just idea of the alternate beauty and bleakness of that wonderful coast, and then makes you see the inhabitants in their daily struggle for existence....  This book, with its sympathetic insight, is the best possible return that Mr. Synge could have made to his friends on the island.”—­New York “Evening Sun."

“Synge is so real it is impossible to resist him.  He seems to have the masterful quality of taking a few scattered peasant families, and giving to them a universal import....  His plays are alive.  They are real plays in real persons, and not the least of their charm lies in the dialogue....  He is tilling what is practically virgin soil, and already he has demonstrated he is a skilled and sympathetic workman.”—­New York Press.

Second Edition now ready.

THE PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD.

A Comedy in Three Acts.  By J.M.  SYNGE.  Cr. 8vo.  Cloth, with preface and portrait of the Author, 2s. net.

A few Copies of the hand-made paper edition still remain.  The Price has been raised to 7s. 6d. net.

“The play, as I read it, is profoundly tragic....  It is a tragedy that does not depress—­it arouses and dilates.  There is cynicism on the surface, but a depth of ardent sympathy and imaginative feeling below, and vistas of thought are opened up that lead from the West of Ireland shebeen to the stars....  I said to myself when I had read two pages, ’This is literature,’ and when I laid down the book at the last line,’This is life.’”—­T.W.  Rolleston (Independent).

“This intensely national Irish Play ...  A comedy of amazing fidelity to the Irish peasant’s gift and passion for a special quality of headlong, highly figured speech, that rushes on, gathering pace from one stroke of vividness to another still wider and better....”—­Manchester Guardian.

“Mr. Synge ... certainly does possess a very keen sense of fact, as well as dramatic power and great charm of style ... one of the finest comedies of the dramatic renaissance ... sustained dramatic power....  These peasants are poets, as certainly they are humorists, without knowing it.  Certain passages of ‘The Playboy’ read like parts of the English Bible.  There is the same direct and spontaneous beauty of image....  Mr. Synge has achieved a masterpiece by simply collaborating with nature.  He and the Irish are to be congratulated.”—­Holbrook Jackson (The New Age).

“‘The Playboy of the Western World’ ... is a remarkable play ... its imagery is touched with a wild, unruly, sensational beauty, and the ’popular imagination that is fiery and magnificent and tender’ is reflected in it with a glow....  There is a great deal of poetry and fire, beside the humour and satire so obviously intended, in this drama.”—­Francis Hackett in Chicago Evening Post.

THE WELL OF THE SAINTS.