear Father Seenan,
Ever yours.
Padmaie

--- Page 20 ---
Scot Tre
COKEAU
AN 1740
P.S. Have forwarded Sermon "3"
Music of Freedom Rossa "3"
and "Domoran Rossa" Comps
It is evident that the relief is in the foreground in the M.S.
A STAR SEYAN et CARA - Music and the evolved relief
Please excuse the delay in
replying to your letter of 11th inst.
We have read over the notes you wish to publish - they can hardly be called "diary" and we are of opinion that they are not good enough to publish. It does not seem fair to Trasolac, so it? He says himself that they are only rough notes and there really is very little in them.
We should like to suggest your publishing something else of hard instead, and we are sending you a copy of his short sketch of Domoran Rossa. Looking for that was
the Cause of the delay in replying owing to enemy action from line to line his papers are hardly scattered.
If you find the Domoran Rossa lot long what about some extracts from the Music of Freedom "the first book he published (in 1907) under the pew name of Carkerdore? If you have not seen that I could let you have a copy, I believe I have back you to relief it, as we have very few copies left. There are some pretty lyrics in it, would you like to see the look and judge of extracts from it would send your purpose?
We appreciate your desire to publish something of Trasolac's in your annual, and we should like to help. I believe I have something worthy of him and we do not think these notes good enough. That is our reason for leading. Will you know what you think of my suggestions as an alternative.
Thank you very much for sending that year's annual. I had read quite a lot of it earlier in the year and liked it so much that I am very glad to have a copy.
I believe I have a copy of the gaie Seag Zudie Marke Vi Surbye

--- Page 21 ---
JAMES JOYCE: QUESTION OF
DOMICILE BEFORE COURT
Mr. Justice Bennett, in the Chancery Division, London, to-day, was asked to decide the domicile of the late James Joyce, otherwise known as James Augustine Aloysius Joyce, the author, who died at Zurich, Switzerland, in January, 1941. He was born of Irish parents at Dublin in 1882.
Mr. A. P. Vanneck, for the administrators of the will of Mr. Joyce, made in August, 1931, said they wished to have it determined whether at the date of his death he was domiciled in England or whether he had acquired some other domicile. The testator, he added, was an author of some repute.
Mr. Justice Bennett—What sort of books did he write?
Mr. Vanneck—I think his best-known book was called "Ulysses."
Mr. Justice Bennett—It sounds Greek to me (laughter).
Mr. Vanneck added that the testator left Dublin in 1904, and afterwards lived in Paris and Trieste, where he supported himself and his family by teaching.
Except for short stays in Ireland he lived in Trieste up to 1915, when he went to Zurich. In 1919 he returned to Trieste and in 1920 he went to Paris. He stored his furniture and came to London in 1931, when he took a flat at Campden Grove, Kensington. For many years he suffered from an affection of the eyes, and as the English climate affected them, he, with his wife and daughter, went to Paris in 1931.
In June, 1932, they set out for London, but, just before starting, his daughter had a nervous breakdown, and as she could not be left alone in Paris the testator cancelled his journey and remained in Paris. At the commencement of the war he went to Vichy, and finally to Zurich, where he died.
Mr. Justice Bennett held that at the date of his death the testator was domiciled in England.

--- Page 22 ---
Scott Te
Belgrave Place
Cork
11-1-32
Dear Father Senau,
We have been expecting to
hear from you for some time past
about the registered packet which we
sent you and which we asked showed
he returned immediately. You acknowledged
the receipt of the Music of Freedom and
the "Revolutionist" and said that you
were going away for a few days and that
on your return you would read them -
let us know if you thought extreme
would be suitable for your magazine
After that we registered by you the only
copy we possess of the page of
"St Patrick's" - a weekly in which Lemy's
first published poem appeared
With that we sent a few of his
unpublished poems. We got nown
from you since and though the packet
was registered we are feeling rather
uneasy.
I should be very much obliged, if
you will let me know by return whether
you received those papers safely, and
when we may expect to get them
and be looks back.
Is Miss Le More in car
Mastro M. Subone

--- Page 23 ---
Ara-na-Glasie,
Stillovan Park,
Go. Dulahi
12. 11. 34
Dear Father Senan:
You was a hard task. You set me. "Stand and Greeblablenge" was not an easy book to review, but I have made a wallot at it. Moill, maybe, be sorry you asked me. However, you can do what you think best with the enclosed - revise it, recast it, mail it, decabilate it, cuts its darn legs off - anything. I wont mind. I am returning the book as hyan of the Talbot Press sent me a copy, and you might want another book at this. Good luck to you, Keryman
Yours age
Alance Walsh

--- Page 24 ---
SEPTEMBER 6, 1928
The Advocate
The Literary and Critical Page
Canon Sheehan, Storyteller
His Versatility, Character, Originality
O N March 1 in this year of Grace there appeared on this page a review of the last book William O'Brien, that eagle-spirited Irishman, gave to the world. I contrived to weave into the strands of that "notice" something of the admiration I long had for the author of "Irish Fireside had for the threads of affection for him Hours." Threads of spiritual front and his for his splendid spiritual front and his armour of character, for his services to the land that bore him (she whom he loved second only to the Faith to which he was so faithful); threads to gratitude for the joy and gain in reading many of his pages, entered into its fabric. There was a sort of tragic timeliness about my "appreciation" of William O'Brien, for I had barely handed my article to the printer when the news came of William O'Brien's death. The melancholy painting was mine of lauding and lamenting this truly great Irishman in the one issue of "The Advocate":—
The light lay golden over all the ways when swittly darkness hurried from the steep.
But these things be, have been, and shall be. . . No one would have remembered what I, wrote of the patriot who was, alike, so eloquent with tongue and pen, of course—no one save myself that is. But if even I had forgotten I would have had reason to remember. It happened that in the course of my article I observed: "I have never read the book which William O'Brien wrote in prison, 'When We Were Boys.' Those of my friends who have, take pleasure in telling me of its shining recapture of the 'Light of Other Days.' Some day I will read it." I will be able to read it now, for the other day the mail brought me from Mrs. William O'Brien a copy of that work inscribed by that lady—whom he loved and honoured so greatly—bearing a few words of thanks, which I prize with care and pride. You see there are rewarded chatters upon books and bookmen may now and again be recompensed in an unexpected fashion for some weak, well-meaning words strung together.
"The Graves of Kilmorna."
One cannot read every book, of course. Indeed, one can read very few books—properly. One cannot always read every book of a favourite author. Time plays a part in these affairs; and one only has his share of it. A certain book may be inaccessible, a thousand circumstances may prevent one from completing the cycle. I had not (nor have, as yet) read "When We Were Boys." This, however, is a situation that will soon be corrected. Another book I have not read is "The Graves of Kilmorna," that last novel by Canon Sheehan, published after his death. I mention this work for two reasons; firstly, because William O'Brien thought highly of it; secondly, because this article is to deal in some fashion, discursive or otherwise, with Canon Sheehan. "Kilmorna" is a mask-prise for Mallow, where both the name and the politician were born, and where they were school associates. Love for that town—deep, pensive and a little mournful—shines, with enduring glow, in the words and reactions of both priest and tribune. This is what William O'Brien wrote of "The Graves of Kilmorna": "... the last few years have proved it is a book of prophecy in the sacred things of Irish nationality all but as amazingly verified as all Isaias in a more ethereal domain. The Graves of Kilmorna' might have been a still more precious muniment of contemporary Irish history, if the more insistent haste and paralysing forces of Death had not forbidden the elaborations of the second part of the book with the same certain touch with which in the first part he made the idealism of the pennan men immortal." I cannot say if this be exact—I have not read the book. But I have read most other books by Canon Sheehan and some of his life.
A Good Volume of Work.
As a matter of fact I have just concluded reading "Canon Sheehan Doneraile," a biography by the Very Rev. Dr. Herman J. Heuser, who was until last year, editor of the
"Ecclesiastical Review," that important American monthly publication for the clergy. And, because I have just read that solid and information-packed "Life"—which, first published in 1917, was reprinted for a third time in 1923—I shall make some slender levies upon it. In the first place, it will tell us that its subject between 1895 and 1910 published fifteen volumes. They are "Geoffrey Austin," "The Trump," "Failure," "The New Curate," "Luke Delmege," "The Blindness of Dr. Gray," "Glenanaar," "Lisheen," "Miriam Lucas," "The Queen's Fillet," "Under the Cedars and the Stars," "Parerga," "The Intellectuals," "Cithara Mea" (a volume of poems), "Mariae Corona" (sermons in honour of Our Lady), "The Graves of Kilmorna," and a number of essays and criticisms. Telling us this, it shows us a fair volume of work, it will be agreed, no part of which is weak or without high merit, though which, seen as a whole, and with even a mildly critical eye, must be noted as various, and not of the one level of achievement, though very patently the work of an excellent recorder of men and of his and their surroundings, of one with an eye for character, and situation, if not quite a master of the architectonics of the novel and with a tendency to the digressive and to hingering over a purple patch to the grazing and derangement of the progress of the story.
A Dreamy Boy.
"The Story of Patrick," Augustine Sheehan, says Dr. Heuser, "is that of a modest country pastor in the south of Ireland who made a great name as a writer of fiction, poetry and thoughtful essay." That is very modestly couched, but it, perhaps, is all the biography the Canon would have wished for, for he was a somewhat retiring priest, happy in his own beloved Doneraile—though with a frequent longer for the company of those who might talk books with him, and become mildly learned and happily philosophical, and hold cheer with him in his house, company the lack of which, it would appear, was chronic with him. . . . Canon Sheehan was baptized in "the parish of Mallow, in the diocese of Cloyne," on St. Patrick's Day, 1852. "Fair-haired and delicate" he was in his early boyhood. In later years he was—it is a self-portrait—"a bit of a dreamer, and when the other lads were shouting at play he went alone to some copse or thicket, and with a book, or more often without one, would sit and think, and look dreamily at floating clouds or running stream, and then, with a sigh, go back to his desk." Well, many another lad, who came to no great harm in later years, has done the same, for such "mooning" is a sort of psychological teething through which certain temperaments, at a certain stage, pass. It must not be counted seriously against their owners in adult years. And we must not count it against Canon Sheehan. He grew out of it. . . . This, as you may readily discern, is "writ sarkastic," as Artemus Ward might say. For Canon Sheehan never drew away from that quiet dreaming of his boyhood. What Richter (a favourite of his) calls "the moonlight" of memory, was always about him. He heard through all his days that which Arnold termed with his wonted felicity, "the hush among the shining stars."
Becomes a Priest.
Of age when Sheehan was only ten years of age when his parents died. That was in 1863. His two sisters, both older than he, and his younger brother, parentless as they were, had good friends. The two sisters were sent to complete their education in the Loreto Convent in Fermoy. They afterwards became Sisters of Mercy at Mallow. When fourteen, Patrick became a student at St. Colman's College, Fermoy, where his brother followed him shortly afterwards.
In 1869 Patrick entered Maynooth. A year before. Two years later the elder, sister Mary Stanislaus, passed from under the cedars to the stars. He had loved them much. He refers to the elder sister in this poignant passage: "Strange, I never felt the pr

--- Page 25 ---
18 Lv. Fitzwallian St.,
Dublin.
Oak Saints Day.
Dear Fr. Senan,
I enclose a note on Mrs. Airlayne's lecture which may or may not be important enough for inclusion. Perhaps you have sufficient already.
You never dropped me the note about the article on the "Records" of which I have seemed to have made a fine hash.
By the way, please do not pay me any more until after publication. It's very generous of you. But that big heart of yours behind the brown robe may lead you into buying a pig in a potte.
Tamia De Tumcall ORZ,
Francis Mac Manus.

--- Page 26 ---
Davis-na-Greine
Stillorgan Road
Caty
Dec. 4th 1942.
Dear Jew Father
On my october tomorrow - to dinner - last night @ ten, I was given your telegram; and I was so gratified by your generous congratulations that all sense of fatigue and depression of spirits vanished as @ the touch of a magic wand. The blessing from you and your reverend colleague I regularly prize while I pray that my own unworthiness may not frustrate, or impair, its operation. I have been overwhelmed with congratulation from all sides, but no one had the thought but you to give me God's blessing. Your message is more than encouragement; it is an inspiration.
With a thousand thanks,
I am faithfully yours,
William Magenis.

