Books

...These are the souls that he touches most feelingly unless we except those two kings of the wilderness, Daniel Boone and Pere Rasle...

...There is a semblance of miracle in these restorations...

...The sequel is really humorous, for the fact of the ride having leaked out, not only was the bandit unpunished but he had an audience with Charles II, who pardoned him and imposed on him the name of "Swift Nicks" under which name the king's officers were in a few weeks advertising a large reward for his capture for a further crime...

...Florence MacCarthy, at the time imprisoned in the Tower of London, mentioned one of these MacSweeneys as "the most exercised commander, and of the greatest skill and experience, and reputation for that country's wars of any mere Irishman...

...New York: The Irish Book Shop...

...It is the story 446 THE COMMONWEAL February 24, 1926 of any soul called by God from the thousand hampering trivialities of material desires to be His spouse...

...The Thames was frozen over, sometimes so firmly that bonfires were lit on it and fairs held on the ice in 1607, 1608, 1620, 1683, and 1684 i™m January 6 to February 7. In my recollection of more than fifty years during which such a thing would have struck my imagination, I can only once remember the Thames to have been really seriously frozen over...

...It was not only the highwaymen but the abductors of young heiresses who prowled about the muddy highways...

...He, too, was left in possession of 2,000 acres of Donegal land...

...Besides the investigations into conditions in the MacCarthy principalities which inferentially reveal conditions in other parts of Ireland, there is a chapter on the Cromwellian confiscation which deals with the whole of the country, and a very important account of the policy of surrender and re-grant which deals with one of the most momentous happenings in Irish history...

...Doughs...

...he brings in household troops— "Norse fighters" like the MacSweeneys, the MacDonnells, the MacCabes...

...He assumes predominant power...

...Christopher Columbus, Cortez, Montezuma, Ponce de Leon, and De Soto, even the terrible Red Eric, become in ironical verity our comrades, fellow sharers of difficulty, disappointment, internal chagrin...

...Down to the Cromwellian conquest certain of these learned orders were able to maintain the estates that had been set apart for their support in the old Celtic polity...

...He might have remembered, when he quoted one of Ruskin's outbursts of sentimentality over the horrors of little girls wearing large shoes, that one of Ruskin's cherished tenets was the denial that human effort and aspiration could be handled as so much material commodity...

...If the author had contented himself with this, all would have been well...

...Bertram C. A. Windle...

...Meantime, the lines of traffic could hardly be called roads, for the traveler had "right of good passage" between any two places and, it seems might and at times did actually ride or drive over growing corn when he found the ordinary track impassable...

...Only the extraordinarily endowed, be they bricklayers, realtors, metaphysicians, or politicians, will be able to maintain the necessarily high-salaried domestic servants...

...It is with the gesture of a school boy that he throws mud at popular idols...

...The Present Economic Revolution in the United States, by Thomas Nixon Carver...

...With a shingle in his upraised hand, the author goes after America's most smug satisfactions, attacks her foremost slogans...

...In marshaling her forces, Miss Hurst is fairer to the convent than to the home...

...The impetus of the attack carries them, perhaps, beyond the borders of their old territory, and the subjugate lands held by the Normans or by native rulers...

...Among the passengers were, of course, Catholics, though as a rule such were not to be met with more than five miles distant from their own homestead, that being the limit of their ability to travel without license from the Privy Council or some other important authority...

...Well, this revolution is already upon us, and its onrush is being accelerated by our stoppage of immigration of cheap, unskilled labor...

...In the American Grain, by William Carlos Williams...

...Pizarro, Cortez, Coronado—but you Hernando De Soto keeping the lead four years in a savage country against odds 'without fortress or support of any kind,' you are mine, Black Jasmine, mine...

...As to Miss Guli Springett, she, under the care of Thomas Ellwood—a stout fellow and a real protector—whilst journeying through the land on her lawful occasions was the victim of several attempts at abduction...

...IN so far as this book presents a series of fresh facts and infers from them a distinctly novel observation as to the social and economic course to which this country is holding, it is an altogether admirable example of lucidity and beauty of logical construction...

...He fled for the north and it was lucky for him that in the Great North road he had one constructed by the Romans, for on an English road of the period he would have had no chance...

