Lord Dunsany (Edward Moreton Max Plunkett), the eighteenth baron of his name, is the author of a number of stories and plays unique in their type of clever imaginativeness.  Besides the inimitable Five Plays and other dramas listed in the bibliography, his best writings are to be found in Fifty-One Tales, which includes “The Hen,” “Death and Odysseus,” “The True Story of the Hare and the Tortoise,” and other highly entertaining matters. Fame and the Poet, originally published in the Atlantic, has been recently produced with good effect by the Harvard Dramatic Club.  Fame’s startling revelation to her faithful worshiper of her real nature and attributes is naturally most distressing—­even more so, perhaps, than the rendezvous which this same goddess appointed another poet, in the Fifty-One Tales:  “In the cemetery back of the workhouse, after a hundred years.”

Lord Dunsany was a captain in the First Royal Iniskilling Fusileers—­a regiment mentioned in Sheridan’s Saint Patrick’s Day—­and saw service in Syria and the Near East as well as on the western front.  He was wounded on April 25, 1916, in Flanders.  Since the war he has visited the United States and seen a performance of his Tents of the Arabs at the Neighborhood Playhouse, New York City.

Beulah Marie Dix:  THE CAPTAIN OF THE GATE

Miss Dix is author of several plays—­in addition to those from Allison’s Lad included in the play-list, of Across the Border, and, with the late Evelyn Greenleaf Sutherland, of the frequently acted Rose of Plymouth Town.  She has also written several favorite historical stories, including Merrylips.  The Captain of the Gate is a tragedy of Cromwell’s ruthless devastation of Ireland.  The determined and heroic captain surrenders, to face an ignominious death, to keep his word and ensure delaying the advance of the enemy upon an unprepared countryside, and his courage inspires exhausted and failing men to like heroism.  This is an effective piece of dramatic presentation.

Percy Mackaye:  GETTYSBURG

Mr. Percy Mackaye has been most active in the movement for a community theatre in the United States and for the revival of pageantry.  He contends rightly that this development might be one of the strongest possible influences for true Americanism, and his dramatic work has all been directed toward such a theatre.  Most notable are his pageants and masques, particularly Caliban by the Yellow Sands, for the Shakespeare Tercentenary; his play The Scarecrow, a lively dramatization of Hawthorne’s Feathertop; his opera Rip van Winkle, for which Reginald De Koven composed music; and The Canterbury Pilgrims, in which the Wife of Bath is the heroine of further robustious adventures.  Mr. Mackaye is also translator, with Professor Tablock, of the Modern Reader’s Chaucer.  The little sketch presented here is taken from a volume of Yankee Fantasies, in which various observations of past and present New England life are recorded.  Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, a powerful story of the Civil War, is a most excellent help to realizing what the boy Lige really endured in those days of battle.