--- Page 27 ---
Canon Sheehan's Maecenas
Jail Carlotte
Sept. 17, 1942
BY GERALD FAIRLESS
THE Doneraile which Canon Sheehan made famous is one of the most tranquil towns in Ireland. There is a great calm to be found there, as I found it, when on a bright day in Easter Week I knelt at the grave where the great Canon sleeps in peace.
Thirty years ago his death brought sorrow to the multitude who knew him in his books, and who were familiar with his philosophy and his thoughts and even his trials as these are revealed in the vivid pages of Luke Delmege, My New Curate, The Triumph of Failure or Under the Cedars and the Stars.
Kneeling beside his grave in the Easter sunshine, there came back to me with a new poignancy the words he spoke when in his last illness he handed the manuscript of The Blindness of Dr. Gray to his friend Father Herman Heuser: "This may be the last thing I shall write," he said, "I feel that my days on earth are numbered, and I am growing weary."
TIMELY COMMENDATION
He was right; the hand of death was already upon him. It is a con-
Doctor Herman Heuser was, at the time, editor of the American Ecclesiastical Review, and he praised the work of Canon Sheehan with such wisdom and discretion, that Fr. Matt. Russell, S.J., wrote to the Canon declaring that Dr. Heuser's important commendation outweighed all adverse criticisms and was tantamount to a command to continue his literary apostolate. That timely encouragement has given to us the noble books of Sheehan which were published after 1897. Without that encouragement, what a lamentable hiatus would be left in our truly Catholic literature! We should never have heard of Glenandar, or Luke Delmege or Lisheen or The Intellectuals, or even My New Curate.
That is something which Catholic Irishmen should never forget to Dr. Heuser. But the Doctor did much more than give Sheehan that crucial good word. He placed the pages of the Ecclesiastical Review at Sheehan's disposal; and, in its pages, there appeared serially many of those works which we now have in bound and treasured volumes.
A GREAT PRIEST
It is a prity that here in Ireland we think of Dr. Heuser only as the helper of Canon Sheehan. His own noble life and labour are (as he would wish it himself) eclipsed by the fame of his protégé. But Dr. Heuser was a great priest in his own right, remarkable for his sanctity, and so prodigial in his personal charities that he died in poverty. He was Professor of Theology for over fifty years at the Seminary of St. Charles at Overbrook. His literary labour for God was unwearied and intense. The story of that has been told elsewhere. His success as editor of The American Ecclesiastical Review was universally acknowledged, although that part of his work was secondary to his priestly activities. Early in life he became a member of the Dominican Third Order, and thereafter made Saint Dominic his model and inspiration in his professional and literary work.
But Father Heuser's personal claim to the gratitude of Irishmen will al-
ways rest chiefly upon his efficacious encouragement of Canon Sheehan. That gratitude the Canon, for his own part, expresses again and again in his letters: "My most grateful thanks are due to you, above all, for your kind and encouraging words which are worth more than gold," he wrote to Dr. Heuser in 1899. "You and Fr. Russell are the only priests that have said a kindly word of my work hitherto. It was weary work. But I felt I was working for Our Lord and He would reward me . . . and I recognize that it would not have been possible for me to continue my work if I had not the good fortune of having you as my sponsor."
THEIR WORK REMAINS
No eulogy of Dr. Heuser could add anything to the praise and gratitude which is implicit in these words of the Canon of Doneraile. When I knelt at Canon Sheehan's grave in Easter Week, I could not help remembering all those things and, in my poor prayers, I included the saintly Dr. Heuser. May I hope that all who read this article will offer a prayer for the eternal welfare of two priests who united so nobly to do great work for God before the night came. Their work remains!
Dr. Heuser.
solation to remember that he had near him in that hour Father Heuser who had been for many years his friend, his patron, his Maecenas. In fact—fact that should not be forgotten—when Canon Sheehan published his first book, Geoffrey Austin, back in 1895, he was so saddened by adverse criticism that he determined it should be his last book as well as his first, and he was moved from his resolve only by the authoritative commendation of this friend.

--- Page 28 ---
Dis na Mara,
Salthill,
Salery.
21/10/42.
My dear Father Senan,
I do not feel that I could do
very well the strike on Derry, City
and County ye want for the C. A.
I hardly know Derry City at all
and I should portray make many
blunders, which could be resented. If
Derry County I am know material not well?
All that the person who will do this
strike best is Turpestor McAuley,
Jr. Columbia College, Derry, who, if I am
not mistaken, writes the Lackers for
the Derry Journal. You could
find out now at the time from one of
the Derry presite: very Father John
Dotty of the Cathedral. But I am
committed that somebody the last
who has an utmost hardway to the
City or County, and a jury doctor
approach to their possession, would be
the person required.
Appear from my new facts of expir-
ted Dene enthusiastically. You have
doubtless heard that my brother, Louis
J. Walsh, has been dangerously pill
since the Medally Jury. We were
summoned by Billy ran to what his wife
found to be his deathed. He relied
after our risit, but also! Where has been a
change for the worm during the last couple
of weeks, and our hope that he is to be
spent to us are daringly. I fear I may
be called up north at any minute, and
I should not be to found that any work
which concurrence might present me from
completing. Well we found not and may there
for the completion of the same there a concern

--- Page 29 ---
Myles Na gCopaleen
Play at Abbey 1. Press 26 1. 62
THE brother would'nt go to the Abbey last night—he says he's tired of the new playboys of the weshtern world—so I had to go by myself, and who should I meet there but your man, Plowman, the poet, and what gas we had in the two grand intervals. There was a play on by a joker called Myles Na gCopaleen (or, as the brother calls him, Miley of the Horses) and the only drawback was that we could'nt get saying during the three acts the gas sayings we had in our mind, and had to keep them for the two intervals when we could'nt be heard saying them with the pulling of corks in the ante-room next door.
Anyway, it was a terror of a play altogether, with lashings of bad words and long drawn-out speechifying, the like of which was never heard on land or sea.
One joker kept mentioning a certain indecorous part of the anatomy which everybody seemed to think funny, and another lad kept throwing out hints that most people came into the world in a left-hand way till, in the end, I began to jerouse to myself that the pub had been transposed with the poor ould Abbey.
For the benefit of those who don't understand Irish or English a la Miley, the play was about a man who, to get into the Dail, sold his soul to the Devil, as in Faust. The first Act—an Urban Council in session was like a good humoured discussion in a pub—as dull if not as dirty. The second Act consisted of a long, platitudinous speech by Faustus Kelly, and the third showed an Englishman succumbing to an alleged Irish propensity to spirituous liquors.
I shudder to think what it would have been like only for superb acting, especially by F. J. McCormick, and exquisite music by the orchestra.

--- Page 30 ---
BOSTON COLLEGE
CHESTNUT HILL
MASSACHUSETTS
July 19, 1940
My dear Father Senan:
Your letter was almost six weeks late in reaching me and so I could not answer it sooner to express my concern for you in view of the fact that you were going to London in May to undergo a serious operation. I trust that at least you have been able to return to Ireland by this time. I cannot believe that England could be a more desirable place for you at the moment.
Every day brings such added horrors regarding friends on the other side of the Atlantic, that we are forced to our knees as the only recourse to what is needed. Undoubtedly this is God's way of teaching us the very foundation of our faith. But it is a difficult lesson and one that in its learning demands strength that is beyond our natural powers.
May God protect you and have you in His special keeping. Every day I anxiously and fearfully listen to the most recent developments and wonder what will be the fate of those I love upon the other side of the Atlantic.
Please extend to the Ryans, Donal O'Cahill, Frank McManus and my other friends, my prayerful regards.
Devotedly in Xto.,

--- Page 31 ---
55 , The Rise,
Glasnevin.
Dear Father Senan,
I hope this is all right and long enough.
I did the best I could.
Maybe you'd risk a block of the Blaskets with it.
I'd be obliged if you would kindly add a sub-title business in italic giving some details of the name of the company, etc., as
I have no data by me from which to construct one.
Hope to let you have a humorous article soon, though the humour is almost kicked out of me by this hard world.
Watch yourself, and for the love of Mike pay some attention to Brother Ass, the Body. As I said before, if anything happened to you they'd either have to get ten good men to replace you or make a friar of
Yours as ever,
John D Glasnevin

--- Page 32 ---
6
IRISH CPINION.
March 31, 1917.
Doctor O'Hickey, Thinker and Teacher
Continued from last week.
By the Rev. Paul Walsh, M.A.
THE CLERGY AND THE IRISH LANGUAGE.
NEXT was subject of O'Hickey continued to lecture on the various branches of Irish Architecture till he resigned the lectureship in 1906. The different periods were treated in detail, from the monuments of the Bronze Age to the Round Towers. Periodically, however, he digressed to subjects digressions usually took the form of a causerie on the aims of the Gaelic League movement, and on its progress both outside and inside the college. These discourses were largely instrumental in keeping up enthusiasm, in directing attention to the far-reaching effects of the propaganda in the country, and in stimulating a desire to be in readiness for the work when the college gates would be passed for the last time. The various activities of the year were passed in review, the Feiseanna, the Oireachtas, the language procession, and so on. The Boards of Education had their share of attention; in a word, no phase of interest was passed over. These summaries were thoroughly appreciated by the students, cut off as they were from the outside world; their interest was all the greater if some West Briton, some Atkinson or Mahaffy, was to be disposed of. The inevitable appeal to the whole body to throw themselves into the good work was always forthcoming at the end. Here is one delivered on April 30th, 1902. "More than once before," he said, "on such occasions as the present, have I appealed to you to throw in your lot for life with the Gaelic League and with Irish Ireland. Many a time when I have been engaging in the intrigues or of parrying the blows of Trinity College and the Boards of Education, and the whole West Briton horde, have I been cheered by the thought that former appeals of mine have not been made in vain, and that each year's exodus from the halls of Maynooth supplies me with earnest, enthusiastic and capable lieutenants in every part of Ireland. Much of the best work done by priests whom I have had the honour to reckon amongst my pupils. Should this gratifying development continue, and I entertain no doubt but it will,
Exhortations like that which I have just read secured many adherents, especially among members of the Theology Classes, they are now scattered in many lands, but fortunately many of them are at work at home, and have done and are doing, yeoman service in the cause. Let me give one, more quotation from these addresses, and I have done with this part of my subject. It is an illustration of how, by approaching the
points from different sides and at different angles, O'Hickey strove to impress his appeal. He had been speaking of the encouragement which should be given to Irish-speaking parents who should be given to Irish-speaking parents to speak Irish to their help. "Above all should the clergy help," he said; "yes, help to the utmost of their power. To them, of all men, should this be a labour of love. Theirs is a unique opportunity, theirs a power of advancing the nation's regeneration to which no other class can lay claim. Why close our eyes to the truth? For the decadance of the nation's speech the clergy are in large measure responsible. Against the miasma of foreignism which everywhere spread its contagion the clergy were not proof, any more than other classes; whilst their example and precept worked more havoc to the language than those of any other class to play an even greater and more far-reaching part in restoring its falling fortunes. Such a part they may easily play; it will cost them but little effort. By adopting this course will they most perpetually ensure for themselves in perpetuity the people's affection and trust. Be it theirs, then, to aid and lead the people in building up the fortunes of the language of our race, of the saints and sagas of our country's pank. And you who are by and by to join their ranks, shrink not your share in this work; shrink not any effect that may the better enable you to act your part with credit and success. On you, beyond yea or nay, the final issue of the struggle will in large measure former. Associates in the footsteps of those of your former fellows who, far apart as they are, have, north and south and east and west, displayed such tireless pleaced and enthusiasm, in the good cause energy so much work of enduring value to their credit."
O'GROWNEY BOOK I., PAGE 1, SECTION 1.
It was in September, 1903, that I first saw Dr. O'Hickey. I was up for the entrance examination to Maynooth. Dr. O'Hickey set the questions in Irish history and presided while we wrote the paper. Many of those present here features of the member the stern, determined features of the man, and will agree with me that the youngsters from the country might well dread his rigour at the marking-sheet. However, with some causerities, we elementary Irish class. We commenced with O'Growney Part I., page 1, section 1. I remained under Dr. O'Hickey one year, after which we parted company for a time. During that year I learned a good deal of elementary later when I resumed the study on my own. One thing that struck the student was the deadly earnestness of the teacher. In fact, he was too much in earnest, and unbent too seldom. We had classes two or three times a week. There were about 70 in the class altogether, and of these perhaps one half had at that time something more than an academic interest in the language. The rest merely wished to pass, and that with the least possible amount of trouble. The year's work was always introduced with one which I have taken from his class notebook of the year 1898:—
1. Importance of the Language.
2. It is our own.
3. It is a fine language.
4. It is being taken up widely.
4. It will be more or less necessary for some, useful for all.
5. My own experience. To them, of all preaching.
6. We should not be outdone in devotion by (a) our kith and kin beyond the seas, (b) by the keys to our country's past."
When the work had commenced Dr. O'Hickey was most regular, minute and scrupulous in the attention he gave to his pupils. No day passed without the selection and appointment of a les-
son and written exercise. He kept a record of the business to be got through in each class. The first task when he entered the lecture-room each day was to read his own version of the composition exercise previously set. This translation did from manuscript even when the always did fr