...Miss Hurst's production of a novel containing so much Catholicity is encouraging...

...At least, he is without inhibitions—taking in life on every side at a rich, even romantic angle—feeling, thinking, developing...

...He was a traveling tinker...

...What was most horrid to you brought out all your pity and there you were, mixed up in what you shuddered back from...

...Wafer of His flesh...

...He is sincere...

...and, on this territory, the amounts due for the support of the hierarchy of chiefs was systematically applotted...

...The problem which Mr...

...The fact is, that the roads were then far worse than they were when the Romans had sway 1,300 years before...

...Wealth and power are becoming diffused throughout all classes of our population, tending rapidly to -eliminate such class-distinctions as remain...

...The chief and his fighting forces are driven out...

...In the two books that are before us there is evidence of this...

...Butler proposes and elucidates is this: at the time of the Norman invasion the Irish chiefs held only a little land as personal property—they had demesnes which were granted them for personal services, but such demesnes were only a very small moiety of the territory that they ruled over...

...the chief plants the land with men who owe him personal loyalty...

...And in three portions that retinue of Turlough's was, that is fifty in each, besides wives and womenfolk, and no portion of these could claim supremacy or submission of any other portion...

...Besides these there were the musicians, and the poets, and the inferior servants...

...Miss Parkes has read with results most delightful for her own readers the memoirs of Pepys, Evelyn, Taylor, the water poet...

...Butler when he shows us the Celtic polity even in its unbalanced form in Tudor times forces us to raise this question: "In the first place, instead of the wild, semi-nomadic life of plundering clans depicted by some writers, we have evidence, in Desmond, of an organized state, with an elaborate fiscal system, providing a settled annual revenue for the sovereign and his various sub-chiefs...

...in each there is the honest work of a first-rate scholar...

...At all times of the year these roads must have been detestable...

...The account of the MacSweeneys that Father Walsh prints and translates is interesting, not only as a record of an Irish family, but also for the light it throws on the Irish mind of the sixteenth century, and for the clues it gives to conditions at the time...

...THE story of the conflict between the loves of the spirit and of the flesh is the theme of Fannie Hurst's novel, Appassionata...

...All the Milesians," he told O'Donovan, "from Fanad to Ballyshannon acknowledged him to be the senior and agreed in the number of generations from him up to Sir Malmurry...

...And, perhaps, the most tragic figure on the road was the hunted Catholic priest with a price on his head, traveling under any one of a dozen names and in any one of a dozen costumes...

...But there was probably another factor that went to make this failure: America had been discovered, and that discovery, as Professor MacNeill has pointed out, had a decisive effect on Irish-English relations—it made the Tudors resolved to dominate the western island...

...Equality under liberty, the glorious American ideal, is in course of realization...

...Aurea mediocritas...

...Butler's is about the MacCarthys, who were senior representatives of the Milesian families of the south...

...sometimes lying hid in one of the ingenious Holes contrived in the same houses by "Little John," the sixfoot-two Jesuit lay-brother so artful in the construction of such places...

...The mother, "at whom nobody ever looks," is a fretful person whose "eyes cling like burs" to the resentful face of her son Frank, a would-be writer who has lost his faith...

...as he becomes a landowner, land-hunger grows more and more upon him...

...Even the highly spiritualized Laura is constantly tortured by the fear of the physical side of marriage, ignoring all else, till she induces a sort of hysterical paralysis which is twice cured by her promise to become a nun...

...The marriages described are mere travesties...

...And it is not surprising to discover later on that: "Some time after Murchadh Mear had made that conquest, his wildness and enthusiasm drove him to think of going in search of the Fortunate Island, for he had heard some account of its wonders...

...Why were the Irish princes unable either to reject or to use Henry's pretensions to being lord of Ireland...

...covered often with floods and, when severe frosts set in, almost impassable...

...It was not, however, the weather and the roads which were most to be dreaded, but the human pests, notably highwaymen, who infested it...

...That great people had covered the important parts of the country with first-class roads...

...But now there are no rights nor tenures that have to be respected: the land subjugated is "sword-land" and is the chief's own...

...Let him justly admire the peaceable methods of labor, and exhort labor to continue these for its own material welfare...

