Gaelic League, a band of
enthusiasts zealous for the revival of the Irish language both as a
spoken tongue and as the medium for a national literature, and eager,
also, to breed up a race of Celtic scholars. The lyrics in his _Love
Songs of Connacht_ are full of grace, tenderness, and fire, and
indicate the kind of gems which he and his fellow laborers have added
to the treasury of poetry in English. But it is Lady Gregory,
especially in her _Cuchulain of Muirthemne_ and _Gods and Fighting
Men_, who more than any other has found a way to stir the blood of
readers of to-day by the romantic hero tales of Ireland. From the
racy idiom of the dwellers on or about her own estate in Galway, she
happily framed a style that gave her narratives freshness, novelty,
and a flavor of the soil. Upon the work of scholars she drew heavily
in making her own renderings, but she has justified all borrowings by
breathing into her books the breath and the warmth of life, and her
adaptation to epic purposes of the dialect of those who still retain
the expiring habit of thinking in Gaelic was a real literary
achievement. She has, indeed, in sins of commission and of omission,
taken liberties with the old legends, but this may render them not
less, and perhaps more, delightful to the general reader, however
just complaints may be from the standpoint of the scholar.

Even so brief a sketch as this may suffice to bring home to those not
already aware of it a realization of the delights to be drawn from
the creations of a living literary movement, which is perhaps the
most notable of its generation, and which has gathered together a
remarkable group of poets, novelists, and dramatists, who, as men and
women, are a most interesting company--a fact to which even George
Moore's _Hail and Farewell_, with its quick eye for defects and
foibles and its ironic wit, bears abundant testimony.

REFERENCES:

Brooke and Rolleston: Treasury of Irish Poetry (New York and London,
1900); Krans: William Butler Yeats and the Irish Literary Revival
(New York and London, 1904); Yeats: Ideas of Good and Evil (London,
1903); Moore: Hail and Farewell, 3 vols. (London and New York,
1912-1914); Lady Gregory: Our Irish Theatre (New York and London,
1913); Weygandt: Irish Plays and Playwrights (New York, 1913); Yeats:
Introduction to Fairy and Folk Tales of the Irish Peasantry (London,
1889), Representative Irish Tales (London, 1890), Book of Irish Verse
(London, 1895)