--- Page 33 ---
Knock Brogan Cark,
Bandon
26th Oct. 1942
Dear Rev. Father,
I have read and degested your Annual for 1942 and as an old Volunteer and I. R. H., man I thank you for the wonderful work. But it was not to praise the Annual I write you now but to ask you if it is possible that you are in possession of a Cermon preached by one of your orders in San Francisco (I think) shortly after the rising of 1916.
At one time I could quote it in entirety but not so now The opening of it I can recall viz
"To day we sorrow and withal we repice. Many of our noble brothers have been done to death by brutal England: therefore we sorrow."
After that it goes on to show why "we repice," telling of the noble societies they made etc. I would be ever so thankful if it is possible for you, to let me have a Copy of it or to publish it in next years edition. I do not want any publicity please but I would respectfully suggest that Your Hales, who was so brutally treated by Major Percival, be asked to record his "encounter" with the enemy. This Major Percival is the same who showed up "so," with the Japanese lately in the West. You is farming about three miles East of Bandon and would, I am sure, be willing.
I have are a few other "items" from here which I am sure would be acceptable for publication if you so desire, namely the murders of Volunteer John Conradly and the baring of his body in Lord Bandon's Cark and the murders of three younger Volunteer Begley, Galvin and O'Donaghue on the main Bandon — Summerway Road, all by Percival's men.
But to return to the main purpose of my letter I would be ever so thankful if that Sermon is obtainable. I can recall it in friend in 1918 and getting it "aff" in toto.
Wishing you greater success in your next edition and may lyd in His mercy give you the strength inspiration and long service in the noble word you are doing is the very sense we wish of yours respectfully
Sean Murphy

--- Page 34 ---
4th Koo 1942
My dear Baltis Sennan
I received the article and your brind enclosure this morning, and will write the maltis at once. It was most polematic about Alice Mulleyan as she is here just now, but leaves for to trouble. She would have gone up sooner, but I'm by de asked her to call on him and sent his ear for his today.
I have arranged to call to her tomorrow on the anti-partition, as she is always interesting on the social science, so when I get the data I will post the script. I could write reasons on dear Maddien I do hope you continue well, during then hard months when you are so much needed with many thoughts.
Sincerely yours Cathleen O'Briennan

--- Page 35 ---
Ard. na. Glasse
Stellorgan Park
to Dublin
2. 7. 35
Dear Father Senan:
Excuse delay in rebelly to your letters
of 12th June - I was looking over Donegal,
which in parts is nearly as good as Kerry
I enclose my usual contribution towards
making damn borkmen sanity - if that
is at all possible - while they are still
Young. Best wishes.
Yours age
Chance West

--- Page 36 ---
IRISH P.E.N. (DUBLIN CENTRE)
A Meeting of Dublin P.E.N. will be held at Jury's Hotel, Dublin, on Saturday, 14th November, at 7.30 p.m. sharp when
DR. ALICE MILLIGAN
will talk about the beginnings of the
IRISH THEATRE
with reminiscences of Lady Gregory, W. B. Yeats, Edward Martyn and George Moore
Chairman: Austin Clarke
Each Member of Dublin Centre may bring a guest
Telephone 91245
Kathleen O'Brennan,
Hon. Secretary,
44 Oakley Road, Ranelagh

--- Page 37 ---
Some time ago a distinguished American ecclesiastic offered a prize of £200 for the best.
Photograph
Lafayette.
MRS. T. CONCANNON, B.A., SALTHILL, GALWAY,
Who has won the £200 prize offered by an American
Bishop for the best "Life of St. Columbanus."
"Philosophical Historical Presentation of the
Life of St. Columbanus." A large number of
ecclesiastical as well as lay students at home
and abroad entered for the competition, and to
the pride and satisfaction of Connaught and
indeed of Ireland the adjudicators (a commit-
tee of the Irish Hierarchy) have declared Mrs.
T. Concannon, M.A., of Salthill, Galway, to
be the successful competitor, and she has there-
fore been awarded this valuable prize.

--- Page 38 ---
Seamus O'Kelly
TO-MORROW will be the 25th anniversary of the death of Seamus O'Kelly, journalist, poet, playwright and novelist; an Irishman who deserves the kindly remembrance of his countrymen.
In the troubled times Seamus was a pillar of strength to the independence movement and he served the cause with an unswerving and unobstrusive fidelity. The close friend of men like Arthur Griffith and Seumas O'Sullivan, he was one of the small group of writers from whom the young men of the 1916-1918 period drew so much of their inspiration. His death came as the result of an attack on the old offices of Sinn Fein in Harcourt Street, where, in the absence of Arthur Griffith—then interned—he was editing "Nationality."
Born at Loughrea in 1880, Seamus O'Kelly drifted into journalism and edited successively the "Leinster Leader,"
Seamus O'Kelly, from the painting by E. F. Solomons, A.R.H.A.
the "Dublin Saturday Post" and "Sunday Freeman." But in the intervals of a busy life he found time for literary work and displayed an unusual versatility. The Abbey Theatre staged with success four plays from his pen, including "The Stranger," "The Bribe," and "The Parnellite." He produced two full-length novels, "Wet Clay" and "The Lady of Deerpark," as well as a volume of verse. As a writer of short stories he had no equal in his time, and "The Weaver's Grave" is one of the finest examples of the art to be found in the English language.
When Seamus O'Kelly died he was given a public funeral, a tribute to a man who had served his country well. To-day, he would be in danger of being forgotten if he had not written things more imperishable than monuments of stone or bronze.
M. J. MacM.

--- Page 39 ---
U.S. LITERARY AWARD
FOR IRISH WRITER
The Downey Award—a medal—was conferred last week in the United States on Mairin Cregan (wife of Dr. J. Ryan, Minister for Agriculture), for her book, “Rathina,” published by the Macmillan Co., New York, about a year ago.
The award is for the best book of the year in the English language, suitable for American young people and written in the Catholic tradition, writes an IRISH PRESS reporter.
Since its publication the book has been widely and very favourably reviewed. It pictures the day-to-day life of a family living in the Irish countryside. Apparently this has a Christian appeal, for already the Board of Education of the Methodist Church in the United States has asked the author to write for their own girls' magazine and appreciation has also been received by the author from the Presbyterian Church in America.
It was chosen as the book of the month by the Pro Parvulis Book Club on its appearance and was also put on the selected list of the Cardinal Hayes Literary Committee.
“Rathina” is being published by a well-known London firm early next year.

--- Page 40 ---
A Cara,
Szribineork Jaedilze me, ta'
mórán vaomi i n Eirpn a léizeas
mo cús leabiarisci, azus ta' chú'
maii oram mar szribineork azus
mar jaedeal. Ta' mórán orbre
deanta azam do léizeann azus
do leirrideaci na h- Eireann.
Aci saizal cruaid saizal an
szribineora. Is mpnc a biós sé'
deacark ozapn a bici beo. Ni'
deis maii ar szribineork Jaedilze
a diceall a deanomi.
Bérn budieac do dupne ar
bic dá laizead a duogad leis a
dieanom domi. Is i mo cús
cús na úre. Cabiark airzid
dá laizead i, Bérn budieac
out ar a son.
mise le deaz njém
Sevsam II ac Srianna

--- Page 41 ---
JOHN O' LONDON'S WEEKLY, MARCH 26, 1943.
SPRING BOOKS NUMBERJOHN O' LONDON'SWEEKLY
Vol. XLVIII No. 1,203
ON SALE FRIDAY, MARCH 26, 1943.
Price 3d.
(Published Fortnightly as a temporary War-time measure)
[Registered at G.P.O. for transmission by the Canadian Magazine Post. Entered as Second-class Matter at the Post Office at New York, N.Y., under the Act of March 3rd, 1879.]
The Eagle Mind of Yeats
By L. A. G. STRONG
W. B. YEATS touched life at many points, impressing it always with the strength of his personality. The greatest poet of his time, developing so continuously up to the day of his death that his greatness was no mere halo of fame but was active and contemporary, he influenced those who might have been his sons and grandsons as strongly as he had influenced his fellows at the Rhymers' Club.
He was a politician, exercising a direct influence upon the Irish, national thought of his lifetime, and an indirect influence which is still incalculable. His work as man of the Abbey Theatre than that of any of his colleagues. His dramatic works extended the range of verse one-act stages, remain at least two of his prose one-act plays, and at most of their kind. His talk was unsurpassed in a society where good talkers are ten a penny. He was an orator with a dangerous power over passion and intellect. He defended art and the artist with sympathies he was boundlessly kind. He studied magic and, in his instinctive, unsystematic way, knew a great deal about psychic research and occult phenomena in general. As philosopher and as critic he was violently uncertain, but shot many an arrow of thought to the centre of the target. He told a brilliant story, * * * * *
which the poet believed in magic. This, surely, is to blame a man for failing in something he did not attempt. Mr. Hone, if I read his book rightly, set himself to collect with all possible industry the data on which a final judgement may be based. He has been at pains to sift truth from legend: he has communicated with almost everyone who could throw light on any period of Yeats's life, and made a well-judged use of each contribution: he has brought out friends which are news to many of Yeats's facts: he has not been afraid to let his eye twinkle: he has written many pages to which Yeats would have nodded instant and vigorous approval: and, above accents, he has kept throughout the form and accents of the man as we knew him. Final or not, here is an honest and excellently well-proportioned history of Yeats's activities, from which can be inferred the gigantic figure and the ranging mind; a book which no student will be able to do without.
* * * * *
I THINK there is a relative failure on the human side—none on the intellectual, unless it is a failure that at the question of magic the biographer has shugged his shoulders. Although tribute is paid to Yeats's affection for Miss Nora Heald and her sister, Mrs. Edith Shackleton, and to his creative friendship with Lady Gerald Wellesley, something of the warmth of those last years is missing. We are told that Dr. Gogarty went offensing him: the Doctor has written better of those visits. We would not gather, from Mr. Hone's story, that in those last years at Riversdale Visitors he took most friend O'Connor were the visitors he took and dreak in, and to whom he was closest in talk and in the opening of his heart. Lennox Robinson was suggested. So was Lady Ottoline Morrell, who makes but few appearances and is the occasion of the stein of the fashion receives index.
The Stein of the such quality must necessarily gather about him a various penumbra of legend: and it is therefore fortunate that so soon after his death, a biographer of skill and integrity should have access to the prime sources. He has an inquest on the mass. Mrs. M. Hone is experienced and judicious. His work is distinguished by a caustic impartiality, a dry note of astringency that greatly enhances the better qualities of any subject that can stand up to it. He is not, can never be, wholly sympathetic to his subject here: but the biographer towards Swift and Berkeley has gone a long way towards understanding Yeats. I can think of no writer who could have done the job so well, though, as a complement to it, I wish that Mr. Frank O'Connor could be persuaded to write a book more closely in tune with Yeats's humour and humanity.
I see that Mr. Hone has in some quarters been censured for not supplying a full and final analysis of Yeats's character, and in particular for failing to analyse the degree to
antipathies should be omitted, though a few of them flared into scenes so extravagant that they would fitly illustrate the life of the poet who, dramatic and passionate life always the father's influence is clearly traced, as are all the main spiritual debts of a large-scale proposal. We shall not know how far his creditor to Maud Gonne's daughter was a symbolic gesture. He seems to have recovered from her refusal without pain. The paradox of Yeats's thought was that, Oxford, once, "The thing heard is never the message, nor the thing seen the vision," symbols were for him the only reality, since all reality was symbolic.
ONCE set down in an essay the summary of Yeats's view of material phenomena, and was rebuked by a distinguished living poet, for putting into his mouth nonsense which he could not have believed, since, had he believed it, he must contemporary standards that a responsible reviewer should think me capable of attributing to so great a man as an opportunity to know what Yeats thought on those matters, and that I kept a faithful record of what he said. If it be lunacy, then I would rather be mad with the man of whom Edmund Wilson said, "His sense of reality is inferior to that of my contemporaries."
W. B. Yeats. From a drawing by Sargent.

