paigning with her father would entail. The turning of Ann Nugent from her husband is the really significant part of the play,—and in thoughts of that we pay scant heed to the political satire and even to the pathos of the desertion of a leader by almost all he expected to follow him, and the reduction of his life, as he puts it bitterly, "to an anecdote—a thing to be told stories about." And in the end that is the fate he will meet. Time and a wife that he wronged have broken him. As he staggers off at the end of the play, a stricken man and older than his forty-five years, this is his cry:—
I've killed a man, I've crippled a child, I've got myself shut up for eighteen years—God knows what good came of it all—but—Peter—I meant—I tried ... I know I meant right—and in prison my cell used to be filled with the sad faces of men like me who had given everything for Ireland—they wouldn't have come to me, would they? if I hadn't been of their company. They are here now—I see them all around me—there is Wolfe Tone, and there is ... oh, quiet watching faces, I have tried—tried as you tried—and been broken....
With this ability of his to pick out a theme that is basic in Irish life, and with the years bringing him an experience of life that will dominate any propagandist purpose, Mr. Robinson should grow in seriousness of intention and accomplishment. He hates sham, he has sane and cleansing satire of pretension, he writes good dialogue, his experience as stage manager of the Abbey Theatre is teaching him the stage; he is only twenty-five. Do not these things augur a future?
