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).  There is much of interest, though chiefly as regards the drama, in the reviews, Beltaine (London and Dublin, 1899-1900) and Samhain (London and Dublin, 1901-1903).

IRISH WRITERS OF ENGLISH

By P.J.  LENNOX, B.A., Litt.D.

The Gaelic literature of Ireland is not only of wonderful volume and priceless worth, but is also of great antiquity, whereas the English literature of Ireland, while also of considerable extent and high value, is of comparatively modern origin.  The explanation of this fact is that for more than six centuries after the Anglo-Norman invasion of 1169 the Irish language continued to be both the spoken and, with Latin, the written organ of the great mass of the Irish people, and that for nearly the whole of that period those English settlers who did not become, as the well-known phrase has it, more Irish than the Irish themselves by adopting the native language, customs, and sentiments, were kept too busy in holding, defending, and extending their territory to devote themselves to literary pursuits.