Taking as their main subjects both contemporary Irish life and Irish myths and legends, Samuel Lover's stories are noteworthy precursors to the Celtic revival movement centered around figures such as William Butler Yeats and John Millington Synge, which began shortly after Lover's death. Lover's contributions to this national renaissance have largely gone unrecognized, but he was truly a renaissance man: painter, novelist, dramatist, poet, musician, composer, and performer. He was best known in his own time as a miniaturist whose works were exhibited to considerable acclaim both at the Dublin Academy and the Royal Academy in London. But his popular 1842 novel, Handy Andy: A Tale of Irish Life, also brought him wide renown as a writer, and his self-illustrated Legends and Stories of Ireland (1831) was an immediate success. Peopled by rogues and buffoons of a sort that an English audience might recognize as being stereotypically Irish in their...