Graphic or the London News are
excellent. Besides, if we want to understand the history of a nation
through the medium of art, it is to the imaginative and ideal arts that
we have to go and not to the arts that are definitely imitative. The
visible aspect of life no longer contains for us the secret of life's
spirit. Probably it never did contain it. And, if Mr. Barker's Waterloo
Banquet and Mr. Frith's Marriage of the Prince of Wales are examples of
healthy historic art, the less we have of such art the better. However,
Mr. Bayliss is full of the most ardent faith and speaks quite gravely of
genuine portraits of St. John, St. Peter and St. Paul dating from the
first century, and of the establishment by the Israelites of a school of
art in the wilderness under the now little appreciated Bezaleel. He is a
pleasant, picturesque writer, but he should not speak about art. Art is
a sealed book to him.

The Enchanted Island. By Wyke Bayliss, F.S.A., President of the Royal
Society of British Artists. (Allen and Co.)

SOME LITERARY NOTES--II

(Woman's World, February 1889.)

'The various collectors of Irish folk-lore,' says Mr. W. B. Yeats in his
charming little book Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry, 'have,
from our point of view, one great merit, and from the point of view of
others, one great fault.'

They have made their work literature rather than science, and told us
of the Irish peasantry rather than of the primitive religion of
mankind, or whatever else the folk-lorists are on the gad after. To
be considered scientists they should have tabulated all their tales in
forms like grocers' bills--item the fairy king, item the queen.
Instead of this they have caught the very voice of the people, the
very pulse of life, each giving what was most noticed in his day.
Croker and Lover, full of the ideas of harum-scarum Irish gentility,
saw everything humorised. The impulse of the Irish literature of
their time came from a class that did not--mainly for political
reasons--take the populace seriously, and imagined the country as a
humorist's Arcadia; its passion, its gloom, its tragedy, they knew
nothing of. What they did was not wholly false; they merely magnified
an irresponsible type, found oftenest among boatmen, carmen, and
gentlemen's servants, into the type of a whole nation, and created the
stage Irishman. The writers of 'Forty-eight, and th