beaten. Here is a brief expression of his creed, uttered at the very inception of the Hampton enterprise. He does not minimize the difficulties before him, but declines to take the possibility of failure into consideration : "The enterprise is as full of bad possibilities as of good ones; most embarrassing conditions will occur from time to time; all is experiment, but all is hopeful. What can resist steady energetic pressure, the force of a single right idea pushed month after month in its natural development? . . . Few men comprehend the deep philosophy of one-man power."

...

General Armstrong had a natural love of literature, and his small opportunity for reading caused him sincere regret. But he could not by any possibility have been satisfied with the life of a literary man. To stand aside and comment would have been the most irksome of tasks for him; nor, to say truth, would his criticism have been worth much. His own path he knew. At thirty he writes cheerfully from Boston: "I have been over the 'Athens,' but would n't live here for anything. I am glad I'm on the outposts doing frontier duty and pioneer work, for the South is a heathen land, and Hampton is on the borders thereof. I see my whole nature calls me to the work that is done there—to lay foundations strong, and not do frescoes and fancy work." In this spirit his lifework was done; he had no sense of personal virtue in it. "Few men have had the chance that I have had," he wrote toward the end. "I never gave up or sacrificed anything in my life — have been, seemingly, guided in everything."

The present biographical sketch of this strong man's life is written by one of his daughters, with much simplicity and modesty; the record of a personality and a career well worth summarizing in print, though they have written them

1 The Hour-Glass and Other Plays: Being Volume Two of Plays for an Irish Theatre.

selves most effectively otherwise than in words. H. W. Boynton.

matic Stud

ies.

WHATEVER trepidation may attend Three Dra- the opening of Mr. Yeats's second volume of Plays for an Irish Theatre1 will be happily dispatched by a glance. One may be equally grateful for what these little plays are not and for what they are. They contain none of the air-drawn pseudo-Maeterlinckian fantasy which made so puzzling an affair of Where There is Nothing, the first play in the series. It may be that a symbol now and then shows its head, but it is not encouraged to occupy the foreground. Indeed, Mr. Yeats seems here to have deliberately betaken himself to allegory, which in one of his prose essays he sosharply distinguishes from symbolism; "dramatic fables" is the phrase he uses for these plays in his Dedication. They are written in simple prose, Irish in fibre rather than in dress. The Hour-Glass is a Morality which superficially reminds one of Everyman. "The Wise Man" is suddenly warned of approaching death. He perceives that his wisdom has been folly, but his repentance comes too late. The best bargain he can make with the Angel of Death is the promise of eventual salvation if in the hour that remains he can find one who believes. His wife and children, his pupils and neighbors fail him; they have learned their lesson from him far too well. At last, as the final grains drop from the hour-glass, the Fool, of whom nothing is expected, proves the wisest of all, and the Wise Man is saved: "I understand it all now. One sinks in on God; we do not see the truth; God sees the truth in us." . . . All this appears to suggest not only a universal truth, but a specific condition. It is a vindication of faith as against reason, and of Irish priestcraft as against Irish skepticism.

...

By W. B. YEATS. New York: The Macmillan Co. 1904.

Cathleen ni Hoolihan makes a direct appeal to the devotion of Young Ireland for Old Ireland; not in the name of the shillalah, but gently, with much pathos and much simplicity. "One night," reads the Dedication, "I had a dream, almost as distinct as a vision, of a cottage where there was well-being and firelight and talk of a marriage, and into the midst of that cottage there came an old woman in a long cloak. She was Ireland herself, that Cathleen ni Hoolihan, for whom so many songs have been sung and about whom so many stories have been told and for whose sake so many have gone to their death." She takes the bridegroom with her when she goes; there is work for him to do:

"BRIDGET [laying her hand on Patrick's arm]. Did you see an old woman going down the path?

"PATRICK. I did not, but I saw a young girl, and she had the walk of a queen."

The third sketch seems to be pure kindly satire upon Irish simplicity, upon Irish cunning.