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Death of Professor Stockley
Loss to Irish Letters
RISH life and the world of letters suffer loss in the death, recently, at his home, Arundel, Ballintemple, Cork, of Professor William F. P. Stockley, M.A., D.Litt., Emeritus Professor of English in the National University of Ireland. Professor Stockley, whose scholarly articles
scholastic career at Trinity College, where his colleagues included Dr. Douglas Hyde, Mr. Louis Claude Purser and other distinguished classical scholars.
Shortly after his graduation he went to Canada, where he spent close on 20 years. He held the Chair of English at the Universities in New Brunswick and Ottawa and in 1903 became head master of St. Mary's College, Nova Scotia.
Returning to Ireland in 1905, he became Professor of English at University College, Cork, and occupied the Chair of English until his retirement in 1930.
ELECTED TO DAIL
Always a staunch Nationalist, Prof. Stockley joined the Sinn Fein movement in 1916, and was elected Alderman of Cork City in 1920. He was elected to the Dail for the National University Constituency in 1918 and voted against the Treaty.
He was President of the Cork Literary and Scientific Society from 1913 to 1915, and President of the Cork Library Committee from 1913 to 1930.
He was author of several books, including "English Visitors to Ireland from Raleigh to Newman," "Newman: Education and Ireland," "Studies in Irish Biography," "Introduction to the Dream of Gerontius."
Professor Stockley married Violet Osborne, daughter of William Osborne, R.H.A., of Dublin, in 1892. She died in 1893, and in 1908 he married Marie Germaine Kolb, of Munich, who survives him, as do his two daughters, one of whom is Miss Violet Stockley, M.A., a member of the Professorial staff of the Ladies' College, Cheltenham, England.
made his name familiar to a wide circle of readers of English, Irish and American reviews and periodicals, was a frequent contributor to "The Advocate" some years ago.
CONVERT
A convert to the Catholic Faith and brother of Very Rev. Canon Stockley, Anglican, of Lichfield Cathedral, England, the late professor was born at Templeogue, Co. Dublin, and had a brilliant

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Remembering
Tom Moore
IN a room above a public-house in Aungier St., Dublin, on last Sunday afternoon, the Thomas Moore Society met to commemorate the birthday of the poet. It was a novel birthday party. The house and the room on the first floor have not changed much during the past century. And in that room the songs of Moore were sung on last Sunday afternoon by Mr. Michael O'Higgins, Miss Mairin Fenning and Miss Patsy O'Hara. Mrs. Carew played some of the melodies on the 'cello.
It was a hospitable party. Crowded into two rooms and a corridor, eighty-nine people talked and chatted, dined on sandwiches and cakes, and drank tea. The food was prepared in the little back-room where the boy, Thomas Moore, used eat his bread and milk in the morning before going to school.
In his diary he records how, in the August of 1835, he came with a friend to visit the house in which he had lived the first nineteen or twenty years of his life. He remembered cheerful noisy parties in the two front drawingrooms in which the Moore Society met on last Sunday.
On the ground-floor behind the shop, he drank port wine with the grocer and the grocer's wife.
DISTINGUISHED GUESTS
Seated in the poet's chair, and with a bust of the poet in the background, John Count MacCormack posed for a photograph during the course of the meeting. That chair is all that remains of the Moores' furniture, and the credit of its discovery is due to Dr. Herbert O. Mackey, whose hard work and power of organisation has contributed so much to the rapid progress of the Society. In the course of a speech, Dr. Mackey said that the Society hoped to build a concert hall in Dublin to be called The Moore Hall.
Among the guests were John Count MacCormack and Countess MacCormack; Miss Margaret Burke Sheridan; Senator Donal O'Sullivan and Mrs. O'Sullivan; Senator Joseph Brennan; Rev. Fr. Senan, O.F.M.Cap., and Rev. Fr. Gerald, O.F.M.Cap.; Judge Connolly, Mrs. More O'Ferral; Miss Charlotte Dease; Mr. Kearney, High Commissioner for Canada; Mr. A. M. O'Mara and Mrs. O'Mara; Mr. Morrison Milne, Hon. Sec. of the Burns Society; Mr. M. J. MacManus; Mr. R. Bramham, Runaidhe of the Ard Craobh of the Gaelic League; Miss M. Larchet and Miss Jean Nolan.

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1.P. 28.3.34
A Gaelic
Enthusiast
STEPHEN MACKENNA is dead. In a London hospital, after a painful illness, he passed away just a week ago.
Those who knew him will receive the news with a sense of a great loss—a friend who cannot be replaced. There are men and women—Stephen and Mrs. MacKenna were of these—whose converse was so human and vital, that one can hardly realise their deaths.
That fine appreciation of high principle and that sympathy with those who bore the brunt of the national struggle, was his to such a degree that when we are told the news, we know that something has gone out of our lives which cannot return.
Journalist, traveller, lover of Ireland, man of letters, choice in thought and choice in style, he was one of those who came home in the beginnings of National renaissance, to offer his contribution of a highly cultured mind to the strengthening hopes of a younger generation.
Fought for Greece.
His experiences had been varied and his work already distinguished. He fought through the war for freedom in Greece in the early years of the century and at the end of the war, he returned to Marseilles, whence he went on foot to Paris. There he soon won for himself by his articles a position of importance on one of the great New York dailies, for which he became European correspondent. In this capacity he was sent to various parts of Europe, at one time to Russia to interview Tolstoy, or to visit Rockefeller on his travels in Europe and so on.
But his heart was in Ireland and the inspiration of the Gaelic movement caught him and he gave up his very remunerative post to become a leader writer on the Freeman's Journal, at a very moderate salary. He was not a politician and so his work was almost entirely of an educational and cultural nature. A scholar steeped in Greek, Latin and modern literature, he turned with enthusiasm to Gaelic.
After some years at this work and as he became more deeply immersed in study he turned to translation, one of his unpublished works was a translation of classical work of philosophy into Gaelic.
At this time he entered into a contract to translate Plotinus—a life work in itself—which involved his giving up his position on the Freeman. The first volume of this work was hailed as a literary masterpiece.
This work did not, however, detach him from his love of Gaelic, or of his country. There was always a welcome in his home for Sinn Feiners, and his pen was at the service of the Republican weeklies and added greatly to the cultural quality of the movement which was so richly contributed to by almost all the distinguished Irish writers of the time.
A True Prophet.
In Paris he had been in touch with many active minded Irishmen and was on terms of friendship with Major MacBride. Even in those early days he spoke like a prophet when he told the Major he would die for his country. In 1916 his health was broken, and he was unable to take the part of a soldier, but his convictions were vehemently with the Volunteers. In 1921 his nationalism did not change. He was deeply disappointed with the Treaty and up to June of 1922 he wrote and worked for a new unity, a healing of the breach in national movement. Once the Civil War began, like many of his kind, he felt himself a stranger in the atmosphere of conflict between fellow Irishmen. Just at this period his wife, who was an American and a very fine planist, was suffering from a very serious illness. Her strong convictions and brilliant personality had made her home a centre of national strength.
In quest for a cure, they left
Ireland in the darkest period of the conflict—never to return. Mrs. MacKenna died in Bournemouth some eighteen months later.
In the succeeding period Stephen lost nothing of his studious interest in Gaelic and at the same time hovered about the South of England. One always felt that Bournemouth, where his wife was buried, remained the centre of his wanderings.
He kept up a constant correspondence with a few friends, pouring out his quaint conversations both wise and fantastic—but always with the old earnestness about the Gael.
In a letter written early in January from hospital—it was his last to a Gaelic croney—he concluded with a phrase, poignant now in the light of unexpected death—or maybe he had an inkling of the end. He said: 'At the end of February, when the Spring is breaking, I shall be emancipated.'
He carried his earnestness with a certain gaiety, his courage without display; to him music and young children were always a delight; his indignation at his country's suffering was expressed with vehement aloofness. Gay, indomitable, he went his way, and his friends will long remember his nobility of nature, and in their prayers he will not be forgotten.
P. LITTLE.

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26 upper Fiftywilliam Sh.
22nd Oct 1920
Dear Father Canice
The poem I enclose is the one I mentioned to you and I would be glad to have your opinion whether it might not be put in a later edition. The first edition of his look was raised by misprints and even the second one has many that given an altered meaning to his poems. Some day perhaps you may write an appreciation of his work which up to this has been much beyond his critics.
You gave me great hope by what you said yesterday, for I have my own thoughts on this subject, but a mother's judgment would not be taken, I fear.
It is likely that a look of poems may appear soon and it would be incomplete without some translations from the Irish. There have been already written some from the Spanish, Italian & French which, while closely following the disguised have also added to their value. Please look up soon if you can, a couple of good ones, anything from one bone to five or six - and please copy
Irish the disguised when sending, in order to get at the form to I enclose you a translation from the Poman Breviary which was written for the 15th and is yet unpublished. You can keep their copies if you care to have them - I am sorry they are not in the hand-writing of the writers, but please accept them such as they are. I will look out for your promised vach next week and I will be most gladful for the death poems if you can manage to find them by them, with translations as I mentioned besmace Oya leac.
Myre le mesor mop
1 opis mop Mayre bears ag
Pluynza's (el Conze)
And then I heard his voice and everything was hid, but I could not rejoice, for all my world had flown, Into the darkness slid, Leaving me there alone.
Alone, yet in his sight; I felt my spirit start, Stirred with a living light, and all was glorified. I stood within my heart and he was at my side.
(Joseph was 24 when this was written MUP)
& Charitatis Victima!
From the Poman Breviary, by George Noble Pluynza's
Lerea, trumpet call of God,
To you would fly your home, from Sin
Wild tribes in lovely lands to win,
Offering Christ, or else your blood?
A kinder pain you must embrace,
A sweeter death is yours to face:
Pureed with the spear of Love Divine,
Love's victim, in that wound you die!
The four hearts gathered round your shrine
or folded in your narrow cell
You kindle, tilt consumed they sigh
In flames that quell the fire of Hell!
15 Oct 1920

