Responsive to the need of the young writers associated with Yeats, the National Literary Society was founded in Dublin in 1892, and a year later London Irishmen, among them men already distinguished in letters, founded in the English metropolis the Irish Literary Society.  From the presses in Dublin, in London, and in New York as well, books began to appear in rapid succession—­slender volumes of verse, novels, short stories, essays, plays, translations, and remakings of Irish myths and legends, all inspired by, and closely related to, the past or the present of Ireland, voicing an essentially national spirit and presenting the noblest traits of Irish life and character.

Not content with the organization of the two literary societies, Yeats, with courage and relentless tenacity, cast about to realize his long-cherished dream of a theatre that should embody the ideals of the Revival.  In Lady Gregory, and in Edward Martyn, an Irishman of large means, who with both pen and purse lent a willing hand, he found two ardent laborers for his vineyard.  George Moore, who in the event proved a fish out of water in Ireland, Yeats and Martyn contrived to lure from his London lodgings and his cosmopolitan ways, and to enlist in the theatrical enterprise.  The practical knowledge of the stage which this gifted enfant terrible of literature contributed was doubtless of great value in the early days of the dramatic adventure, though Moore’s free thoughts, frank speech, and mordant irony brought an element of discord into Dublin literary circles, which may well have left Yeats and his associates with a feeling that they had paid too dear for a piper to whose tunes they refused to dance.  Be that as it may, in 1899 Yeats’s dream was measurably realized, and the Irish Literary Theatre established, to be succeeded a little later by the Irish National Theatre Society.  Enough, however, of the dramatic aspect of the Revival, which receives separate treatment elsewhere in these pages, as does also the dramatic work of certain of the authors considered here.

From what has already been said, it should be plain that in the last decade of the last century the ranks of the Irish Literary Revivalists filled rapidly, and that the movement was really under way.  The renascent spirit took various forms.  To one group of poets the humor, pathos, and tragedy of peasant life deeply appealed, and found expression in a poetry distinctively and unmistakably national, from which a kind of pleasure could be drawn unlike anything else in other literatures.  In this group Alfred Perceval Graves and Moira O’Neill cannot pass unmentioned.  Who would ask anything racier in its kind than the former’s “Father O’Flynn”?

Of priests we can offer a charmin’ variety,
Far renowned for larnin’ and piety,
Still I’d advance you without impropriety,
Father O’Flynn as the flower of them all. 
Here’s a health to you, Father O’Flynn,
Slainte,[1] and slainte, and slainte agin. 
Powerfullest preacher,
And tinderest teacher,
And kindliest creature in Old Donegal.