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IRISH PLAYS AND PLAYWRIGHTS

of a Town" save Miss Arabella Dean. In "Maeve," the heroine and Finola are sympathetically presented, and there is a kind of attraction as well as decided repulsion in Peg Inerny. But such sympathy as Mr. Martyn does express here seems to be expressed not because the women are fellow human beings, but because Maeve and Peg Inerny symbolize Ireland's resistance to English ways and because Finola is filled with loving-kindness for Maeve. Agnes Font in "The Enchanted Sea" escapes the pillory rather inexplicably, for she is poor, weak girlhood unable to understand the other-worldly idealism of her cousin and Lord Mask. But since Mrs. Font was altogether repulsive and the men either too dreamy for "common nature's daily food" or too hard in the way of the Black North, Mr. Martyn felt, I suppose, that his hearers would be utterly alienated were there not some one in the play sympathetic in the ordinary way of human nature.

"A Tale of a Town" was put on for the first time at Molesworth Hall, Dublin, late in October of 1905, by Cumann nan Gaedheal, not very notably, but it was hailed by the Irish Ireland newspapers as admirable propagandist material, "The United Irishmen" declaring that "an Irish play which brings home to us, as this does, the secret of the endurance of foreign government in this country, is a national asset."

Mr. Martyn has not cared enough for "The Place Hunters" (1905) to publish it in book form, contenting himself with its printing in a little periodical. It is, as its title indicates, a fellow of "A Tale of a Town," but it has