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EAC - SIMILE of a letter by OLIVER GOLDSMITH in the possession of the publishers
If you should ask, why in an interval of 10 months years, you never heard from me, permit me, Madam, to ask the face question, I have the best cause in recommendation. I wrote to Kilmore from Lyden in Britain from Lyden in Handers, and Peace in France, but occurred no answer. So what could I attribute this pleasure but to Duplecore or forgetful nephew? Whether I was right in my conjecture, I do not pretend to determine, but this I must inconvincibly owe that I have a three year time in my turn and cannot to forget them when I could not but look upon aftergreeting me. I have attempted to blot their names from my memory, and I outfell it short while days in efforts to lose their names from my hearts could I have secured you had not now been forbidded with this renewal of a discontinued corespondence and every effort the restless make to procure sleep forces but to keep them waking all my attempts contributed to improper what I would forget deeper on my inagression. But this is a subject I would willingly turn from, not yet for the ford of me I can't tell I have paid all. I was mistaken, when I did not know me trying to Kilmore in face to conventances that all my endeavours to continue your regards might be attributed to sorry motives, my littlest might be regarded as the pertinents of a begger and not the permission of a friend, while all my professions in friendship of being considered as the result of disinterested clearm might be assord to be real infinitely I believe, under, you had too much generosity to place them in such a light, but I will not be seen even the headers of such a respector, the most educated friendships are always most soulable of the flightest insights and the strongest jea tools is ever afforded on the warmest regard. I could not, I am, I could not contend a correspondence where every achievement for feel faceard might be considered as an undoubted request for future ones, and where it might be thought I gave my heart from a native of grottende alone, when I was conscious of having bestowe
It is true this under might have been forging enough, but your left must confess it as in character. Those who know me at all, know that I have always been actually Duplecore principles from the rest of Manchester, and while none regarded the interests of his friend more, no man in earth regarded his own less. I have often of fielded bluntness to avoid the impunities of fledgers, have frequently feend to everbook those morts too obtuses to escape nature, and protected. I discouraged to those instances of good nature and good professions which I could not fail truly to applaud, and all this lets I should be reminded among the grinning tribes who fay very true to all that is fad, who fill a racant chain at a tea table whose mother professed never move or avoid circle then the circumference of a quinteen, and who had nothing to recharge the money in your packet than the routes of your breast all this. I say, I have done and a thousand others very villy this very disinterested things in my time, and for all which no fact cared a few things about me. God carefully Madam, is it to be wondered that he should once in his lesser face get you who had been all his life for starry homely professions it is probable you may one of those say fee me turn into a perfect Markes and es
Hunters, and as I with and intricates a mouse hole I have already given my heart by order for an intimate reform in the Hotel of my fances, Delaware at amities of peoples, I wish life again in my tea, and which my grates with trust take I shall of having my room with fictions I intend to draw it with more or less of fine goality, those will make pretty furniture uncoupled and would be a bit too expensive, for I shall draw them all out with my own hands and my landless daughter shall frame them with the parsings of my black wais breast, lack maxim is to be inscribed on sheet of clear paper and wrote with my best fear, of which the following will force as appreciated. Look Sheep. Mind the "mean chance. Money is money now. If you have a thousand pounds you can put your hands by your fides and say you are worth a thousand pounds every day of the "year Sake a farther, from an hundred pound and it will be an hundred pound no longer. Thus which way so ever I turn my eyes they are fare to meet one of these friendly Monitors, and as we are both of an attorney who having his room round with looking gleeps to correct the effect of his profess, my appointment shall be for wished in a peculiar moment to correct the errors of my mind.
Earth, Madam, I meant, wish to be rich, if it were only for this reason, to fay without a blessed how much I esteem you, but whose I have money a fatigue to encounter before that happy time comes; when your poor old friendly friend may again give a toolet to the lacremacie of his natural feelings to, Kilmore finefield recount the various arrestments of an head forgetted life, laugh over the follies of the day join his flicts to your happiness and forget that ever he flawed in those streets where Ruther and O' way starved before him.
And now I mention those great names, My Uncle - He is no more Meal foul of fine as when one I knew him. Menton and Swift great dinner with age as well as he. But what shall I say, his mind was too active in inhabitant not to disorder the feeble maxim of its abide, for the richest jewels forced mean their settings, but who but the fool would comment his cardinal, he now forgets the calamities of life, perhaps indulgent heaven has given him a fortifier of that tranquility here which he to well referes adversities.
But I must come to business, for business, as one of my meaning tells me must bee minded or lost, I am going to publish in London a Book with Dr. The profess state of satie and alterations in Europe, I be brotherless in Ireland respected every put for mance these without making the author any confidential I will in this respect disappoint their avoice and have all the profits of my labours to myself. I must therefore request Mr. Lawden to corredate among his friends and acquaintance in hundreds of my proposals which I have given the Brotherless Mr. Probles in London street directions to find him, if in performance to find
circulation he should receive any furnished proposals I intricated when collected they may be feut to the Madley's as a forgived who will give a recipit and be accountable for the work or a return of the subscription. If this request which if agreed with will in force measure he an encouragement to a man of liaming, should he disagree able or trouble from I would not propess it, for I would be the last man on earth to have my labours go a begging, but if I know Madam der and face I ought to know him, he will accept the complayment with pleasure, all I can say if he writes a book I will get him two hundred furnishes and those of the best with a Europe. Whether this request is complied with or not I shall not be uneasy, but there is one Detiction I must Make to him which I solicit with the narrowest and our and in which I cannot hear a respectful I mean Mr. Madam that I am by your ever affectionate abided Priminian and agreed
The Plover Godsmithy Gon See how I blot and Hearse when I am asking a favour. Temple Eathange Coffee house near Temple Par Lond. Aug 11th 1758
Mr. Lawden at Lyden at London Court at Lyden at London Great Ireland.
It is true this under might have been forging enough, but your left must confess it as in character. Those who know me at all, know that I have always been actually Duplecore principles from the rest of Manchester, and while none regarded the interests of his friend more, no man in earth regarded his own less. I have often of fielded bluntness to avoid the impunities of fledgers, have frequently feend to everbook those morts too obtuses to e

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Poet, Critic, Engineer,
Real Artist Painting
History for Posterity
Padraic Gregory
Builder of Churches
Padraic Gregory is the rare combination of poet and critic, engineer, man of thought and man of action, the real artist who is putting the worth while of the present into the tradition of the future.
Master of the ballad form and critic of deep penetration, Padraic Gregory is an architect by profession and a master of versatility in the fine arts. He has written sacred drama as part of his share in the revival of the Catholic theater.
His Coming of the Magi is among the finest blank verse plays in English of this century. His songs have been made famous the world-over by great singers such as John McCormack.
Yet none of his achievements has the same significance as the churches he has built. To the daring and originality of the artist, he adds the skill of the engineer and crowns all by a deep knowledge of the rubrics, symbolism, and heraldry of the Church.
His published works include: (verse) The Ulster Folk, Old World Ballads, Ulster Songs and Ballads, Ireland: A Song of Hope, Complete Collected Ballads, Poets of the Insurrection, The Old Scottish Border Ballads, The Catholic Heritage in English Literature, The Ulster Songs of Padraic Gregory, and many others. He looks at things as a Catholic, and writes and speaks of things as a Catholic.
His When Painting Was in Glory is his first American-published book and describes the lives and paintings of the more important artists of the Golden Age of Italian Painting from 1280 to 1580.

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Photo Kate Pragnell.
Nora Hopper (Mrs. Chesson).

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F. J. CANON SHEEHAN OF
DONERAILE *
It was certainly in the fitness of things that the man who "discovered" the late Canon Sheehan of Doneraile should have undertaken the biography of the author of "My New Curate." Just twenty years ago or to be more precise, early in March, 1898, Rev. Dr. Heuser, the accomplished editor of the American "Ecclesiastical Review," having been impressed by the publication of "Geoffrey Austin," wrote to Canon Sheehan to furnish a series of papers on Irish clerical life "written in a mingled vein of humour and serious thought." Shortly afterwards Father Sheehan forwarded the first ten chapters of the proposed serial which was to be entitled "My New Curate: Stray Leaves from an Irish Parish Priest's Diary"—and it duly ran as a serial in the "Ecclesiastical Review," the author's anonymity being preserved, not merely from censitiveness to publicity, but from unwillingness to encounter criticism similar to that which had been passed upon "Geoffrey Austin." Dr. Heuser had already predicted fame and fortune for the gifted author of "Geoffrey Austin," and, he also furthered the issue of the serial in book form. Therefore, as has been said, it was peculiarly fitting that Dr. Heuser should give us the standard biography of Canon Sheehan of Doneraile.
In a commendably brief foreword Dr. Heuser gives a delightful account of his own acquaintance with Canon Sheehan, prefaced by a few general remarks that are worth quoting:—
"The story of Patrick Augustin Sheehan is that of a modest country pastor in the South of Ireland, who made a great name as a writer of fiction, poetry, and thoughtful essays. Between 1895 and 1910 he had published fifteen volumes. They are: 'Geoffrey Austin,' 'The Triumph of Failure,' 'My New Curate,' 'Luke Delmege,' 'The Blindness of Dr. Gray,' 'Glenanaar,' 'Lisheen,' 'Miriam Lucas,' 'The Queen's Fillet,' 'Under the Cedars and the Stars,' 'Parerga,' 'The Intellectuals,' 'Cithara Mea' (a volume of poems), and 'Mariae Corona' (sermons in honour of Our Lady). Besides these he wrote a number of Essays and Criticisms. Another novel dealing with the Irish uprising of 1867, and bearing the title, 'The Graves of Kilmorna,' was published after his death. Some of his books gained at once an international reputation, and were translated into German, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Hungarian, Slavonic, and Russian (Ruthenian). These writings not only reveal his special gifts as a thinker and writer, but they allow us to form a fair estimate of his character as a man; of his aims and ideals as a priest and pastor of souls; and they record many actual experiences which gave direction and emphasis to these aims.
"Canon Sheehan wrote his novels as a travelled man tells his adventures to young folk. His poetic gift made him clothe the incidents in the vesture of romance, with a moral vista behind the action of his story to draw the attention of the reader to higher things. Although his figures were mostly copied from the life around him, a certain sense of fitness and a natural delicacy caused him so to modify the form of his characterplay as to make it impossible for the general public to point the finger to any individual and say: This is the man. But those who knew the Canon and the relations that shaped his visions or influenced his motives in writing, could in many cases trace the sources of his immediate inspirations to definite places and persons. His mode of life tended towards retirement, and apart from an absorbing devotion to his duties as parish priest the outside world saw him rarely, and then only as the interpreter of some particular message such as his office as a preacher or lecturer led him to take up for the time."
From the time of the appearance of "Geoffrey Austin" and "The Triumph of Failure," a small section of reviewers had endeavoured to besmirch the fame of the author under the plea that he had cast aspersions upon Irish character and faith, had criticised the Catholic clergy in a distorted fashion, and had given a rap to the curriculum of studies at Maynooth College. One of the reviews in the "Independent" was keenly resented by Canon Sheehan, who wrote of it to the present writer as "that piece of savagery," while the review of "My New Curate" in the "United Irishman" was equally hostile.
It is a truism that an author is not the best judge of his own work, and hence it is not surprising to learn that Canon Sheehan regarded "The Triumph of Failure" as "the most careful thing I have written," and "my best book." Most critics are now agreed that while "My New Curate" broke fresh ground, and while there is much fine writing in "The Triumph of Failure," Canon Sheehan will probably live as the author of "Luke Delmege" and "Mariae Corone".
Among the many clerical friends who helped to stimulate Canon Sheehan into further excursions into Irish pastoral preserves were:—Bishop O'Doherty, Monsignor O'Riordan, Dr. Stang, Dr. Hogan, Father Tom Finlay, S.J.; Father Matthew Russell, S.J.; Father George O'Neill, S.J.; Canon William Barry, Bishop Browne, Bishop Brady, Bishop Whiteside, Father Henry Browne, S.J.; Dr. Kelly, and others. Incidentally we learn that Canon Sheehan was anxious for a good notice in the FREEMAN'S JOURNAL of "The Triumph of Failure," and that said notice was penned by the late W. P. Coyne, while the notice in the "Independent" was by the late John O'Mahony.
From a letter written by Canon Sheehan to his biographer, dated June 7th, 1905, we learn that the unselfish pastor of Doneraile had assigned to the Bishop of Cloyne, and trustees all his literary property "for the support of the sick and aged priests of this (Cloyne) diocese."
Another unselfish act of Canon Sheehan's was the destruction of his two manuscript volumes of Memoirs. Dr. Heuser tells us of the fate of these autobiographical memoirs—"A few days before his death, the Canon called his brother and asked him to go over with him his letters and other papers. These he had already carefully arranged and tied together with notes indicating their dates and contents, evidently with a view to their final disposition. Placing his hand on the Memoirs of his own life, he said to his brother: 'These might do harm to others; let us destroy them.' And then and there the volumes of manuscript were thrown into the open grate, while the dying priest watched the red flames as they cropt from sheet to sheet and curled to brown and black, until the glow died down, leaving nothing of the pages but the flaky tinder with its edges of ashy gray."
It is remarkable that Canon Sheehan, as we learn from his biographer, rarely changed a word in his manuscript, and he scarcely ever revised or re-read what he had written "currente calamo"; indeed, his exquisite handwriting (of which the present writer had numerous specimens) was an index of how little trouble his thought-arrangement or the refining of his imagery cost him.
Probably the most interesting portion of the present biography is Part III, dealing with the pastoral life of Canon Sheehan at Doneraile. Dr. Heuser gives a charming account of the topography of the parish, and the excellent parish priests that laboured there during the eighteenth century, including Father Owen O'Keeffe, the Irish poet. But we are here given the intimate life of the pastor of souls, his solicitude for his flock, his preaching and teaching, his labours in regard to the Land Purchase Act, his educational work, his charity to the poor, his zeal for the beauty of God's House, and his relationship to priests and religious.
In a word, this is a model of what a biography should be. It is a fascinating volume, and is beautifully printed and illustrated. All admirers of Canon Sheehan's writings must feel deeply grateful to Dr. Heuser for his satisfying biographical work.
W. H. G. F.
"Canon Sheehan of Doneraile. The Story of

