e to be back in Denmark."

Lady Gregory reveals more of life--leaping, imaginative life--in that
little note than in all the three acts about Grania and the three about
Brian. It is because the characters in the comic plays in the book are
nearer the peasantry in stature and in outlook that she is so much more
successful with them than with the heroes and heroines of the tragedies.
She describes the former plays as "tragic comedies"; but in the first
and best of them, _The Canavans_, it is difficult to see where the
tragedy comes in. _The Canavans_ is really a farce of the days of
Elizabeth. The principal character is a cowardly miller, who ensues
nothing but his own safety in the war of loyalties and disloyalties
which is destroying Ireland. He is equally afraid of the wrath of the
neighbours on the one hand, and the wrath of the Government on the
other. Consequently, he is at his wits' end when his brother Antony
comes seeking shelter in his house, after deserting from the English
Army. When the soldiers come looking for Antony, so helpless with terror
is the miller, that he flies into hiding among his sacks, and his
brother has to impersonate him in the interview with the officer who
carries out the search. The situation obviously lends itself to comic
elaborations, and Lady Gregory misses none of her opportunities. She
flies off from every semblance of reality at a tangent, however, in a
later scene, where Antony disguises himself as Queen Elizabeth, supposed
to have come on a secret visit of inspection to Ireland, and takes in
both his brother and the officer (who is himself a Canavan, anglicized
under the name of Headley). This is a sheer invention of the theatre; it
turns the play from living speech into machinery. _The Canavans_,
however, has enough of present-day reality to make us forgive its
occasional stage-Elizabethanism. On the whole, its humours gain nothing
from their historical setting.

_The White Cockade_, the second of the tragic comedies, is a play about
the flight of King James II after the Battle of the Boyne, and it, too,
is lifeless and mechanical in so far as it is historical. King James
himself is a good comic figure of a conventional sort, as he is
discovered hiding in the barrel; but Sarsfield, who is meant to be
heroic, is all joints and sawdust; and the mad Jacobite lady is a puppet
who might have been invented by any writer of plays. "When my _White
Cockade_ was produced," Lady Gregory t