Irishman--Le Fanu's short stories in the _Purcell Papers_,
such as the _Quare Gander_, or _Billy Molowney's Taste of Love and
Glory_. These are good examples of a particular literary type--the
humorous anecdote--in which Irish humour has always been fertile, and of
which the _ne plus ultra_ is Sir Samuel Ferguson's magnificent squib in
Blackwood, _Father Tom and the Pope_. Everybody knows the merits of that
story, its inexhaustible fertility of comparison, its dialectic
ingenuity, its jovialty, its drollery, its Rabelaisian laughter. But,
after all, the highest type of humour is humour applying itself to the
facts of life, and this is burlesque humour squandering itself in riot
upon a delectable fiction. Humour is a great deal more than a
plaything; it is a force, a weapon--at once sword and shield. If there
is to be an art of literature in Ireland that can be called national, it
cannot afford to devote humour solely to the production of trifles.
_Father Tom_ is a trifle, a splendid toy; and what is more, a trifle
wrought in a moment of ease by perhaps the most serious and
conscientious artist that ever made a contribution to the small body of
real Irish literature in the tongue that is now native to the majority
of Irishmen.

Of contemporaries, with one exception, I do not propose to speak at any
length, nor can I hope that my review will be complete. There is first
and foremost Miss Barlow, a lady whose work is so gentle, so unassuming,
that one hears little of it in the rush and flare of these strident
times, but who will be heard and listened to with fresh emotion as the
stream is heard when the scream and rattle of a railway train have
passed away into silence. Is she a humorist? Not in the sense of
provoking laughter--and yet the things that she sees and loves and
dwells on would be unbearable if they were not seen through a delicate
mist of mirth. The daily life of people at continual handgrips with
starvation, their little points of honour, their little questions of
precedence, the infinite generosity that concerns itself with the
expenditure of six-pence, the odd shifts they resort to that a gift may
not have the appearance of charity,--all these are set down with a
tenderness of laughter that is peculiarly and distinctively Irish.

Yet, though we may find a finer quality of humour in those writers who
do not seek to raise a laugh--for instance, the subtle pervasive humour
in Mr. Yeats's _Celtic Twilight_--sti