...There are even instances of an Irish prince doing something which would have been unimaginable in the older polity— appropriating for his own use the estates that heretofore had been the support of the learned orders...

...Her fatal faculty for detail makes parts of the book objectionable...

...But in the sixteenth century the Irish chiefs had become great landowners—the O'Neills, the O'Briens had great estates, while the MacCarthy Mor held one of the greatest properties in the British Islands...

...This Nevison robbed a man who recognized him on Gad's Hill— where Falstaff had his memorable conflict and where Charles Dickens was afterward to live—near Rochester at four o'clock in the morning...

...She was attacked by eleven gentlemen highwaymen one of whom was to marry her but she escaped and was actually married clandestinely to her cousin when only twelve years old...

...For example, at Highgate on the road between London (and close to that city) and Holyhead every traveler who alighted for the first time at the inn at the top of the hill had to take oath on a pair of horns extended to him at the end of a long pole that he would never eat brown bread when he could get white, never drink small beer when he could get strong, and never kiss the maid when he could kiss the mistress with this saving clause, "unless he likes the maid best...

...By her pity Laura is especially fitted to labor for Him whom pity for sinners nailed to a cross...

...Balboa lost his eyes on the smile of the Chinese ocean...

...2.00...

...Laura Regan is the daughter of a wealthy contractor who makes her think of a semiparalyzed gorilla, and who tyrannizes over his family...

...Butler shows that the change was largely due to the re-conquest of Irish lands by the militant clans...

...Sister M. Eleanore...

...sometimes in one of the hidden chapels which one sees in so many of the old houses of the period in England...

...The narration is robust, yet the golden light of the sun pours over each one of those individuals...

...and that it is actually happening is perfectly apparent to anyone who has contributed to the maintenance of his plumber's new sedan...

...Here, where the fact is obvious, Professor Carver makes an overwhelming case of it...

...He reads them truly, though violently, in many ways, "resting on no authority but the secret warmth of their tightlocked hearts...

...Or again, he might be met, as Miss Parkes tells us very truly, bound to a hurdle and dragged along the rough or muddy road to the place where he was to be hanged, drawn and quartered, for that was a common ending to such a life...

...Today in Donegal one might hear such description from the lips of some old Shanachie in a chimney-corner: "He collected a great splendid fleet, and he and his followers launched their immense capacious ships, and their long surpassing-swift galleys, and their beautiful easily-managed boats, on the surface of the expansive deep, and on the high stormswept sea, and on the blue-horizoned limitless abyss...

...J.00...

...That's funny...

...Pity is her prime characteristic...

...Every clan, every sub-sept, had its own territory...

...all occupations are being leveled to an equal degree of compensation...

...dusty in summer, boggy in winter...

...O'Levies, surgeons...

...RAVELERS from the western shores of the Atlantic who visit England and race in trains over the excellent permanent ways or in automobiles over the equally excellent roads should read this most fascinating book if they would have an idea of what travel was like in that land some two hundred or more years ago...

...The only hero is he who is not hurt...

...Appassionato, by Fannie Hurst...

...In the original the passage is held together by strong alliteration...

...Boston: Little, Brown and Company...

...He offers us all their worst angles, their most unpleasant odors...

...He conceives of everything in the new America as being warped by concealment and fear, our women most of all...

...The men of the story do not at all understand the spiritual element in love between the sexes...

...On the other side are the pursuing love of Christ, Laura's love of Him which "flows through her in a natural spring, no more to be helped than another woman can help the torrent of her earthly love," and her frightened repugnance from marriage as she saw it in her own family...

...The nun Mother Agatha is a happy creation, "sensible, everyday Mother Agatha with the face like the lit lamp," who could understand how a girl would want to send her hands out in service like healing white wings to the Magdalenes and yet would shudder with nausea at thought of touching their sores...

...Upon the very real spiritual beauty of the book is heaped sordidness...

...Get hurt...

...She is forced by it to her choice...

...The main document that is translated and interpreted in the volume was written in the years 1513-1514...

...But what are the pursuits with which our single universal laboring class is regaling itself, now that it is attaining its prosperity and finding time to seek the actual ends of existence...

...Butler: in the main, he suggests, it was because of the ignorance of the English Crown on the subject of Celtic tenures...

