the coming of the Normans to Ireland. It is pitched to a higher key than any other of her historic plays, and it is held better to its key, but its tragedy is far less impressive than the tragedy of "The Gaol Gate" (1906) which pictures the effects upon his wife and his mother of the imprisonment of an Irish lad of to-day, and their learning that "Denis Cahel died for his neighbor." This little play is out of the life that Lady Gregory knows and can deal with; it is finely conceived and finely executed, lingering in the mind as does the keen heard rising from some bare graveyard fronting the Atlantic.
Just why Lady Gregory, who has rendered in prose so well old legends, should render old Irish historic life so much less well I cannot explain. Sometimes I think it is because she has found less of that history than of that legend among the people. Yet in "A Travelling Man" (1907), her little miracle, somewhat in the manner of Dr. Hyde's, that brings Christ into a modern peasant home, she has made a play of a tender and reconciling beauty. With the success of "A Travelling Man" and "The Gaol Gate" before me I cannot say it is because her genius is for farce; and to say that it is because her genius is for the plays of modern peasant life does not help to account for the fact.
The idiom of all these plays is racy of the soil, and when it need be, eloquent with the eloquence that is almost always in the English of the Irish. It is full of wise saws and proverbs, quips and quirks of expression, the picturesquenesses and homelinesses of speech that are characteristic of a peasant to whom talk is the half of life. These range from sayings like those of the clowns of