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IRISH AUTHORS: No. 8
MAURICE WALSH
Cursini Publicitas Dec 1945
Every man to his own trade—if he knows what that trade should be. Most of us don't. Probably, very few of us that write books shouldn't write books at all, and, doubtless, booksellers' counters are overflowing with volumes that should never have been written. Such would seem to be the opinion of our censors, and they might be right at that.
So I may be flattering myself when I claim that I am an honest-to-God plain storyteller without qualification. At any rate I started apprenticeship at an early age—in my teens—but I did not become what might be called a professional until I was forty. I was unlucky—or otherwise—in that I had a taste for reading and the means of pandering to it, for my father was one
of those unique Kerry famerics who possessed and loved books. I was brought up on most of the romantic and classical writers from "Monk" Lewis to Charles Reade, from Swift to Thackeray, from Sterne to Dickens. My father, of course, held that there was no storyteller later than Charles Reade; and he held that, outside the Bible, the best story ever written was Les Miserables. I read even prejudiced Carlyle before I was twenty, and am inclined to boast that I am one of the few that waded through his fourteen volumes on one Frederick the Great. In poetry, Maud touched the high and sombre lights for me until I came upon Hertha which, I should say, is by a now obscured poet called Swinburne. My shortcoming was that I could not abide the Essayists—not even Hazlitt, not even Lamb.
Every inveterate reader, before he comes to the age of reason, has the itch to write a book the like of which was never seen on land or sea. So naturally enough, at an early age I started imitating my favourite authors. Anyone will tell you that I have done nothing else since. One should not imitate another writer unless the other writer is a Russian, and then one's work will have the austere, emotionless, atmosphereless quality of the best translation. That is the ideal, but it doesn't sell.
At that time in Ireland journals (like The Shamrock, The Emerald, The Weekly Freeman) which did nurture and encourage young writers as Chambers's Journal did and does in Scotland. My first successful effort at about the age of sixteen—was not a Wild West story. I knew enough to avoid that field. It was a Bushranging story, of course, and it won me a two guinea prize in The Weekly Freeman. The editor was a man of ungoverned suspicion, for my pastor down in Kerry had to vouch that I had spent all my brief days in Australian back-blocks or that I had not copied the story word-for-word from Robbery under Arms. I was never within ten thousand miles of Australia and I had not copied the story—not word-for-word—so I got the two guineas, and thought I would never again see a poor day. I have.
After that first success I won the two guinea prize at reasonable intervals. And then I thought I would try the long and back-breaking stuff. My trusting parents had sent me to Dublin to study for the Civil Service, but I spent most of the time in the National Library reading the Annals of the Four
Illustration by Alan Reeves from The Irish Times.
Masters and the State Papers of Elizabeth. The result was that I failed my examination and got the material for an historical romance, that I sold later on to The Emerald. As a serial it ran for twenty weeks and I got twenty in those days. Why, if a man had a shilling on Saturday night 'tisn't aunt he'd call the Queen. For that solitary shilling he could and did acquire himself two pints of Guinness, an ounce of tobacco, a box of matches, an evening paper, a seat in the gallery at Dan Lowry's and his horse-tram fare home. Another sixpince and he could make a beast of himself. By the way, the name of that serial was Eudmon Blake, a hectic romance of the days of Red Hugh, with flowing blood and love, and the small Sassenach potatoes but too many in the drill.*
In 1901 I entered the best Department in the whole Civil Service—the Excise—and spent the next dozen years here and there about the British Isles, the United Kingdom as they then were—only Ireland didn't know it, as Mr. Dooley says. Wandering done, I settled down in the Province of Moray on the edge of the Highlands, a most convenient place where a man on the loose foot may swing south to the Grampians; west to Skye; north to John o' Groats, and east to all the distilleries on Speyside. I did all that swinging, not forgetting the distilleries that sometimes seemed to swing of themselves. And in my spare time I did a little Excise work.
But I did not long. I was too busy living. But I returned to Ireland in the winter of 1922, and a nostalgia for the Highlands compelled me to write. I knew no one in a Dublin dig, the Civil War was on, and night sniping was the popular pastime. To solace myself I thought I would try to recapture the glamour of outdoor life in the Highlands. So I wrote The Key above the Door in three winter months, sent it in for a £500 prize competition, had it returned without a word, let it lie about for months until a friend brought it outright, but they did not hold me to the letter of my contract, and Chambers and I became and are now members of one happy family.
I do not know that I owe any gratitude to that friend who made me send that manuscript to Edinburgh, for he compelled one to go on writing outdoor romantic novels—While Rivers Run, The Small Dark Man and so on—until finally I became a mere professional grinding out a book every couple of years or so.
Like all writers, and most men, I no longer read anything but detective stories. All other modern books are only a drug on the market. In fact I myself have started to write detective stories. My last book The Spanish Lady was tending that way and my yarn The Min in Brown now in the hands of the printer and binder is a plain story of detection with a modicum of love and human interest. It should be in the hands of a disgusted public before Christmas.
I am not sure but I think that altogether I have written twelve or thirteen books. One written in 1939 has not yet been published on this side of the Atlantic. It is called Son of Apple and is based on an old folk tale translated for public by Catriona McLeod. Chambers are waiting for good paper to publish it in a belles lettres edition. My son, Maurice, who is my severest critic, frequently says: "Dad, your Son of Apple is easily the best thing you ever wrote. It will sell a million copies, and Walt Disney will make a great film of it—have you a fiver to spare?" To all whom it may concern, I invariably fall for that sort of flattery—but I never dig up the fiver.
* I used the material later on for Blackcock's Feather.

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Miss Dora Sigerson (Mrs. Clement Shorter).

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Mrs. Katherine Tynan Hinkson.

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Supplement given away with the Xmas Issue of THE PEASANT, 1907.
Journs successfully
Mr. Rooney
"pear na münntire."
Patriot, Poet, and Essayist.
BORN, October 20th, 1873.
DIED, May, 1901.
We'll shrine his name and story bright
to guide us on,
Till hope has reached its haven, till gloom
and grief are gone.
Till Freeman's hands may fashion the
name and fame on high,
Of all who trod that pathway and showed
the way to die.

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W. & D. DOWNEY,
MRS. BRYANT.
57 & 61, Ebbery Street, London.
J. Sophie Bryant

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LITERARY NOTES AND NOTIONS
PRINCIPLES OF FREEDOM.
I said a fortnight ago that Count Plunkett's book of poems had a message for the Irish people to-day as timely as was the message of "The Sovereign People" at another vital hour. This may be said even more emphatically of Terence MacSwiney's Principles of Freedom (Talbot Press, Island). It is not too much to say that this book is as important as the writings of Padraig Pearse themselves. It is a sort of apology, an exhaustive statement of faith by one of the greatest minds of modern Ireland. The struggle of the small and enfeebled nation against an immense military state rendered marvellous and already all but successful by sacrifices and martyrdom like that of the early Christians who saw a new world beyond the great Pagan Empire which then blackened the world, is here explained as far as explanation in words is possible. It was no more combative instinct, that made men in darker days than these throw away wonderful intellectual gifts, great earthly prospects, happiness, and life itself, in what appeared to all the world a hopelessly mad protest against what was surely immutable. It was zeal that could only spring from some great spiritual vision that encouraged men to endure the horrors of the past five years with no obvious prospect of success. This book tells us better perhaps than anything else that has been written, what it was that inspired, first the patriot leaders, and second their humbler and often nameless disciples who loyally supported them and suffered in their turn in every remote corner of the land.
AN APOSTOLIC BOOK.
Any mere ebullition of racial passion would have been crushed by the trampling that followed Easter Week, or by a week's operations of the Black-and-Tans. But a cause like MacSwiney's, a cause like that of Stephen and Sebastian, could not be crushed by brute force. That fact has begun to be realised by those who sought thus to crush it. They, MacSwiney discovered many of MacSwiney's own countrymen, for it is he that wields the hammer that knows how unbreakable the anvil is. Not that we are to suppose that the holiday-makers at Gairloch envisioned all that MacSwiney stood for, but they began to feel that they were struggling against an irresistible tide. It is not for them, but for us and the generations to come in Ireland, that MacSwiney wrote his apostolic chapters on such subjects as Moral Force, Loyalty, Womanhood, The Language, Literature and Freedom, Religion, Intellectual Freedom, Militarism, and Empire.
PROPHETIC WORDS.
Most, if not all, of this book was written before the war. The most striking chapters were penned when Ireland was concerned with what sounds to-day like the name of something pre-historic—Home Rule. MacSwiney was glad that Home Rule seemed to be assured, for, like Pearse, he believed it would be a useful instrument towards the achievement of true freedom. Above all, he regarded the settling of the Home Rule controversy as essential to the Home Rule controversy as essential to the saw that so long as that controversy lasted the true issue was obscured. He hoped that when Home Rule was established the air would be cleared, and people would see that the issue was now a clear one between nationality and jingoism. "One day," he wrote, "the consciousness of the country would be electrified with a great deed or a great sacrifice,
and the multitude would break from lethargy or prejudice and march with a shoutful freedom in a true, a brave and a beautiful sense. We must work and prepare for that hour."
"OUR TIME HAS ITS OWN TRIAL."
That was true foresight. It was an example of the deadly consistency which runs through every line that MacSwiney wrote. In another chapter he speaks of the need for spiritual earnestness, and declares that men must still be ready to sacrifice themselves for principle. "Christians," he wrote, "might well find exemplars in the early martyrs, those who for their principles went so readily to the lions. One may anticipate the complacent rejoinder that 'this is not so exacting an age; men are not asked to die for religion now; and one may in turn reply, that perhaps our age may not be without occasion for such high services, but that we may be unwilling to go to the lions. Our time has its own trial—by no means unexacting let me tell you—but we quietly sleep it by; it is much easier to revive the infidel." That is the essence of MacSwiney's teaching. To him the cause he suffered for was identical with the cause for which Saint Sebastian was shot full of arrows. It was religion to him. The Irish cause to-day was a vital part of the cause of Right, and allegiance to it was a high moral duty.
WORDS OF A SEER.
If MacSwiney had not died as he died I doubt if this book would ever have been published. Not that it lacks literary read. On the contrary, one has seldom read more beautiful prose, eloquent yet classic. But as with the books of Holy Writ, it is the significance of the authorship that gives this wonderful writing its power. Other men have said that Imperialism is a bad thing, that religious differences should be grapped with and ended, not played with and perpetuated, and that art must be sincere to be good; but when Terence MacSwiney says these things he speaks as one who sees realities, one whose vision is direct and immediate like that of spirits. His great faith, by which he cheerfully passed from this world into the invisible, confident of the future of Ireland as common men are confident about money matters, this marked him as one who saw all things sub specie aeternitatis. What he says on any subject comes to us, like a message from beyond this world. It is the judgment of one inspired. We recognise him now for what he is by reason of that world-amazing deed of last year, and for this reason we read his words, not, with bewilderment, but with understanding.
A CAUSE THAT HAS NO END.
MacSwiney was one of those who never doubted for an instant the ultimate triumph of the Irish cause. He reminds us that Emmet said not "If my country takes her place amongst the nations of the earth," but "When my country takes her place," he wrote as the epitome of Irish history. He wrote as the "freedom of Irish trade". He quotes a writer who says "A nation of men unanimously bent on freedom or conquest can easily confound the artificial actions out of all proportion to their grants," and MacSwiney adds "Yes, and by our unanimity for freedom we mean to prove it true." But he was not blind to the dangers of freedom. He did not expect that Irish freedom would mean a certain setting-up of heaven on earth. "That we shall win our freedom," he wrote, "I have no doubt; that we shall use it well I am not so certain, for see how sadly misused
it is abroad through the werly to-day." Like Pearse, MacSwiney looked far beyond the mere winning of freedom, and for him the Irish cause ran into the future as far as the Judgment Day. "We should make this resolution" he wrote,—"our future history shall be more glorious than that of any contemporary state. We shall look for prosperity, no doubt, but let our enthusiasm be for beautiful living; we shall build up our strength, yet not for conquest, but as a pledge of brotherhood and for the defence of the weaker ones of the earth."
OTHER IRELANDS.
MacSwiney was an enemy of imperialism not merely because it has weighed on Ireland, not even alone because it murdered millions in this country by famine and the sword, laid low our art and degraded our ancient houses, but because it was radically and essentially evil wherever it appears throughout the earth. "We shall conquer," he wrote. "Let the enemy count his dreadnoughts and number off his legions—where are now the legions of Ireland and Carthage?" Not only must he again trapped by it, "but," wrote MacSwiney, "must rathe

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IRISH P.E.N. (DUBLIN CENTRE)
Dublin P.E.N. will hold a Dinner at Jury's Hotel, Dublin,
on Saturday, 10th March, at 6.30 p.m. prompt, when the guest
of honour will be
MR. D. L. KELLEHER
Chairman: Seumas O'Sullivan, President.
Those wishing to attend will kindly notify the Hon.
Secretary not later than the 8th inst.
Each Member of P.E.N. may bring a Guest.
Dinner 5.6.
KATHLEEN O'BRENNAN,
Hon. Secretary,
44 OAKLEY ROAD.
TELEPHONE 91245.