...The Normans seize a territory in which the chief has a small demesne, and in which the great part of the land is held by the nobility, the Church, the learned orders, the free members of the Tuath...

...That was marriage supernal...

...Nevertheless, it is a glorious achievement to have put so much purchasing power in the possession of masses of people who, in other countries, would never have had it— who would, in fact, have constituted the impoverished masses...

...His facts are briefly these: Universal free education in America is providing equality of opportunity for the rising generation to a far greater extent than has ever before been provided anywhere...

...And it is strange to find the occupant of a Harvard chair characterizing as a "pig-trough philosophy" the urge toward self-expression in elegant leisure...

...There were external attacks upon this polity, but its breakdown under Tudor absolutism was due to a weakness that prevented a League being formed...

...The MacSweeney of Doe fought against Hugh O'Donnell at the battle of the Curlew Mountains...

...It is well-nigh impossible to appraise the novel critically because of its jarring elements...

...But temperament is a dangerous thing, it would seem, for the practitioners of what was once called the "dismal science" of political economy—even when it is as safe a temperament as Professor Carver's—for when he loses hold on his steel-bound inductive method and breaks into lyrical hosannas by way of conclusion, his effects become distressing, as well as stimulating, to the thoughtful...

...He resembles a man with a battle-axe starting joyfully to blaze a new spiritual trail through the forest of the world and finding the popular advertisements with "Don't Touch" written large all over them, on every tree...

...The Irish, like the Welsh, had solved 444 THE COMMONWEAL February 24, 1926 the problem which baffled the English until the restoration of the Stuarts, the problem, namely, of providing a fixed revenue for the Crown...

...What is being substituted for the squalor of the slums and for the over-sumptuous dining salons of our obsolescent Mr...

...Here let Professor Carver rejoice for a moment in his liberal Macaulayesque faith in increasing and diffused material comforts...

...Consequently, it is here that the strength of his fine prose conceptions begins to be weakened, broken upon by colloquial comment, heavily edited, its dignity thrust aside...

...Seeing the hurt legs of the Crucified: "You could have torn your heart to shreds to bind them...

...This is a novel of moods and emotions rather than of plot, of epithets rather than of incidents...

...In Muskerry, which was also a MacCarthy principality, the Carew Calendar in 1600 mentions the lands set apart for the professional classes, eight and a half ploughlands in all—a ploughland was a great measure of land: "MacEgans, brehons...

...it postulated fixed metes and bounds, a considerable amount of tillage...

...3.00...

...There before your adoring eyes...

...The vast outlines of a nature which never swerves, punishes cruelly, rewards infallibly, are his poetic material...

...For Williams will conceal nothing, palliate nothing...

...For it, as the achievement of a flower, pure, white, waxlike, and fragrant, that Columbus's infatuated course must be depicted, especially when compared with the acrid and poisonous apple which was later by him to be proved...

...Laura's final renunciation is robbed of greatness by the "miracle...

...Fox, the father of Quakerism...

...Yet she escaped and subsequently became the wife of no less interesting a person than one William Penn, a Quaker, whose name will never be forgotten as the founder of Pennsylvania...

...No dream of a golden fountain of youth would have drowned the vigor of his discoveries...

...New York: Albert and Charles Boni...

...he was left in possession of 2,000 acres of Donegal land...

...On the one side are Laura's ecstatic delight in her exquisitely beautiful body, her craving for luxurious surroundings, and her affection for her likable fiance, which is, however, piteous rather than passionate...

...Butler's material...

...2.50...

...Then, in the course of time, the original owners, who had been living in the mountains, under some able leader, break in upon the settlers and drive them out...

...and even capitalists are being forced to work, as they find profits from capital alone insufficient...

...They were fighters in the Norse fashion—Galloglaigh, the Irish called them, a name that comes into English as Gallowglass—their main arm was the battleaxe...

...The O'Dalys, as we shall see, had a considerable property in 1641 in what is now counted part of Muskerry...

...it would roll out finely from the lips of a story-teller...

...Both books have at their core family, or rather, dynastic history...

...Yet on occasion, numbers of them managed to make their way to Saint Winifred's Well in Wales, then as now a great place of pilgrimage* How they managed to do this Miss Parkes does not tell us, but make the pilgrimage they certainly did...

