es, its
sects and sets, its manner of comporting and amusing itself. The field
is a wide one, but Miss Laffan has the happy art of generalization--of
portraying a whole society in a few well-marked types. There is no
confusion of character, and though we seem to have shaken hands with all
Dublin in her pages, from great dignitaries to school-boys, the picture
is never overcrowded.

"A drop of ditch-water under a microscope" Hogan calls the society of
his native city--"everybody pushing upward on the social ladder kicking
down those behind." This zoological spectacle is not confined to Dublin,
but there appears to be a combination of strictness and indefiniteness
of precedence belonging peculiarly to that place. At the top of the
ladder, though not so firmly fixed there as before the Disestablishment,
is the Protestant set, regarding the Castle as its stronghold and
looking down on the Roman Catholic set, who reciprocate the contempt.
These grand divisions are separated by a strict line of demarcation,
even the performance of the marriage ceremony between Protestants and
Catholics being forbidden in Dublin. They contain an endless
ramification of lesser groups, whose relations we may attempt to
illustrate by quoting from the book before us an account of the mutual
position of Mrs. O'Neil and Mrs. Carew, the former the wife of a
tradesman shortly to become lord mayor, the latter a "'vert" from
Protestantism and the spouse of a Crown solicitor in debt to his future
mayorship. "The lady mayoress elect, conscious of her prospective
dignity in addition to the heavy bill due by the Carews, was the least
possible shade--not patronizing, for that would have been
impossible--but perhaps independent in manner. She did not turn her head
toward her companion as she addressed her; she put more questions to her
and in a broader accent than she usually did in conversation; and she
barely gave her interlocutor time to finish the rather curt
contributions she vouchsafed toward the conversation. On her side, Mrs.
Carew, mindful of her position and of her superior accent, which implied
even more, wanting to be condescending and patronizing, and half afraid
to be openly impertinent, was calm and self-possessed. She grew more
freezingly courteous as the other lady grew less formal."

We have said that Miss Laffan began with realism pure and simple.
_Hogan, M.P._, remains, so far, to our mind, her strongest book, but
there are finer and swe