ast
generation or so have experienced. The beggar on the road, the piper at
the door, the old people in the workhouse, are henceforth accepted as a
sort of aristocracy in exile.

Lady Gregory obviously sought out their company as the heirs to a great
inheritance--an inheritance of imaginative and humorous speech. Not that
she plundered them of their fantastic tropes so greedily as Synge did.
She studied rather their common turn of phrase, its heights and its
hollows, its exquisite illogic, its passionate underflow of poetry. Has
she not herself told us how she could not get on with the character of
Bartley Fallon in _Spreading the News_, till one day she met a
melancholy man by the sea at Duras, who, after describing the crosses he
endured at home, said: "But I'm thinking if I went to America, it's long
ago I'd be dead. And it's a great expense for a poor man to be buried in
America." Out of sentences like these--sentences seized upon with the
genius of the note-book--she has made much of what is most delightful in
her plays. Her sentences are steeped and dyed in life, even when her
situations are as mad as hatters.

Some one has said that every great writer invents a new language. Lady
Gregory, whom it would be unfair to praise as a great writer, has at
least qualified as one by inventing a new language out of her knowledge
of Irish peasant speech. This, perhaps, is her chief literary peril.
Having discovered the beautiful dialect of the Kiltartan peasantry, she
was not content to leave it a peasant dialect--as we find it in her best
dramatic work, _Seven Short Plays_; but she set about transforming it
into a tongue into which all literature and emotion might apparently be
translated. Thus, she gave us Moliere in Kiltartan--a ridiculously
successful piece of work--and she gave us Finn and Cuchullain in
modified Kiltartan, and this, too, was successful, sometimes very
beautifully so. Here, however, she had masterpieces to begin with. In
_Irish Folk-History Plays_, on the other hand, we find her embarking,
not upon translation, but upon original heroic drama, in the Kiltartan
language. The result is unreality as unreal as if Meredith had made a
farm-labourer talk like Diana of the Crossways. Take, for instance, the
first of the plays, _Grania_, which is founded on the story of the
pursuit of Diarmuid and Grania by Finn MacCool, to whom Grania had been
betrothed. When Finn, disguised as a blind beggar, visits the lovers