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IRISH PLAYS AND PLAYWRIGHTS

before Mr. Martyn had written of the sea enchantment it had lent its charm to many of the stories of "Fiona Macleod." It was two years after its publication in 1902 that, on April 18 and 19, 1904, "The Enchanted Sea" was put on at the Antient Concert Rooms, Dublin by "The Players' Club." It was not well played, but according to Mr. Standish James O'Grady it was much better, seen and listened to, than read. Writing, in his "All Ireland Review," of its production, he puts it on record "I never saw an audience so attentive and at the same time so undemonstrative. It was like being in church." The audience probably felt the dignity of conception back of the insufficiency of execution in the play and its ineffectiveness of presentation. The story that Mr. Martyn dreamed to carry over the footlights is of Mrs. Font, a peasant woman who has sent her husband, a gentleman, to his grave a broken-spirited man because of her sacrifice of his honor to advance their material position. When the curtain rises, Mrs. Font has been thwarted, by the death of her son, in her lifelong dream of obtaining possession of the Font estates. The estates have reverted to her nephew, Guy Font, a strange boy, who has been brought up by the peasantry of the west coast and so has come to share many of their beliefs. He is fascinated by the sea by which he lives, and his family's friend, Lord Mask, has been drawn to him, although there is such disparity in their years, by this love of the sea which he and the boy have in common. Mrs. Font wishes her daughter to marry Mask, but the young people are but half in love with each other. Agnes Font cannot share his visionariness, as her other