It is easy to find his literary origins—they are the Bible, Homer and Herodotus. He made the Bible his book of wonder when he was young, being induced to do this by a censorship his mother had set up—she was adverse, as he tells us, to his reading newspapers and current periodicals. From the Bible he has got his rhythmic, exalted prose. He took from it too the themes that he has so often repeated—fair and unbelieving cities with their prophets and their heathen kings. Homer he loves and often repeats, and the accounts of early civilizations that Herodotus gives delights him. I do not think he reads much modern literature, and I am certain that he reads none of the philosophic, sociological and economic works that fill the bookshops to-day. He would not judge a book by its cover, but he would, I am sure, judge it by its title. I have seen him become enraptured by titles of two books that were being reviewed at the time. One was "The High Deeds of Finn," and the other "The History of the East Roman Empire from the Accession of Irene to the Fall of Basil the Third" (I am not sure I have got the Byzantine sovereigns in right). He has a prodigal imagination. I have watched him sketch a scenario for a play, write a little story, and invent a dozen incidents for tales, in the course of a morning, all the time talking imaginatively. He thinks best, I imagine, in the open air while he is shooting or hunting around his Castle. And he exercises a very gracious hospitality in that twelfth century castle of his in the County Meath, and he would travel a long way a-foot, I know, to find a good talker that he could bring into the circle. It is a long time now since an ancient historian in Ireland wrote into "The Annals of the Four Masters," "There be two great robber barons on the road to Drogheda, Dunsany and Fingall; and if you save yourself from the hands of Fingall, you will assuredly fall into the hands of Dunsany."
New York, August, 1917.
