to climax as in "Mixed Marriage." Its undoubted power is in the feeling underlying it, in its characterization, and in its style. Mr. Campbell was already known when his play was put on at the Abbey Theatre, April 15, 1912, as the author of "The Mountainy Singer" (1909), a volume of freshly felt and singing verse; and of "Mearing Stones" (1911), little prose records of things seen and of moods felt in a corner of Donegal. Many a striking phrase of "Judgment," indeed, is already written down in the paragraphs of "Mearing Stones" as actual talk heard in the roads, and several of the situations of the plays are workings-up of situations of which its author found himself a spectator on the streets of Andara or on the highway between Slieve a-Tooey and the sea.
I first came upon his verses, if I remember rightly, in "The United Irishmen," but I was first impressed by him as an illustrator, his name being always signed in those days after the Irish fashion, Seosamh MacCathmhaoil. A Dublin friend sent me at Christmas in 1907 a "Calendar of the Saints," for which Mr. Campbell did the illustrations, illustrations akin to those of Miss Althea Gyles, which so surely take one back to Ireland's heroic age, instinct as they are with the primitive aloofness of antiquity.
It is not antiquity, however, that Mr. Campbell has chosen for his play. Indeed, he rejects antiquity, deliberately "using peasants as ... protagonists instead of kings—who, like Pharaoh, are 'but a cry in Egypt,' outworn figures in these days with no beauty and no significance." "Judgment" is made out of the story of the countryside concerning "a tinker's woman," Peg Straw,
