about Ireland.  So, too, with his contemporary Le Fanu, whose reputation rests on a double basis.  He made some wonderful excursions into the realm of the bizarre, the uncanny, and the gruesome.  But in the collection known as The Purcell Papers will be found three short stories which for exuberant drollery and “diversion” have never been excelled.  That the same man could have written Uncle Silas and The Quare Gander is yet another proof of the strange dualism of the Irish character.

The record of the last fifty years shows an uninterrupted progress in the invasion of English belles lettres by Irish writers.  Outside literature, perhaps the most famous sayer of good things of our times was a simple Irish parish priest, the late Father Healy.  Of his humorous sayings the number is legion; his wit may be illustrated by a less familiar example—­his comment on a very tall young lady named Lynch:  “Nature gave her an inch and she took an ell.”  In the House of Commons today there is no greater master of irony and sardonic humor than his namesake, Mr. Tim Healy.  On one occasion he remarked that Lord Rosebery was not a man to go tiger-shooting with—­except at the Zoo.  On another, being anxious to bring an indictment against the “Castle” regime in Dublin and finding the way blocked by a debate on Uganda, he successfully accomplished his purpose by a judicious geographical transference of names, and convulsed the House by a speech in which the nomenclature of Central Africa was applied to the government of Ireland.

But wit and humor are the monopoly of no class or calling in Ireland.  They flourish alike among car-drivers and K.C.’s, publicans and policemen, priests and parsons, beggars and peers.  It is a commonplace of criticism to deny these qualities in their highest form to women.  But this is emphatically untrue of Ireland, and was never more conclusively disproved than by the recent literary achievements of her daughters.  The partnership of two Irish ladies, Miss Edith Somerville and Miss Violet Martin, has given us, in Some Experiences of an Irish R.M. (i.e., Resident Magistrate), the most delicious comedy, and in The Real Charlotte the finest tragi-comedy, that have come out of Great Britain in the last thirty years.  The R.M., as it is familiarly called, is already a classic, but the Irish comedie humaine—­to use the phrase in the sense of Balzac—­is even more vividly portrayed in the pages of The Real Charlotte.  Humor, genuine though intermittent, irradiates the autumnal talent of Miss Jane Barlow, and the long roll of gifted Irishwomen who have contributed to the gaiety of nations may be closed with the names of Miss Hunt, author of Folk Tales of Breffny; of Miss Purdon and Miss Winifred Letts, who in prose and verse, respectively, have moved us to tears and laughter by their studies of Leinster peasant life; and of “Moira O’Neill” (Mrs. Skrine), the incomparable singer of the Glens