BOOK NOTICES.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XVI, Issue 29, 9 November 1888, Page 29

BOOK NOTICES.

Dunmtre ; or, The Bays of ths Land League, by Louisiana Murphy

Dublin : M. H. Gill and Son. This is the libretto of an opera written on the subject named ia the title. The idea of the work is a happy one and it has been well carried out. The plot which centres in the return of an absentee landlord to his estate and his perplexity and disgust at rinding the altered condition of things there is interesting and diverting, and the dialogue is bright and humorous in the extreme. The verses, especially, of which the greater part of the opera necessarily consists, are clever in a marked degree and many witty points are made in them. The writer, however, haß had a higher object in view than that of giving an hour's amusement to a reader or an audience, and has undertaken her task with the intention of adding her mite to the contributions due by every Irish man and Irish woman in aid of the National cause. This she has succeeded in doing in a manner aa racy as it is original and which only requires to be made sufficiently prjminent to meet with the admiration it deserves.

'• Ireland's Wrongs Righted or the Present against the Past " is a pamphlet which contains a lecture delivered at Invercargill by Mr. Thomas Denniaton in reply to a lecture delivered there previously by the Rev. F. W. Isitt. If this lecture be an answer to Mr. Isitt, however, Mr. Isitt must be easily answered. It is simply a feebly attempted rehash of arguments that have been exposed and refuted a hundred times over when put forward in their full force by people capable of dealing with them. In Mr. Denniston as a lecturer on Irish affairs we have evidently a man who does not understand his own feeling 9 talking about matters of which he is incapable of baing anything but igaorant — which, in fact, he has not faculties to comprehend much less to explain, and the result is what might be expected. Mr. Denniston may attempt to answer Mr. Isitt, but to answer Mr. Dennißton we could hardly call on any one out of long clothes who might not be offended at the summons.