was his with Mr. Yeats and Mr. Moore and Lady Gregory, is partially shown in the rewriting of the play by Mr. Moore into "The Bending of the Bough." The motives remain as they were, and, in essentials, the action is the same, the first act being little different in the two plays The four other acts, however, Mr. Moore has almost entirely rewritten, and though everywhere the fundamental brainwork is Mr. Martyn's, the last acts are finer in the revised version. Mr. Moore makes far more plausible the girl, Millicent Fell, for love of whom, and a life of ease, the political leader Jasper Dean gives up a leadership through which he could largely right his country's wrongs. Not only does Mr. Moore make believable the action of the play, but he puts words on it, which, if not true dramatic speech, reveal, after the manner of the novelist, just what are the thought and emotion of the characters, and the words are in themselves beautiful.
In "A Tale of a Town" the political situation from which evolves the action of the play is the unification by Jasper Dean of the corporation of a town, unnamed, on the west coast of Ireland, to prosecute a lawsuit against an English town, Anglebury, which owes the Irish town a large indemnity, promised the Irish town when it gave up a line of steamers in the interest of the Anglebury line of steamers. After uniting all the various elements save the place hunter Alderman Lawrence against Anglebury, Dean gives up the leadership because his fiancée, whose uncle is the mayor of the English town, turns against him because he is opposed to the interests of her set. To hold her he betrays his town.