In the Dedication Mr. Yeats expresses gratitude to a friend who has helped him "down out of that high window of dramatic verse," to a renewed acquaintance with "the country speech." The resulting "dramatic fables" have been successfully produced in Dublin and London. They would be a boon to our stage, upon which the Irishman has roared in farce quite long enough.

Meanwhile the "high window of dramatic verse" continues to be occupied, not always happily. Mr. Hardy's present volume, we note with concern, is only the first installment of a work of imposing proportions. Several hundred speaking human characters are promised for the whole Drama, not to speak of an Ancient Spirit of the Years, a Spirit of the Pities, Spirits Sinister and Ironic, etc.

1 The Dynasts: A Drama of the Napoleonic Wars, in Three Parts, Nineteen Acts, and One Hundred and Thirty Scenes. Part First. By

66

Obviously this is not to be a drama of the practical sort. In his Preface the author goes so far as to speculate "whether mental performance alone may not eventually be the fate of all drama other than that of contemporary or frivolous life." He admits, however, that this work is rather a panoramic show' than in any strict sense a drama. A panoramic show, one supposes somewhat vaguely, ought to possess lucidity, mobility, the color and the flow of life in the mass. The multitudinous scenes in the present effort are full of information, comment, and proper names; they are empty of persons and of poetry. They have logical continuity, but no creative unity whatever. They do not flow into one another; they are stuck up side by side, like photographs on a wall. They are, in short, the work of a master of realistic fiction in a field altogether alien to his powers. Mr. Hardy has never proved himself a poet in a small way; he here scores a failure in the colossal style. His verse is for the most part an achievement of elaborate mischance: A verbiage marked by nothing more of weight Than ignorant irregularity,

as he makes Sheridan say in the course of a remarkable versified report of a parliamentary debate. The Spirits have a particularly crabbed and toplofty habit of speech. It is the Ancient Spirit of the Years (and not Ancient Pistol) who emits this extraordinary couplet: So may ye judge Earth's jackaclocks to be Not fugled by one Will, but function-free. Mr. Hardy has, one discovers after some exercise of patience, succeeded in throwing emphasis upon England's part in the Napoleonic struggle, and in expressing a healthy British scorn for Napoleon and other foreign persons.

Mr. William Vaughn Moody has a true instinct not only for poetry but for dramatic poetry, as readers of his THOMAS HARDY. New York: The Macmillan Co. 1904.

their beauty, as much as in their grandeur, are the peculiar glory of England. Its story and that of its masters must of necessity include an epitome of English history during a thousand years, and as to legend and romance, one can go back into the wonderland of a dim past with John Rous, the worthy fifteenth-century Warwickshire antiquary, who asserts that Warwick was founded about the time of "the birth of King Alexander the Greek conqueror." Lady Warwick writes in a straightforward, unaffected style, and her work being in its nature largely that of a compiler, she selects and uses her material with excellent judgment and a due sense of proportion. She gives space enough, and not too much, to a consideration of the legendary chronicles, and the authentic but rather scanty records of the Saxon and Norman earls. The first The first figures that can really be vitalized are of the house of Beauchamp, especially its greatest son, Richard, of whom the Emperor Sigismund declared that he had not his equal in Christendom "for Wisdom, Nurture, and Manhood,

if

all Courtesie were lost, it might be found in him again; " and whose noble monument in the centre of the beautiful chapel he founded has kept him in remembrance even to this day. The career of this all- accomplished knight's more famous son-in-law, the king-maker, is clearly and well described, and with him the old order passes, his hapless grandson, the Plantagenet earl, being the most pitiful victim of the new rule.

