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Ismay’s Children is by the clever authoress of that wonderful little story Flitters, Tatters, and the Counsellor, a story which delighted the realists by its truth, fascinated Mr. Ruskin by its beauty, and remains to the present day the most perfect picture of street-arab life in all English prose fiction.  The scene of the novel is laid in the south of Ireland, and the plot is extremely dramatic and ingenious.  Godfrey Mauleverer, a reckless young Irishman, runs away with Ismay D’Arcy, a pretty, penniless governess, and is privately married to her in Scotland.  Some time after the birth of her third child, Ismay died, and her husband, who had never made his marriage public, nor taken any pains to establish the legitimacy of his children, is drowned while yachting off the coast of France.  The care of Ismay’s children then devolves on an old aunt, Miss Juliet D’Arcy, who brings them back to Ireland to claim their inheritance for them.  But a sudden stroke of paralysis deprives her of her memory, and she forgets the name of the little Scotch village in which Ismay’s informal marriage took place.  So Tighe O’Malley holds Barrettstown, and Ismay’s children live in an old mill close to the great park of which they are the rightful heirs.  The boy, who is called Godfrey after his father, is a fascinating study, with his swarthy foreign beauty, his fierce moods of love and hate, his passionate pride, and his passionate tenderness.  The account of his midnight ride to warn his enemy of an impending attack of Moonlighters is most powerful and spirited; and it is pleasant to meet in modern fiction a character that has all the fine inconsistencies of life, and is neither too fantastic an exception to be true, nor too ordinary a type to be common.  Excellent also, in its direct simplicity of rendering, is the picture of Miss Juliet D’Arcy; and the scene in which, at the moment of her death, the old woman’s memory returns to her is quite admirable, both in conception and in treatment.  To me, however, the chief interest of the book lies in the little lifelike sketches of Irish character with which it abounds.  Modern realistic art has not yet produced a Hamlet, but at least it may claim to have studied Guildenstern and Rosencrantz very closely; and, for pure fidelity and truth to nature, nothing could be better than the minor characters in Ismay’s Children.  Here we have the kindly old priest who arranges all the marriages in his parish, and has a strong objection to people who insist on making long confessions; the important young curate fresh from Maynooth, who gives himself more airs than a bishop, and has to be kept in order; the professional beggars, with their devout faith, their grotesque humour, and their incorrigible laziness; the shrewd shopkeeper, who imports arms in flour-barrels for the use of the Moonlighters and, as soon as he has got rid of them, gives information of their whereabouts to the police; the young men who go out at night to