establish the legitimacy of his children, is drowned while yachting off
the coast of France. The care of Ismay's children then devolves on an
old aunt, Miss Juliet D'Arcy, who brings them back to Ireland to claim
their inheritance for them. But a sudden stroke of paralysis deprives
her of her memory, and she forgets the name of the little Scotch village
in which Ismay's informal marriage took place. So Tighe O'Malley holds
Barrettstown, and Ismay's children live in an old mill close to the great
park of which they are the rightful heirs. The boy, who is called
Godfrey after his father, is a fascinating study, with his swarthy
foreign beauty, his fierce moods of love and hate, his passionate pride,
and his passionate tenderness. The account of his midnight ride to warn
his enemy of an impending attack of Moonlighters is most powerful and
spirited; and it is pleasant to meet in modern fiction a character that
has all the fine inconsistencies of life, and is neither too fantastic an
exception to be true, nor too ordinary a type to be common. Excellent
also, in its direct simplicity of rendering, is the picture of Miss
Juliet D'Arcy; and the scene in which, at the moment of her death, the
old woman's memory returns to her is quite admirable, both in conception
and in treatment. To me, however, the chief interest of the book lies in
the little lifelike sketches of Irish character with which it abounds.
Modern realistic art has not yet produced a Hamlet, but at least it may
claim to have studied Guildenstern and Rosencrantz very closely; and, for
pure fidelity and truth to nature, nothing could be better than the minor
characters in Ismay's Children. Here we have the kindly old priest who
arranges all the marriages in his parish, and has a strong objection to
people who insist on making long confessions; the important young curate
fresh from Maynooth, who gives himself more airs than a bishop, and has
to be kept in order; the professional beggars, with their devout faith,
their grotesque humour, and their incorrigible laziness; the shrewd
shopkeeper, who imports arms in flour-barrels for the use of the
Moonlighters and, as soon as he has got rid of them, gives information of
their whereabouts to the police; the young men who go out at night to be
drilled by an Irish-American; the farmers with their wild land-hunger,
bidding secretly against each other for every vacant field; the
dispensary doctor, who is always regretti