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Ready April
COUNTIES OF CONTENTION
by BENEDICT KIELY
Demy 8vo Boards. 7/6 net approx.
A Study of the Origins and Implications
of the Partition of Ireland.
This original study of Ireland's main political problem does not confine itself to a mere chronological narration of events between Carson's speech at Craigavon in 1911 and the passing of the Government of Ireland Act in 1920. These events are skilfully placed in their appropriate historical background with an imaginative and literary power that never allows itself to misuse facts. Carson on the platform opening his campaign against Home Rule is seen in silhouette against the struggles of the Irish nineteenth century, including the history of Orangeism back to the battle of the Diamond. Opposed to Carson is the figure of John Redmond and the background of Irish Parliamentarianism. More vitally opposed is the new Ireland that announced itself in the Revolution of 1916. The idea of Partition is followed from its first proposal to its appearance in the Partition Act.
The author looks beyond the material facts and figures to the spiritual partition expressed and emphasised by the present political division. As an Ulsterman he has keenly felt the effects of that division, and his approach is sincerely designed to find the compromise of understanding that would end the misunderstandings of the past, teach Irishmen to live at peace with each other, and solve forever the thing that generations of Englishmen have known as "the Irish problem."
Benedict Kiely is a Dublin journalist, who hails from a town across the Border in Co. Tyrone. He is a graduate of University College, Dublin, an Associate of the Irish Historical Society, and his writings are well known to readers of the Capuchin periodicals, the Standard and various other newspapers and journals.
He has made a special study of the problem of Partition, and the result is a book which shows clear logical thinking, well reasoned arguments and balanced unbiased judgements.
The book is well printed and bound, and has an attractive dust cover in red, white and black.
Counties of Contention
by
Benedict Kiely

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IRISH AUTHORS: No. 11.
FRANK O'CONNOR
My parents were poor and I was an only child. That meant that from the beginning I was thrown very much upon myself, so I learned to read when I was still very young. The only papers I could afford or come by were English school stories. Those papers have been brilliantly and devastatingly analysed by George Orwell, and I feel sure they were just as snobbish and silly as he suggests. They dealt with young fellows whose fathers had titles and cars and who had lots of money to spend in the tuck shop. They were, I am certain, just as bad for me as love stories for a servant girl, except that I am not certain that love stories are bad for servant girls, nor have I ever been able to bring myself to believe that Mme. Bovary really did go to pieces as a result of reading the novels of Scott.
The rest of my education was acquired haphazard in a public library. It was a very good library, run by an Englishman who took his work seriously; yet, in spite of that, and in spite of the fact that I became a public librarian myself, public libraries seem to me terrible places with a degrading air of institutionalism and of pseudo-professionalism. They still function as a branch of local government without reference to any system of education. I know that your true auto-didact is a tough Alpine plant, and though not very beautiful in himself, is guaranteed to grow almost anywhere with the minimum of attention, but it seems to me that the minimum requires that the public library should be utilised as part of an adult educational system; should be a centre for lectures, recitals and exhibitions of art sufficient to ensure that the borrowers know at least how to use it.
Thanks to public libraries my own education was as slow and painful as it could well be, given my temperament. Those were the days before borrowers were allowed even to see the shelves and one had to choose one's books from a card catalogue. School stories apart, the only things I knew anything about were the two things which every Irish child knows far too much about: politics and religion. Having almost poisoned my mind by reading every standard Irish patriotic book, I got on to the works of Canon Sheehan, a clerical novelist with a delightful habit of quoting Goethe's poems in the original. With the simple optimism of the auto-didact, I decided that it would be a good idea to learn German and meanwhile to read all Goethe in English. Somehow or other I managed to do both in a sort of way; heaven knows how, for I had left school before we got so far as long division, and I was twenty before I found out what the simplest grammatical terms meant. I tried my hand at writing, in Irish, another language which I was under the impression I knew, and finally something I published in a weekly paper attracted the attention of an old teacher of mine, a fine novelist, who, before I could waste any more of my life, introduced me to English literature. He also introduced me to Seán O Faolain, a few years older than myself. When I was twenty-three or four I got a job in a public library with a poet who made me read Yeats, Pound, Eliot and the rest of the moderns, criticised my early efforts at writing and introduced me to A.E. who published my first articles and poems; and to him I owe the most pleasant period of my education.
The above extract is taken from An Appreciation of Literature by Frank O'Connor (Metropolitan Publishing Co., 3/6). Copyright is reserved.

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Famous Irish Books Re-viewed (No. 1)
STANDISH O'GRADY'S "THE FLIGHT OF THE EAGLE"
READERS have forgotten how long is Standish O'Grady dead. I can never forget visits to Sandymount nearly forty years ago and meeting the author of "The Flight of the Eagle": the prose-epic of the Hugh Roe—Red Hugh O'Donnell from Dublin Castle in "thy golden time o' great Eliza!"
For Standish O'Grady, Elizabethan Ireland was more alive than Victoria's. Soaking himself in the State Papers, brooding over the Four Masters and chanting O'Clery's "Bardic Life of Hugh Roe," he lived in their world. Philip O'Sullivan's
He claimed to dramatise history in the manner of Carlyle. He was far more picturesque than his master and never fell into turgid Teutonic metaphysics. He was fond of spraying his pages with Latin and Gaelic phrases and nicknaming for his characters live as they live in Walter Scott.
Who can read "The Flight of the Eagle" and not conceive a new vision of Royal Harry and a Viceroy whom the Irish Chiefs adored for a man. "It was a strange flock but the flock suited the shepherd and the shepherd the flock. Grew and pro-rew liked each other well." Such is O'Grady's summary of Elizabethan's viceroy! Ireland was never so loyal appreciating the towering temper of this figment of a King.
The chiefs were controlled by the cruel system of tarking and keeping hostages in the Grate of Dublin Castle. The stealing of Red Hugh from the North by the clever trick of the ship with wines was a smirch on Perrott's name: but it kept Tir Connall quiet during the Armada. The O'Donnells sent thirty captured Spaniards as a handsome gift to the Castle would be sent back in exchange. He was too valuable.
O'Grady's pen glittered as he described the trapping of the boy and his Sweeny and Gallagery guardians in Lough Swilly. Scott never found so exciting and fateful moment in Scotch Calendars.
Thenceforth Red Hugh languished in the Bermingham Tower with a few other boys who were liable to be executed, should their relations give trouble at home. And at home was ever plotting the Ingean Dhu, "the daughter of the O'Donnells," who was holding the O'Donnellship for her son Red Hugh.
The pages are crowded with
men of war and art, deftly introduced by O'Grady's phrases: for instance:
"Would the reader care to glance at the author of the Facery Queen and see the dreaming man wide awake, his oaten reed racked for a while and singing robes on their peg?"
What fantastic beings were abroad in Ireland—Sir Walter Raleigh, Archbishop Miller Magrath, yellow-haired Turlough O'Hagan, Sir Felim O'Toole and Feach O'Byrne—all revolving round the central plot, the escape of the Eagle—the Irish Aiglon.
Perrott got no luck by his Irish deputyship. "The eternal tragic and the tears of things have begun at last for close as the pious Four observe:
fingers, touched sweetly that night his stony lyre." A lovely sentence for you, preachers and appreciators of English prose!
This second time Red Hugh gallops North through "a storm of hoofs" by the one ford over the Liffey where Fitzwilliam, the new deputy, had failled to set guards. The Brown Geraldine conducts him and Garret Moore of Mellifont hides him on his way, the Moores who bred the future Lords Drogheda, but they had entered thereby into Irish Saga. As O'Grady wrote:
"The Moore's secret was well preserved. Even the F.M. writing in the reign of James I are careful not to mention the name of the 'who befriended Red Hugh. Whatever storms of war
Sir Shane Leslie.
By
SIR SHANE LESLIE
there is no human glory but its end is sorrow." O'Grady had a ghastly touch. Of the witness against Perrott he writes a chapter headed "Emergence of the Noseless One." And what could be more grim than the escape of the boys from the Castle feeling their way through the tarred heads of rebels impaled like vermin on a game-keeper's pillory: "proud, horrible tiara of this Virgin Queen of Irish castles."
Red Hugh was brought back by Felimy O'Toole who could not afford to be at war with the Castle. The next attempt was dear companion Red Hugh's Shane O'Neill, died somewhere in Glenmalure. Look at the Three Rock Mountain and think of the boys lying in the snow, for it was at Christmas that they escaped. "Out of prison, darkness and the jaws of death where the son of Shane perished. Red Hugh ascended, a historic star, bright but baleful, and from horrid locks shook pestilence and war. Of the sons of Shane none ever got rightly over, as it were with one consent, pressing them down so great was man's dread of the blood of Shane."
O'Grady's hints tell us more of history than the historians: and his ecstasies open out the old Gaelic world as only revealed to poets and prophets. It was a poet who wrote with O'Grady's pen on Red Hugh's escape: "Baleful Oure, with fluent
and devastation rolled down this way from the North, corn or horn was never touched on the Moore estates; Garret Moore and his people could sleep in peace."
All is leading up to Red Hugh's passage through the gates of the North, and as he passes the sacred and legendary mountain of Slieve Gullion, all the tradition, of which he is to be the last champion, rises out of rock and lake. O'Grady flings away the scholar's pen to assume the mantle of the Bard. Then was written the greatest chapter of historical and supernatural romance in all Irish and Anglo-Irish literature.
Touched the sir Walter never. John Mitchel only uttered echoes on his sibilant political reed. The great Carleton remains a Firbolgian bog-trotter working in the lowlands compared to Standish O'Grady's majestic invocation of the past as he brings down the magical light upon the red locks of a boy riding into the North.
It runs like an incantation, and yet this is a book for school-boys as well as a cure for Irish politics and all sicknesses of our days: a cure also for pessimism and solitary drinking and for all our pettiness and bitterness of old Standish O'Grady, whom I recall standing by the great sands that stretch into Dublin Bay, and who watching of old, "the red sun rise gloriously from the waves of the Irish Sea." To day I do not find "The Flight of the Eagle" on
the bookstalls, nor even in the shelves of those who should read it like a Breviary. Here is but one passage in that wonderful chapter:—
"O melancholy lake, shaped like the moon! Lake uplifted high on the arms of Slieve Gullion; boggy, desolate, thick-strewn with grey boulders on thy eastern shore and, on thy western, regarded askance by ruddy as with blood-aloof observant of thy never-ending sorrow; unfathomable Druid lake....."
"Sky-neighbouring lake vexed by all the winds! mournful, sibilant, teeming fount of thy vast phantasmal mythus, O Ultonia!
"Of that mythus, all that it tended, the last great secular champion, rides to-day round Slieve Gullion's base soon to reappear, how differently! at the head of his armies, the eagle of the North, the swift leopard of Tir-Connall, vainly too, despite all his bravery. Such is the power of the weaving stars!"
No literary movement that all the root from old Standish O'Grady's writings. Wherever his ashes lie and wherever his books are scattered, a salute from one Irish writer at last.

