arranged by his wife, to get him out of
politics altogether and out of his liquor-selling and into farming far
from town. I cannot identify Dempsey with any one prominent Irish
statesman, but the lesser fry on both Nationalist and Unionist sides are
as easy to identify as the men that suggested the characters of "A Tale
of a Town." In "The Eloquent Dempsey" all the art of Mr. Boyle has been
lavished on the central figure, which, when all is said, remains a
caricature, and caricature uncompensated for by any great or noble
characteristic of the play, whose primal quality is but cleverness.
Effective as its satire is, and provocative of laughter as it always is
on the stage, it is altogether cheaper in its quality than "The Building
Fund."

"The Mineral Workers," with its chief portrait that of a returned
Irish-American mining engineer, takes us to certain phases of society
not met among the publicans and politicians and peasants of Mr. Boyle's
earlier plays. Other than these are not only the hero, Stephen J.
O'Reilly, but the aristocrat, Sir Thomas Musgrove, and his sister, Mrs.
Walton, who is of the family connection of Sir Arthur Wing Pinero's
Georgianna Tidman. Dan Fogarty, the holdback, unprogressive farmer, is
the sharpest-cut and truest to life of all the characters, so clear-cut
and true, in fact, that one thinks of him as almost a fellow of Shan
Grogan in "The Building Fund." Uncle Bartle is sentimentalized, and
Kitty Mulroy has no such personality as Sheila O'Dwyer. Contrast "The
Mineral Workers" with a novel of the returned American, "Dan the Dollar"
of Mr. Bullock, and the calibre of Mr. Boyle's play is quickly revealed.

What Mr. Boyle had been had he come into touch with the movement ten
years earlier, it is of course beside the point to speculate. He was not
a young man when he first became acquainted with the art of the Abbey
Theatre in London and was impelled to write plays for it. He was,
though, able to adapt the experience he had had as a story-writer to the
stage in "The Building Fund." That being so, why is it that his later
plays, successful though they have been as vehicles for the purveying of
amusement on the stage, have not taken rank by their art or by their
reading of life with "The Building Fund "? It may be that it was the one
theme susceptible of dramatic presentation that he had brooded over long
enough to transmute into terms of drama, and that the later plays, full
of successful stage t