atus about them, of the hero age
of legendary Ireland--tales which drew attention to the romantic
Celtic past of myth and saga, and must have been an inspiration to
more than one writer of the younger generation. In contrast to the
broad epic sweep and remote romantic backgrounds of O'Grady, are the
stories of Jane Barlow, whose _genre_ pictures of peasant life in the
west of Ireland, like her poems mentioned above, show how
sympathetically she understands the ways of thinking, feeling, and
acting of her humble compatriots. A like minute and faithful
knowledge is evident in the work of two story-tellers of the north,
Seumas MacManus and Shan Bullock. The former's outlook is humorous
and pathetic. He tells fairy and folk tales well, and is a past
master of the dialect and idiom that combine to give his old-wives'
yarns an honest smack of the soil. Let him who doubts it read
_Through the Turf Smoke_ or _Donegal Fairy Stories_. If Shan Bullock
walks the same fields as Seumas MacManus, he does so with a different
air and with a more definite purpose. Sometimes he turns to the
squireens, small farmers, or small country gentry, and lays bare the
hardness and narrowness that are a part of their life. Or, again, in
pictures whose sadness and gloom are lightened, to be sure, with
humor or warmed with love, he studies the necessitous life of the
poor. _The Squireen, The Barrys_, and _Irish Pastorals_ are some of
his representative books.

In the novel as in poetry the ladies have worked side by side with
their literary brethren. Miss Hermione Templeton, in her _Darby
O'Gill_, and elsewhere, has written pleasantly and gracefully of the
fairies. In a very different vein are the novels of the
collaborators, Miss Somerville and "Martin Ross" (Miss Violet
Martin), over which English and American readers have laughed as
heartily as their own fellow countrymen. _The Experiences of an Irish
R.M._remains, perhaps, their best book. The work of these ladies, be
it said by the way, is in the line of descent from that group of
older Irish novelists who wrote in the spirit of the devil-may-care
gentry, the novelists from Maxwell to Lover and Lever, who were ever
questing "divilment and divarshion," and who in their moods of
boisterous fun forgot the real Irishman, and presented in his place a
caricature--him of the Celtic screech and the exhilarating whack of
the shillelagh, the famous stage Irishman who has made occasional
appearances in En