BOOK NOTICES

New Zealand Tablet, 6 March 1919, Page 28

BOOK NOTICES

Wrack and Other Stories, by Dermot O’Byrne (Talbot Press, Dublin. 3s 6d.)

Since we read Seumas O’Kelly’s volume of stories we have not come upon a better collection of Irish tales than this book in which Mr. O’Byrne, enhances the reputation made by his earlier publications. It is a real Gaelic book. The stories are drenched with the poetry and pain of Ireland. Moreover they reveal great dramatic power and a very keen observation of men and things. There are old and new stories stories about the Ireland of the past and about the Ireland of to-day ; each in itself a little work of art. Mr. O’Byrne can write, and no mistake. One is as forcibly struck by his intense -realism as by his tender imagination and broad sympathy. The book is surely a promise of even greater things to come from the same pen. Janies F intan Lalor: Fat riot and Political Essayist. (Talbot Press. 5s net.) Miss L. Fogarty, 8.A., has done good service in collecting in one volume the writings of Lalor, who had such an influence in his own day over the minds of his countrymen. Miss Fogarty regards him as “the dominant mind inspiring his age.” Mr. Arthur Griffith, who writes the preface, holds that Lalor was essentially a laud reformer rather than a Nationalist. At any rate he belongs to the immortal group of men who have striven in the past and present for the freedom of Ireland, and it is not too much to say that the doctrines he preached laid the foundations of the victory of the Irish tenants over the bad landlords. Griffith is right in holding that it is rather to Davis we must turn for the true apostle of Irish freedom but what Davis did for the nation, Lalor did for the i

peasants and farmers—teaching them to fight for their own and to assert their rights to hold the land of their own country. The book is one that ought to have a place in an Irishman’s library beside' the works of Davis. -

-Ways of Study , by Darrell Figgis. (Talbot Press.) Those who have read Children of the Ecurth' realise that a new book by this writer is an important event in Irish Ireland. The present book was finished while the revolvers of his captor's were pointing at his head, and he tells us that at his present address (in an English gaol, whither he was transported without trial or without evidence in the Brithunnish fashion) he had small opportunity to make any changes or corrections. The last essay, thus finished, has appeared in Studies, and aroused much attention on account of its scholarship and Research. The essay dealing with Parnell is good reading. Figgis, who, like-Parnell, is an Irish Protestant, scarifies the brutal and treacherous Government that plotted Parnell’s downfall, employing even the forger as a tool to bring about that end, just as in our day they had recourse to perjurers and bogus plots to put the author himself in gaol because he loved a, small nation. After General Butler’s lecture we know no better sketch of Parnell than this. The essays on Francis Thomson and George Meredith are fin© pieces of writing. The critic handles his themes with a distinction of style and an intuition worthy of those two masters of English Letters. Some Irish Vincentians in i China in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, by Rev. Patrick Boyle, C.M. (Brown and Nolan, Ltd., Dublin.)

An important and up-to-date contribution to the history of the missionaries of the Island of Saints and Scholars. It is especially opportune now in view of the wonderful zeal with which Maynooth has taken up the task of preaching the Gospel in China. Our Alma Mater. (Riverview College.)

This annual is on the high level of its predecessors and is an artistic souvenir of' the great Jesuit college.