...Leaving these tropical prose poems of little epics with the song—for it is a song on Sir Walter Raleigh—we come to the account of the Puritans who are the author's pet aver* sion...

...Twice taken from the arms of earthly lovers by her divine Spouse, she finally gives herself to be His perpetual bride, knowing He will love her even after her shimmering beauty has gone...

...Father Walsh's is about the MacSweeneys, comparatively newcomers into Ireland, and Mr...

...The chapter on Jacataqua, the Indian girl, is a dissertation on our lack of sex—"the spiritual barrenness of the American woman...

...He was unable to retain her beyond the church or the blacksmith's door whichever it was that he patronized, but he managed to have her kidnapped later on on the road by one Ensign Wroth...

...What had brought the change about...

...An analysis of these forces and their effects on the heroine make up the book...

...The taking into your very being of Him...

...The title of Father Walsh's book means the Book of the MacSweeneys, and it gives with translations the principal documents relating to the MacSweeney family—pedigrees, family traditions and so on...

...Thus we have innumerable accounts of coaches belonging to the highest in the land being overturned or mired, and of horsemen being thrown or their beasts stuck in some quagmire...

...Why were they not able to form a League which would have forced the Crown to respect their property and their status, or else fling the Crown across the Channel and set up an authority amongst themselves that would have given security to Ireland...

...This fate had apparently befallen the O'Levies and the O'Donins...

...He can see nothing tragic here...

...Leabhar Chlainne Suibhne, an account of the MacSweeney families in Ireland with pedigrees, by Paul Walsh...

...All this will go hand in hand with progress in practical invention and applied science...

...No more had Columbus landed, the flower once ravished than it seemed as if heaven itself had turned up this man for disturbing its repose...

...Father Walsh's book does not deal with material that has anything like the significance of Mr...

...An idealist of Latin blood, he does not want his blossoming, savage wilderness of life soiled by the storekeepers, advertisers, and politicians of humanity...

...In consequence the Celtic polity becomes unbalanced...

...Warring forces are marshaled in array...

...The population of those days was anywhere between 3,000,000 and 5,000,000, and the major part of it never stirred far beyond the precincts of its own village or town...

...This was the attempt made by Henry the Eighth to have the Irish princes surrender their lands to him as lord of Ireland and to grant their lands back to them on terms of feudal ownership...

...One cannot enjoy the book, nor recommend it, and yet one must be glad it was written, for it is another proof that the .soul's quest for God and for union with Him is entering into modern materialistic literature...

...Their successors had done little even to keep these roads in order, until well into the eighteenth century, when something was done to improve conditions...

...Let the sucker who fails get his...

...The older daughter, Fleta, is forced to remain in a monstrous marriage relation because her father exercises more severity than does the Church in regard to the separation of man and wife...

...There were MacSweeneys in Munster too...

...This is now being done, and there are in Ireland now three or four historians who are giving us real glimpses into the Irish past...

...Padraic Colum...

...These are but a very few samples from the gallery opened to us by Miss Parkes in her book which is not only well written and supplied with well-selected instances but is also admirably illustrated with cuts from old books of the period...

...The head of one branch of the family was on the jury that pronounced the great Hugh O'Neill guilty of high treason...

...Cabeza De Vaca lived hard and saw much...

...Thus is the book, too, robbed of greatness...

...Even in his vulgarity he is amusing...

...After smartly thwacking the Bolsheviki, Marxians, anarchists, radicals, and socialists for their "materialism/' which he confuses with mere selfishness, Professor Carver cheerfully reckons all the values and possibilities of human existence in terms of things purchasable with money...

...Travel in England in the Seventeenth Century, by Joan Parkes...

...New York: Oxford University Press...

...He has held old manuscripts up to the sun and infused life blood into them...

...I ^ HERE are chapters of In the American Grain that the -*¦ reviewer considers superior and would like to read, absorb, and enjoy forever...

...Even when we disagree and feel his psychology absolutely at fault we are aware that the man is a dynamo...

...2.SO...

...And it seems as if the winters must have been more severe in those days...

...Travel through some places was, apart from this, accompanied by strange ceremonies...

...Paternalism and snobbishness will be things of the past...

