STAGE IRISHMEN AND OTHERS 



" Let me implore you to recall that hasty negative." 

 Thus does Kyrle Daly, second hero of The Collegians, 

 remonstrate with Anne Chute, when she, in equally 

 splendid periods, entreats him not to give way to 

 groundless expectations, adding that it was as impos- 

 sible that he and she should ever be united as if they 

 lived in separate planets. 



A reader whose instructive privilege it has recently 

 been to study three volumes of the series entitled 

 ''Every Irishman's Library," namely, Carleton's 

 Stories of Irish Life, Gerald Griffin's The Collegians, 

 and Selections from the Works of Maria Edgeworth, 

 is compelled to admit that the interval between 

 separate planets is not greater than is the interval 

 between this present-day Ireland of 1920 and that of 

 Carleton and Griffin. After a conscientious assimila- 

 tion of the Stories of Irish Life and of The Collegians, 

 a literary digestion of the modern kind, weakly and 

 pampered, is aware of such a stupor as is often 

 associated with Sunday afternoon and an undue in- 

 dulgence in roast beef. It is a usual convention to 

 say that one " rises " from the study of a book. 

 The conscientious reader of either of these volumes, 

 classics though they may be, will, more probably, 

 crawl away on all-fours — if, indeed, the power of 

 movement remains with him. The introductions will 

 scarcely have prepared him for the effort involved in 

 a word -by-word perusal of the works whose merits 

 they so authoritatively proclaim. INIr. Darrell Figgis, 



R 241 



