o further into
details. Again Miss Lawless both in _Grania_ and in _Hurrish_ makes you
aware that young Irishmen of Hurrish's class are curiously indifferent
to female beauty. Lever will have none of that: his Irishman must be "a
divil with the girls," although Lever is no sentimentalist, and does not
talk of love matches among the Irish peasantry.

The greatest divergence of all, however, is in the temper attributed to
the Irish. Lever makes them gay, Miss Lawless and Miss Barlow make them
sad. No one denies that sadness is nearer the reality, but it is
unreasonable to call Lever insincere. Naturally careless and
lighthearted he does not trouble himself with the riddle of the painful
world; the distress which touches him most nearly is a distress for
debt. But if Lever is not realistic he is natural; he follows the law
of his nature as an artist should; he sees life through his own medium;
and if books are to be valued as companions, not many of them are better
company than _Charles O'Malley_ or _Lord Kilgobbin_; for first and last
Lever was always himself.

Yet, I must own it, it does not do to read Lever soon after Miss Barlow.
Her stories of Lisconnel and its folk have a tragic dignity wholly out
of his range. It is a sad-coloured country she writes of, gray and
brown; sodden brown with bog water, gray with rock cropping up through
the fields; the only brightness is up overhead in the heavens, and even
they are often clouded. These sombre hues, with the passing gleam of
something above them, reflect themselves in every page of her books. She
renders that complete harmony between the people and their surroundings
which is only seen in working folk whose clothes are stained with the
colour of the soil they live by, and whose lives assimilate themselves
to its character. She has a fineness of touch, a poetry, to which no
other Irish story-teller has attained.

Yet, Miss Barlow has never succeeded with a regular novel: and she may
have been only a forerunner. All great writers proceed from a school,
and there does exist now undeniably a school of Irish literature which
differs from Miss Edgeworth in being strongly tinged with the element of
Celtic romance, from Carleton in possessing an admirable standard of
style, and from Lever in aiming at a sincere and vital portraiture of
Irish life.

1897.

A CENTURY OF IRISH HUMOUR.

In a preface to the French translation of Sienkiewicz's works, M. de
Wyzewa, the