“STOLEN WATERS.”
SOME PRESS NOTICES.
“We can welcome Mr. Healy’s treatment of a difficult and obscure episode in the history of Ulster as on the whole impartial, and based on a judicial reading of a vast accumulation of documentary evidence.... In his capacity as historical detective he is fair-minded to a degree, which would amaze us if we were not so well acquainted with the well-tempered quality of an intellect that for subtlety and power and a dispassionate coolness is not surpassed by that of any Irishman living.... The wonderful net of intrigue by which all this was contrived has been carefully unravelled by Mr. Healy with a pertinaceous ingenuity worthy of Sherlock Holmes.”—Morning Post.
“Mr. Healy has accomplished a difficult task with considerable success. The result of his labours is an absorbing book.... The author has succeeded in weaving a romantic story out of the dry material of official records and legal documents.”—Athenæum.
“The story that Mr. Healy tells has something of the flavour of historical romance.... Mr. Healy’s method of argument on the main issue is calm and temperate.... A wonderful effort in legal and historical research.”—London Daily Telegraph.
“It is a truism that only the busiest men have any time to spare, and it is proved again by the publication of an elaborate historical study by Mr. T. M. Healy, the famous Irish M.P., who is as entertaining and brilliant with his pen as he is in speech. Mr. Healy tells his story with enthusiasm and thoroughness.”—London Express.
“Mr. Healy is a lawyer of original genius who, almost more frequently than any other man of his time, has performed the unexpected. He has done so once again in this extraordinary book, which tells, with many touches of eloquence and here and there a characteristic sting, the tangled story of a legal dispute.... A work of argument and legal history written with sustained eloquence and frequent felicity.... A task which only a passionate sense of duty and determined doggedness could have achieved. As the author in his picturesque manner puts it, the scent was often stale, but despite the difficulties and uncertainties that confronted him, he has achieved what he sought, and presents the result to the expert and the curious.”—Outlook (London).
“Mr. Healy constructs a story of remarkable interest. By dipping into it here and there some instructive glimpses will be obtained of the fashion in which Irish history was made in bygone centuries.”—Observer (London).
“It exhibits vividly enough some of the less favourable aspects of past Irish administration, and it will serve the writer’s purpose of stimulating a considerable amount of sympathy for the standpoint of his contentions.”—Pall Mall Gazette.
“Those who love to extract information from Blue Books will revel in this volume of strange facts.... It would be a needless task to expend words of praise upon this fair-minded volume, prepared by one of the subtlest intellects of our time.”—Review of Reviews.
“‘Stolen Waters’ has to be welcomed as a monument of disinterested advocacy.... Mr. Healy’s vivid, yet archaic, style; at all manner of odd points the unusual word flashes out at you, and relieves the gloom of technical narration.”—Truth.
“Of the utmost value.... Mr. Healy is to be congratulated on the manner in which he has fulfilled this work.”—Tablet.
“A notable volume, ‘Stolen Waters.’ The book, which was noticed at length in the leader columns of this paper, is a monument of patient research.”—Manchester Guardian.
“A series of remarkable investigations.... The book has every appearance of minute accuracy in detail, and gives proof of a remarkable skill in marshalling evidence. We shall be surprised if his conclusions are successfully challenged.”—Glasgow Herald.
“It is a tribute to the skill of Mr. Healy that he has made so interesting a narrative out of a record of legal chicanery. As told by him, the history of the title in the seventeenth century is an amazing story of fraud in high places.”—Scotsman.
“Written in the pungent style of which Mr. Healy is so great a master, the book is eminently readable throughout.... This erudite and eloquent volume.”—Dundee Advertiser.
“Mr. Healy contributes to Irish literature a valuable volume.”—Sheffield Independent.
“Elaborate in its thorough investigation of the historical side.... Mr. Healy’s book is a formidable impeachment of one more chapter in the horrid story of English mis-government in Ireland.”—Yorkshire Observer.
“Mr. Healy has written a very elaborate treatise.... Is, indeed, a most scholarly essay, the result of exhaustive research.”—Yorkshire Post.
“It is evidently the result of a wonderful amount of labour in delving among official and legal records, and the student of Irish affairs will find that the author has collected a mass of matter not to be found elsewhere except at the cost of much trouble.”—Nottingham Guardian.
