Irish Books and Irish People

Whatever Mr. Shaw touches, whether it be the half-hysterical impulse that sometimes passes current for heroism, as in _Arms and the Man_, or, as in the _Devil's Disciple_, the c...

My publisher must take at least some of the responsibility for reviving these essays. All bear the marks of the period at which they were written; and some of them deal with the...

In the autumn of 1846, when the threat of famine had become a certainty, Moore came home to Mayo, where there was grim business to be done. His tenants, on an estate running up...

I pass to a brief examination of the boarding schools, institutions which have never flourished in Ireland. Nearly all Protestants and many Catholics, if they can afford it, sen...

Taking Sheridan and Miss Edgeworth as marking the point of departure, it becomes obvious that one is an end, the other at a beginning. Sheridan belongs body and soul to the eigh...

James Kelly himself, as he sat by the fire declaiming at me, was all browns and greys, like the country outside his door; and his eyes were like brown streams running through th...

Somehow that picture gives a measure of the remoteness. Stephen's Green was not then a place of square-set granite pavement, tram-rails and large swift-moving electric trams; it...

Carleton did for the peasantry what Miss Edgeworth had done for the upper classes. In her books the peasants have only an incidental part, and she describes them shrewdly and sy...

When that reciprocal pilgrimage was accomplished by the Convention, her anticipations were more than justified. But how clever she was! In a flash, she, coming there a stranger,...