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From a Painting by Mercier.
Engraved by Deane.
Believe me
your affectionate brother
Serald Spitzen

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IRISH AUTHORS : 4
DESMOND RYAN
I was born in London on August 27th, 1893, near what seemed to me then the perfect village of Dulwich. Nearby there was a hawthorn-fringed hill where a blind man sat by day and horse-buses and hansoms travelled carefully downwards at night, and somewhere beyond the hill an inn with a Red Fox. Often I watched the stars over the hill and wondered when I would see the Fairy City of Dublin from which my grandmother came or the Donegal of which my mother often spoke or the Tipperary of which my father told gay and witching tales whenever he broke his habitual silence about every Christmas or so. My uncle, Thomas Boyd, who was a poet read me his poems and declaimed Shakespeare at me even before I went to school and I enjoyed in the meantime a mixed literary education given by me to myself : penny dreadfuls about Dick Turpin, the Encyclopedia Britannica, any printed page from Tennyson and Mark Twain to Zola and Wolfe Tone, and Arthur Griffith's United Irishman which my uncle read regularly and sometimes wrote a poem for. At school I and my friend Eugene battered and were battered by our school fellows with equal fortunes because we had the perversity to favour the Russian side in the Russo-apanese war because, and only because, England favoured Japan. Some years later, Eugene and I were at school in Dublin, our teacher was Patrick Pearse.
It was some years before that I had first come to Ireland to live down in County Meath where my father was editing the Irish Peasant, the adventures of which he later told in a book with the ironical title The Pope's Green Island. My first sight of Tara and Dublin was in my thirteenth year, and for the next sixteen years I saw the rise, growth and climax of that national uprising conveniently known as Sinn Fein. Many things happened to me between that beginning and end : as a pupil, teacher and secretary to Patrick Pearse, as a Volunteer in the G.P.O. in 1916, in Frongoch as an internee, and finally as a journalist on the Freeman's Journal. All these things explain why my books form the list they do, the various phases of one theme : The Story of a Success, an account of St. Enda's College, Pearse asked me to edit with an additional chapter ; The Man Called Pearse ; a translation of Le Roux's biography, The Life of Pearse ; James Connolly ; studies of de Valera, Unique Dictator, of the Irish language movement, The Sword of Light ; of John Devoy and the Femians, The Phænix Flame ; a novel of Michael Collins, The Invisible Army ; St. Eustace and the Albatross, a high-spirited fantasy which pained my more serious friends ; an autobiography, Remembering Sion, the book I like best of them all, and which I wrote with all the ferocity and tenderness of exile some years after I went back to London in 1922 ; and a pamphlet, Ireland Whose Ireland? which I wrote to explain the "Irish Question" to the Good Briton and to myself.
If my books have a motive I think it is to explain the complexities of Ireland to myself. Anyway, I find it impossible to keep off the subject or away from Dublin to which I returned in 1939, just before the second World War. The last book I have written is a biography of Seán Tracy for which I gathered materials in County Tipperary in the autumn of 1939, a chronicle of a selfless and single-minded man, from the memories of his neighbours and comrades. And just now, I am working on the letters of John Devoy.

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ALEXANDER IRVINE
(AUTHOR OF "MY LADY OF THE CHIMNEY CORNER.")
PORTRAIT BY J. LANGTRY-LYNAS.
PRESENTED BY MRS. BEAMISH.

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Passing of "The Tailor" of Gougane Barra
WHEN you pass Inchigeela on the back road from Cork to Bantry the country gets wilder. Between you and the mountains lies the little village of Ballingeary, a hamlet of firs and sycamores with a pleasant, battered-looking sandstone church facing the white-washed schoolhouse. Beyond this a road leads off up the mountainside to Gougane Barra, one of the loneliest spots in Ireland.
The black mountain, all vertical lines, swoops down to the lake, where a few fields of unearthly pallor are reflected in the still, black water.
It is, as the country people say, a place that would be gloomy on the twenty-first of June. To see it at its tragic best you should come in the depth of winter, when the valley is loud with the roaring of streams and a cottage window reflected in the lake is the only sign of human life you may see for miles.
On such nights it used to be one of the greatest experiences of life to walk back down the mountain road to a little labourer's cottage that stood with its gable to the road. You walked up a slope to the door, lifted the latch, and found the little kitchen crowded.
A group of old men, their hats drawn over their eyes, their hands joined on their sticks, sat along the settle facing you.
An old woman with a beautiful face was bustling about the table making the tea. Other guests filling on a butter-box beside the fire was an old man with a round, toothless, merry face. You noticed after a white he was a cripple.
HE EXCITED YOU
Tim Buckley, The Tailor of Gougane Barra, was a man who would have been remarkable in any society, and the countrymen who came into his little cottage at night were no fools. One old man had a voice of extraordinary sweetness, and faultless taste in music and poetry. He would sing a song and interrupt himself to point out the beauty of the phrasing. The Tailor had nothing like his perfect taste.
The Tailor and Ansty.
Timothy Buckley
The death took place yesterday week of Timothy Buckley, the Tailor of Eric Cross's book, "The Tailor and Ansty."
but he had something else. That shrewd, crippled little Kerryman had meditated upon life and learned to consolate its tragedies. "There was a star danced, and under that I was born." I think if I had to choose his epitaphe I should pick that line of Shpitach should.
In the phrase of the country people, he was "a great Irishian." No one had more old stories and sayings; more prophecies and interpretations; what the Old Man said, and what the Garlach Coileanach said, or how the Marbhna of St. Patrick originated, and what was the meaning of the line, "I saved Joachim from the shipwreck"; he could have talked for a year and a day about all these things and never come to the end of them; but there are other old men in Kerry and Connemara who can do as much, the Tailor did.
A KERRYMAN
Largely I think it was that crippled leg; for either our afflictions master us or we master them, and very early in life the Tailor must have mastered his, and gaive him dignity and wisdom and assurance. To a lesser extent, he was a Kerryman, an outsider, and he belonged to a generation to whom that wall of mountain between Kerry and Cork meant as much as the Rhine means in European politics. He remembered the terrible faction fights that took place there, and
could tell you the story of a young man who refused to join in them and was murdered by his own family to wipe out the disgrace.
He could tell you of a family who were warned that they would be evicted if they joined further in them, and yet marched out to the faction fight, seventy sleans strong.
Whatever it was, he had astonishing eyes; small and bright and piercing, and nothing pathetic, dramatic or funny that had ever parished in scaped them. He had the novelist's flair for the significant detail. When telling you a story about a dead man's harmless oath, "Dar cnis na mbac!" He would remember the way the old shaving woman, who would shave you for tuppence, cursed: "May the devil bury you by a ditch with a furzebush growing through your back!" He would remember the old man who lived in "The Bower" all alone with his cat, and how when the old man burst into song, "We'll plant a tree in old Ireland," the cat, Moonlighter by name, would join in. He would remember the death of the cat, and how the old man waked it as if it was a Christian, and in a strange way, as if you were reading a chapter of Dickens, your heart would go out to the old man in his loneliness. That was, perhaps, a little the Kerryman, but even more the cripple, whom life had put on one side, but to whom it had given
wisdom to make up for his great loss.
STYLE OF TALKING
He had a style of talking as strongly flarked as his personality. His butter box was "Cornucopia"; the average decent fellow "a jolly cupper"; a man with real goodness of heart "a saint," while one very important figure in the referee to in that mountain cottage but as "The Old Child."
Worldly importance didn't count with the Tailor. He had his old age pension, his cottage and his cow, and no one in the world was richer in his own estimation.
He had friends of every class and creed and country, and the post might bring a letter from America or France.
All were his "scholars," as he called them with innocent vanity.
I have never met anybody quite like him nor do I hope to. There are few of whom one can honestly say that life has been a little bit better for knowing them and poorer for their loss. Tim Buckley was one. Winter will come to the Glen again, and the little windows will be reflected in the lake, and maybe people will still talk poetry in the cottages, but there will never be another house where a traveller can lift the latch and be sure that he will come out in the starlight wiser or happier than he went in.
S. O'L.

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16
PATHFINDER
PRESENTING
George Bernard Shaw
MONDAY of last week a new play called Geneva opened on Broadway. It was assured of a brilliant first night, for its author was the oldest and most famous of living playwrights—George Bernard Shaw, aged 83. Shaw is pressing close on the records set by Sophocles, who lived to write Greek tragedy at 89, and Voltaire, who was writing plays when he died at 84. Geneva is Shaw's forty-ninth play, and he is now working on his fiftieth.
Shaw is the world's most successful self-advertising agency. His wit and startling opinions on every subject under the sun have made him famous in some fields just as his vegetarianism and Socialism have made him famous in others. One of his plays, Pygmalion, achieved a mass audience last year when it was made into a hit movie. His skill as a publicist has made his white-bearded, benignly Mephistopholean face and the initials G. B. S. known wherever type is printed. With characteristic modesty he publicly acknowledges himself to be the world's greatest playwright. Some of his plays, notably Saint Joan, are already rated as at least semi-classics. Other well-known plays are Arms and the Man, Major Barbara, Back to Methuselah, Androcles and the Lion, Candida and Man and Superman.
Geneva, which went to Broadway from a Canadian tour, shocked his left-wing friends when first produced in August, 1938, at the Malvern Festival in England. Its big scene, the trial of three dictators—Herr Battler, Signor Bombardone and General Flanco—before the League of Nations, did not give the dictators the worst of it in the first version. (Shaw has been steadily re-writing Geneva to keep pace with European events).
HIS Socialist friends accused him of admiration for Hitler and Mussolini. Shaw replied that although he "would not like Hitler in Great Britain," yet he "was not sure that it would not be an improvement over the social democracy that is not real democracy at all." Though an "advanced" Socialist who believes in absolute equality of income for all, Shaw has never thought the mass capable of governing itself. His rather pessimistic conclusion to Geneva is that "Man is not a political animal."
Like most of Shaw's sayings, that is probably half jest and half earnest. He long ago learned that the best way to get people to listen to his opinions was to make them laugh and make them gasp.
"I found that I had only to say with perfect sincerity what I seriously meant, just as it struck me, to make everybody laugh," Shaw once said. "My method is to take the utmost
International
Shaw Considers Himself the Greatest
trouble to find the right thing to say, then say it with the utmost levity. And all the time the real joke is that I am in earnest."
GEORGE Bernard Shaw, who has had more influence on the course of the 20th century English-speaking theater than any other man, was born to a shabby-genteel Irish family in Dublin on July 26, 1856. His father, a wholesale grain dealer who was also a drunkard and ashamed of it, was related to the Irish nobility. His son was a born rebel.
He rebelled at going to school, and quit at 15 to take a clerkship in a real estate office. He rebelled at the Anglican church. Finally, convinced that he was a genius to whom Ireland offered no opportunity, he threw his job in the face of his startled employer (who had raised him in four years from $54 to $420 a year), and went to London in 1876 to join his mother. Somewhat of a rebel herself, she had left her husband four years earlier to make a living teaching music.
Shaw, convinced he was a superior or person whom the world would sooner or later recognize, set himself gromly to the practice of journalism. "Practice" it was, since the man who later made a million by his pen says that from 1876 to 1885 he made only 6 pounds ($30) by writing.
He worked steadily, however, writing five novels—none were accepted—at the steady rate of five pages a day. Later Shaw said of his works: "They are the result of perfectly straightforward drudgery, persevered in every day for 25 years." The tide turned for him in 1885, when his friend William Archer got him a job as art critic for The World, a weekly paper. For the next decade, as an art, music and drama critic Shaw was a
brilliant, witty and savage apostle of modernity and Socialism, leading the British crusade for Wagner's music and Ibsen's plays.
Long before his first play, Widower's Houses, was performed in 1892 he had established his reputation as a writer and radical. As a young man with red whiskers and cracked boots, Shaw in 1884 joined the newly-founded Fabian Society, which became the most important Socialist group in Great Britain.
SHAW, already a brilliant pamphletser, forced himself to become a good speaker. For years, long after he became rich and famous, he spoke for Socialism, from platforms or soapboxes, on an average of three times a fortnight. He had his turn at practical politics when, from 1897 to 1903, he was a Borough Councillor for St. Pancras, London.
An atheist whose only God is an imperfect Life Force struggling to express itself more perfectly, Shaw is against the Christian religion because he believes its worship of Christ as God obscures the Christ he sees as a revolutionary moralist. "I am a moral revolutionary," he says of himself. "interested not in the class war but in the struggle between vitality and the artificial system of morality." He calls his comedies, designed to waken people to his ideas, "pins to stick in pigs."
A vegetarian, Shaw assured the meatless British public during the World War they would not become like him: "There are millions of vegetarians in the world, but only one Bernard Shaw." That was shortly after he had scandalized Britons by saying that if the soldiers had any sense they would shoot their officers and go home.
IN 1900 Shaw married Charlotte Payne-Townsend, a well-to-do Irishwoman and fellow Fabian, who nursed him through an illness in 1898. They have no children. Shaw once declared: "If I were a woman I should refuse to have a child for less than $10,000. A nation that will not guarantee the proper nurture of its children does not deserve to have them."
With his wife Shaw has traveled widely on the continent. In 1931, in company with Lady Astor and Lord Lothian, now British Ambassador here, he visited Russia and had a two hour audience with Stalin. He has visited the United States a few times. In this connection, he has said: "I have been careful never to say a civil word to the United States. And they just adore me."
Today the aging but still active playwright and philosopher spends most of his time at his country home, Ayot St. Lawrence, in a small village where he is a financial pillar of the church in which he has never set foot. There is a garden workhouse that revolves to catch the sun, he works on his plays and at the job of publicizing the personality and opinions of George Bernard Shaw.