SOURCE: "Early Nineteenth Century Novelists," in Anglo-Irish Literature, 1926, pp. 171-200.

In the following essay, Law surveys the novels written by the most prominent nineteenth-century Irish authors and comments on the strengths and weaknesses of these authors' major works.

Poetry—there can be no doubt about it—even minor poetry, wears far better than any but the greatest prose; and of all forms of prose-writing none, as is natural enough, is so affected by changing fashions as is the work of the novelist. One can still get a deal of pleasure from the verses of quite minor bards of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. But of the far more numerous prose-writings of that period few survive. How many portly histories, how many sermons full of learned quotations from Greek and Latin authors and bound in solid calf, have mouldered to dust or are to be found thrown contemptuously...