The outlines, at least, of the history of one of the most notorious instruments of that new rule, Edmund Dudley, and of his son and grandsons, are tolerably well known to most readers. Lady Warwick, in a very good summingup of the characteristics of the most conspicuous members of the family that held the earldom under the Tudors, says: "Their ambition was overweening and outran their talents. . . . But

they figured impressively on the stage, and realized the pageant of life better than any of their contemporaries." By the aid of The Black Book of Warwick she is able to revivify some of this splendor of life, and the whole varied story of the house of Dudley is well told. But why is the little son and heir of Leicester

the child of the Countess Lettice passed over in the narrative, and his identity confounded with that of his elder half-brother? All visitors in the Beauchamp Chapel linger at the tomb of "the noble imp," and one can imagine the hopeless perplexity of the earnest tourist when he finds this childish designation, and even the boy's monument, given to Sir Robert Dudley, who died and was buried in Tuscany more than threescore years after the effigy of his small brother had been placed in the Lady Chapel. There is no lack of interest in the annals of the house of Rich, or of contrasts in character; -witness that altogether evil man, the Lord Chancellor; his grandson, for no personal merit made Earl of Warwick, and of whom "Stella" was the unwilling bride; their son, the sturdy Puritan admiral, whose saintly daughter-in-law, Mary Boyle, is sketched at full length, a most living picture with her little foibles and great virtues. Then, in the eighteenth century, the family obscurely ending, the earldom came to the house of Greville, who had possessed the Castle since the passing of the Dudleys.

"Fulke Greville, servant to Queen Elizabeth, councillor to King James, and friend to Sir Philip Sidney," - thus he wrote his epitaph, made future generations his debtor by his admirable restoration and enlargement of the halfruined Castle, which he also "beautified with the most pleasant gardens." Two hundred years later, George Greville, the second earl of his house, restored and supplemented his predecessor's work, and gathered from far and near those treasures of art with which the world is

familiar. A word of appreciation must be given to the author's spirited and sympathetic sketch of that Lord Brooke, the Parliamentary leader, who was slain at Lichfield, and was in his short life an exemplar of all that was best in the Liberalism of his time. One regrets that more space could not have been given to descriptions of the Castle and St. Mary's Church as well. Architecture in such a connection is by no means so "dull" a subject as the writer fears it to be. Space fails to do justice to the illustrations which are given in lavish abundance and are excellently well selected. There are

portraits, from the illuminations of the Rous Roll to the photographs of to-day, relics of every kind, and views without number of the Castle and its surroundings, indicating, so far as pencil and camera may, not only the " grey magnificence," but something of the dreamlike charm of the place. In a few wellchosen closing words, the author shows how she and Lord Warwick have striven to blend the old and the new, and to fulfill in various ways the duties of their stewardship. Surely one of these duties has been fulfilled in the preparation of these chronicles.

He

ONE summer Sunday morning, a numThe Mouth ber of years ago, I dropped of the Mime. in at the French Protestant Church on Washington Square, New York. It was a little late and the preacher had begun his discourse. was a man of commanding presence, and possessed of one of the most fortunate voices, for his calling, that I had ever listened to. I do not at all remember what he said, but I was curiously attracted by the way in which he said it, by the purity and flexibility of his enunciation, and by the subtle play of expression with which it was accompanied, and particularly by the art delicate and unobtrusive and effective, but clearly the art with which he used his lips. I was conscious of a haunting suggestion of some other mouth that I had seen betraying the like skill, employed with equal mastery, in quite different surroundings. It was only at the close of the service, when the preacher recited the Lord's Prayer with peculiar fervor and solemnity, that I recognized that the suggested parallel was with Coquelin ainé, whom I had heard recently, and

as I passed out I learned by inquiry that the accomplished orator to whom I had been listening was the then famous M. Loyson, the Père Hyacinthe whose eloquence had once enthralled the audiences of Notre Dame.

The incident set me upon one of those desultory studies which engage most of us more fascinatingly than our regular pursuits; from time to time I seized every opportunity that presented itself to compare the mouths of orators and actors, and I came to think, with considerable reason, that I could recognize a man of either profession at sight by that sole indicium, especially, as not infrequently happened, if the case observed was that of a really successful practitioner of either. Naturally the comparison was easiest between the actors and the pulpit speakers, since in our land of many sects and scant ceremonial the latter are as numerous as the former. The analogy, however, was as evident among secular speakers, Mr. Curtis, Colonel Ingersoll, Mr. Bryan, and Mr. Bourke Cockran, among political speakers; while my memory ran back to Phillips and