...Liberte, egalite, fraternite...

...Menders of roads, as a class, will be no whit worse nor better off, financially or socially, than menders of bones and tissues, minds, souls, or international relations...

...sleeping where he could, and discharging his duties...

...you're a fool...

...The first two Jesuits who went into Ireland noted that weakness: "They (the Irish) will never endure a superiority...

...What is really wanted is some statement that will resume through a typical figure the great episodes in a certain epoch—in the epoch of the Elizabethan wars, say, or the Cromwellian conquest, or the Williamite war...

...Laura Regan loves God in the way of ecstatic saints...

...Yet there was much going and coming of all sorts of folk, under close supervision, for when you passed through a village if you could not satisfy the local Dogberry that your business was one of an inoffensive kind you were haled off to the filthy lockup and remained there until you could clear your character...

...He dismisses the faint misgiving thus: "All this we may as well admit...

...Improved machinery will, perhaps, make possible a laboring day of no more than four hours for the average man...

...They will go with the heroine to Mass: "Miracle of the Sacrament...

...New York: Alfred A. Knopf...

...This revenue was definitely assessed on certain areas of land...

...She had pity for everyone, even for God...

...It is the poet in Williams who speaks in the Discovery of the Indies: "The western land could not guard its seclusion longer...

...He takes the part of Aaron Burr whom he paints in large, loud colors "because men, never content with the malice with which they surround each living moment, must extend their ill-will backward...

...Pere Rasle, a spirit rich, blossoming, generous, able to give and to receive, full of taste, enduring self-forgetfulness in beneficence—a new spirit in the new world...

...At the beginning of the twelfth century—just before the Norman invasion—a MacCarthy chieftain had built on the Rock of Cashel that chapel that still survives as the gem of Romanesque-Celtic architecture—Cormac's chapel...

...In 1835 John O'Donovan met a man who claimed to February 24, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 443 be directly descended from this MacSweeney Doe...

...A century and a half after Cormac MacCarthy had built the chapel in Cashel the MacSweeneys established themselves in North Ireland...

...They came in from Scotland, but when they first come to be noted they are in possession of a genealogy that knits them to the Irish dynastic families of the north...

...UNTIL the important epochs in Irish history have been given movement, vividness, and depth by a romantic rendering, they will remain obscure to us...

...As figured today in tales there was a certain amount of romance about these gunmen but, in fact, there was nothing to choose between the modern hold-up man and Captain Macheath or any of the other numerous "captains" or the Golden Farmer or even that celebrated person, William Nevison who—and not Dick Turpin, alas, that another legend must be dispelled!—was the hero of the ride to York...

...Fords, tabloid newspapers, Hollywood cinemas, beauty contests, radios, mechanical pianos, confession-stories, more subways, endless two-family suburban houses, quack medicines, and New Thought lectures...

...That "this is something new in the history of the world" will scarcely be contested...

...The MacSweeneys of Connacht forfeited their estates under the Cromwellian regime...

...O'Donins, chroniclers...

...What's tragic in that...

...What would he do with Virgil or Michaelangelo ? Ernest Brennecke, Jr...

...Says O'Donovan: "He then sat down and told me his story, the misfortunes of his family, how he came to be a tinker, and lastly his pedigree up to Sir Malmurry MacSweeney Doe—eight generations...

...a predestined and bitter fruit existing, perversely, before the white flower of its birth, it was laid bare by the miraculous first voyage...

...It seems almost incredible that such a difference should exist—all the way from barbarism to civilization...

...If the mud balls occasionally turn and deface his own best work, it is immaterial...

...and many another book, and from them selected all sorts of incidents illustrative of her theme...

...The formal historians have first to help us...

...The trouble with such an attitude (and it may be a common disease among economists) is that it is purely materialistic, for all the author's assurances that it is divinely inspired...

...dear Mother Agatha, with the workaday and the sublime all mixed up in her...

...Laura Benet...

...Not Americans...

...Figures as to the distribution of corporation shares and stock ownership, deposits in labor banks, industrial life insurance, and income taxes are amassed to demonstrate that labor is accomplishing a real revolution, not by means of physical force but through a dependence upon the "higher strategy" which •employs wealth itself as a weapon to enforce its demands...

