in a hurry, but I do not think the world can be changed suddenly by some heavenly alchemy, as St. Paul was smitten by a light from the overworld.  Though the heart in us cries out continually, ‘Oh, hurry, hurry to the Golden Age,’ though we think of revolutions, we know that the patient marshalling of human forces is wisdom....  Not by revolutions can humanity be perfected.  I might quote from an old oracle, ’The gods are never so turned away from man as when he ascends to them by disorderly methods.’  Our spirits may live in the Golden Age but our bodily life moves on slow feet, and needs the lantern on the path and the staff struck carefully into the darkness before us to see that the path beyond is not a morass, and the light not a will o’ the wisp.” (But this may not refer to our own Revolution, seeing that has been making a step now and again towards what many judged to be a will o’ the wisp through over seven hundred years.)

As to the machinery of the play, the spell was first to have been worked by a harp hung up by some wandering magician, and that was to work its change according to the wind, as it blew from north or south, east or west.  But that would have been troublesome in practice, and the Bellows having once entered my mind, brought there I think by some scribbling of the pencil that showed Conan protecting himself with an umbrella, seemed to have every necessary quality, economy, efficiency, convenience.

As to Aristotle, his name is a part of our folklore.  The old wife of one of our labourers told me one day, as a bee buzzed through the open door:  “Aristotle of the Books was very wise but the bees got the better of him in the end.  He wanted to know how did they pack the comb, and he wasted the best part of a fortnight watching them, and he could not see them doing it.  Then he made a hive with a glass cover on it and put it over them, and he thought to watch them.  But when he went to put his eye to the glass, they had it all covered with wax so that it was as black as the pot, and he was as blind as before.  He said he was never rightly killed till then.  The bees had him beat that time surely.”  And Douglas Hyde brought home one day a story from Kilmacduagh bog, in which Aristotle took the place of Solomon, the Wise Man in our tales as well as in those of the East.  And he said that as the story grew and the teller became more familiar, the name of Aristotle was shortened to that of Harry.

As to the songs they are all sung to the old Irish airs I give at the end.

A. GREGORY.

August 18, 1921.

THE JESTER

A PLAY IN THREE ACTS

FOR RICHARD

January, 1919

A.G.

PERSONS

The Five Princes.

The Five Wrenboys.

The Guardian of the Princes and Governor of the Island.