under notice (especially in the suggestive letter of Mr. Justice O'Hagan) which are outside the range of my (of late years, at all events) scant and hurried reading. The hundred books you proposed to amass seem to be growing dangerously near to a thousand, and I am afraid that to most men to whom it is not given to enjoy lives of learned leisure there will come a sigh that life is not long enough to turn so great a mass of treasure to account. I don't know whether the experience of others confirms my own feelings that, with books as with mankind, you may have any number of acquaintances, but only a few faithful lifelong friends. Three-fourths of the books named by your various eminent correspondents are helps to the understanding of that Irish history which, unhappily, is not to be found in any single book. It would very much reduce the mass of needful reading, as well as do other and priceless service to our country, if among the young students whom this discussion may allure to the fascinating love of Irish historical research (now opening up in a hundred new and varied aspects) there should be one who will yet give Ireland a history which will assimilate what is best in Dr W K Sullivan's investigations of the social conditions of primitive Ireland, tested by the most recent results arrived at by the Celtic philologists of Germany and France; condense M'Geoghegan's opulent details of our golden age; do for each of the dramatic centuries since the Norman Conquest what Mr. Lecky's Irish chapters have done for the eighteenth; depict, by the help of memoirs like those of Tone and Byrne, and Moore's Lord Edward, and the State papers already disclosed in the Castlereagh and Cornwallis Correspondence, or the still more interesting ones to be, perhaps, yet disclosed, the events, sad and glorious and shameful by turns, which brought about the Union; extract from mountains of newspapers and tombs of Parliamentary reports the thirty years of Irish history which is the history of O'Connell; go to Mitchel's lightning pages and Sir C G Duffy's books for pictures of the ghastly tragedy in which it closed; consult Mr. Barry O'Brien's books and Mr. T P O'Connor's for the proper understanding of the politics of our own day; and blend that whole wondrous story with the critical faculty of Dr Sullivan, the sympathy of Judge O'Hagan, and the bright and limpid narrative power of Mr. Justin M'Carthy. Such a work would be our proudest national possession. Until its hour arrive, it seems to me that monographs on particular passages of Irish history, after the type of Sir J Pope Hennessy's "Raleigh in Ireland"—accurate in statement, and charming in style—are best calculated to attract to our sad annals that warmth of human interest in which the Irish history of the future must have its birth. Historical tracts apart, I am afraid that the answer to the question as to the best hundred Irish books, in the sense of a distinctively Irish literature, must be that there are not a hundred Irish books. The beginnings of such a literature were made by Davis. Gerald Griffin, had he fallen on more propitious days, might have enriched it immeasuarably more even than he did. In the touching peasant idylls of Charles Kickham, and in some of T D Sullivan's songs, there are truer intimations than I know of anywhere else in our day of a vein of indigenous Irish thought and feeling, as strongly marked as the difference between "Murty Hynes" and "In Memoriam." For Mitchel's "Jail Journal," I need not say that I share the enthusiasm displayed by so many of your correspondents. It is a book that is well worth transportation to have been the author of; and it is, though coloured by Carlyle's influence, as much nobler than anything that Carlyle wrote as Timon of Athens was a nobler being than Apamanthus. But all these form not a literature, so much as the promise of a literature in the coining days, when all the generous young energies that have had to spend themselves hitherto in action and suffering in the Irish cause, will be free to expand and blossom into a literary activity worthy of the wealth of imagination, intellect, and range of emotions with which Providence has endowed our race.—Yours faithfully,
William O'Brien.
MR. T. M. HEALY, M.P.
TO THE EDITOR OF THE FREEMAN.
Dear Sir—My views on the list made by "Historicus" are not of much value. I have not read half his selections, and unless a prize were offered for the " Best Hundred Readers," I think many similar confessions should continue to be made. What really great books cease to pass current on the bookseller's counter and stow themselves on library shelves? No popular book list should be made to include volumes practically out of the reach if not beyond the range of the million. Still for students' purposes, "Historicus" has done good service, and the discussion you have started will have permanent value. Now-a-days one is continually prayed by English correspondents for "some books on the Irish Question to enlighten Englishmen." Tested by the standard of utility for such a purpose (a poor one of course) John Bull's demand for a pocket manual on Ireland would not be satisfied by many of the works referred to Duffy's, Mitchel's, and Sullivan's books, perhaps, would be best for such inquirers. I was glad to learn lately that Mr. Wm Dillon, B L, has employed his leisure in far off Colorado in making a compilation of the fugitive writings of John Mitchel. No more pious task was ever undertaken by a Nationalist, and no patriot's memory ever better deserved such solicitude. Father Meehan has been doing a similar service for the lesser known writings of Mangan, and it is deplorable that there is so little literary activity amongst us at present, and indeed so little encouragement for it. The strife of politics is too fierce in this generation. Let us hope the next will have the benefit of our struggles in more ways than one. Still we are not entirely barren. The massive strength of tho poems of Sir Samuel Ferguson cannot be too highly admired, and they have a purely Celtic flavour most grateful to those who refuse to believe in the divine institution of the meridian of Greenwich. John F O'Donnell ("Caviare") should not have been forgotten, and his verse well deserves to be rescued from the forgotten pages of the press. The songs of Alfred Percival Graves are thoroughly Irish and genuine. No one can better handle the Gaelic idioms which our peasantry import into English speech. By the way, why does no one make a paper on the effect of Irish on the English spoken in Ireland and America? Then we have Miss Katherine Tynan, who has so exquisitely set to sacred and patriotic subjects the volup-