...Never, from the moment when Laura Regan awakes to a sordid day in her unhappy home from luxurious morning slumber in her beautiful boudoir, till her final conquest by Christ her Beloved in that same room, voluntarily shorn of its splendor, does the warfare cease...

...In thus repressing its fighting temper, and in wisely consulting •self-interest merely (a sound procedure economically, and defensible ethically) the former wage-slave class is effecting what promises to become a staggering diffusion of prosperity among all occupational groups, although individual prosperity within any single group will depend, as always, on individual endowment and energy...

...saying Mass sometimes in a public house where men sat round with pipes and glasses of February 24, 1926 THE COMMONWEAL 445 beer to delude the pursuivants...

...With uncanny ability she coins horrid descriptive phrases and then hammers them into one's brain by endless repetitions...

...By eight o'clock that evening he was in York and talking to the Lord Mayor so as to establish a perfect alibi, and established it was, for no one could have believed that one horse could have traversed this 250 miles in the time...

...Why this attempt failed is clearly shown by Mr...

...They rowed with might and main, and they rested not until they reached the calm beautiful haven of Swilly...

...Similarly, in his chapter on Pere Sebastien Rasle, the Jesuit priest who lived among the Indians, he begins by introducing a dialogue between himself and Larbaud which lasts for the space of fifteen pages...

...It is a great theme and is, for the most part, well handled...

...Laura who, according to her brother, "thinks with her tear-ducts," is torn by recurring shocks of pity for the various members of her family...

...And again the new world says to De Soto: "In the end you shall receive of me, nothing—save one long caress as of a great river passing forever upon your corse...

...It was part of the government policy to suppress the brehons, chroniclers, and rhymers, which was most easily done by handing their lands over to the chiefs...

...She was recaptured and eventually, her first marriage having been annulled, carried her wealth to Lord Dumblane, afterward second Duke of Leeds...

...It is driving poverty and squalor out of our slums...

...They reveal William Carlos Williams in his best light as a truthful yet poetic exponent of history...

...Wine of His blood...

...If our world is to contain nothing but these, some of us cannot but feel that the American prospect is ugly, distressing, even sinister...

...The last pages of the book, from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln and Edgar Allan Poe, are sometimes illuminated as by arc-lights arid then again blurred under spotlights of prejudice...

...Laborers, moreover, are swiftly accumulating capital with their increasing earnings...

...Her popularity among those who know nothing of the religious life will acquaint them with it and with the doctrines of the Holy Eucharist, Baptism, Confession, and Marriage...

...Our leisure class, already infinitesimal, will disappear...

...Less than one of Professor Carver's 270 pages deals with these symptoms of the oncoming universal contentment— or may we say, smugness...

...Too many asides and arguments blur the fine painting of a great personality...

...The MacSweeneys did not emerge badly out of the Elizabethan wars—at least, not badly as far as their estates were concerned...

...But while Leabhar Chlainne Suibhne deals with the MacSweeneys and the MacSweeneys only, Gleanings from Irish History deals with a subject of great social and political complexity—the native administration of an Irish principality, the destruction of the native power, and the alienation of territory that had formed a great Irish lordship...

...they were constables to the MacCarthy of Muskerry...

...In places where they had influence the English gave eager backing to such grabbing...

...Miss Bridget Hyde was the possessor in her own right of 3,000 pounds per annum, quite a nice little fortune today and worth far more then, and besides, had expectations from a very wealthy step-father...

...You were like that...

...It is as amusing as a moving picture caption or a performance on the radio to see how he dashes off into cheapness, presses impatiently to himself sentences like: "Who is open to injuries...

...O'Dalys, rhymers...

...Williams fairly crucifies on the rack of his own littlenesses Benjamin Franklin the "dike-keeper of America, who kept the wilderness out with his wits...

...And that can only be done by a great artist who possesses the racial feeling and who has a sense of the national destiny—in other words we need some writer to do for Irish history what Gogol did for Cossack history in Taras Bulba, what Von Herdenstam has done for the Scandinavian Saga-lore, and Galdos in his Episodios Nacionales...

...The household of a great noble of the time is shown to us by Father Walsh: "These were the standing retinue in the house of Turlough Caoch, namely, 150...