“Learned and comprehensive as it is, the book is most interesting throughout.”—Belfast News-Letter.
“The book is a monument of the sort of painstaking industry that most orators shirk in favour of easier-won bravura effects. ‘Stolen Waters’ is less a fiery philippic than a sober historico-legal study of a phase of Irish history, a solid piece of research work of which we have had all too little in this country. Mr. Healy is a formidable tracker, combining the pertinacity of the Red Indian with the ingenuity of Sherlock Holmes.... Even the layman must realise the patient and laborious scholarship that has gone to the making of this book, and cannot fail to be impressed by his power of marshalling great unwieldy masses of facts and the subtlety and dexterity of his analysis.... It abounds in strange contrasts and dramatic surprises, unravels a tangled tale of corruption and chicanery that might have inspired a score of novels of intrigue, and links up in a startling fashion the events of three hundred years ago with the happenings of the day before yesterday.”—Northern Whig.
“The compiling of Mr. Healy’s book was about as hard and as distasteful work as any historian could undertake. He had to delve into records and wade through State papers practically untouched since the day they were written. And when the facts were revealed he had to piece them together the way one would reconstruct a jig-saw puzzle. All this infinite toil and trouble has been faced.... Mr. Healy’s book, with its wealth of historical lore and its fascinating if grim tale of the way the Plantation of Ulster was carried.”—Ulster Guardian (Belfast).
“Mr. Healy’s remarkable book.”—Irish Independent.
“One of the most valuable practical contributions ever made to the as-yet-unwritten history of Ireland.... He has done more than any man since Lecky to furnish the Irish Gibbon of the future with new light on the most obscure problems of the Ulster Plantation.... As a mere collection of quotations he would have produced a book of enthralling interest. The connecting narrative in which he strings them together is worthy of Mr. Healy’s clear-cut, caustic, and vigorous English at its best. Indeed, his style seems to have caught a new charm of Old Testament austerity. The book will be a Memoire pour Servir of the highest service to the students of Irish history.”—Cork Free Press.
“Mr. Healy has taken much trouble in using the original documents.... A great wealth of evidence, giving careful reference.”—Church of Ireland Gazette.
“Full digestion of its contents leads one to the conclusion that, if not a novel, it is at least a good deal more interesting than many such pieces of literature.... The erudite and witty pages of Mr. Healy.... The many sidelights thrown on history by the painstaking researches of the author.”—Journal of the Ivernian Society.
“The story Mr. Healy’s valuable work tells, and tells well.... No one who peruses the work—no matter what judgment he may form upon the argument it contains—will be likely to lay it down without an expression of admiration for the almost marvellous ability and industry which have been devoted to its production.... The preparation of the volume must have involved an enormous amount of labour and research. In France it would be crowned by the Academy.”—The Irish Catholic.
“Mr. Healy’s most interesting book.... Contains on every page the evidence of unending pains and research, is full of sidelights upon Irish history.... The erudite, yet fascinating, pages of Mr. Healy.”—Catholic Book Notes.
“A notable volume.... The book is a monument of patient research.”—Manchester Weekly Times.
“Mr. Healy has written a remarkable book which is of considerable interest.... The whole story is one of absorbing historic interest.”—The Fish Trades Gazette.
“Mr. Healy has devoted much time to research, and he has produced a fascinating story.”—Natal Mercury.
“What will please the general reader in ‘Stolen Waters’ is the incidental information, the look-as-you-go glimpses at the great Irish chieftains and clans.... Information of an unusual historical character.—Chicago Inter-Ocean.
“The volume is important from a historical and legal standpoint.... Mr. Healy’s interesting book.—Boston Globe.
“Mr. Healy’s long but interesting narrative.”—Catholic University Bulletin (Washington).
“A learned work.... If the decision of the House of Lords is proved to be based on documents that are either forgeries or letters patent obtained by a criminal act, then legislation would at once be introduced to deal with the matter.”—Contemporary Review.
“Proves the patience of the writer, who gives us a narrative of historical interest as well as a work of real legal worth.... Many would surmise that a work on such a topic must be necessarily a ‘dry-as-dust’ book. We have found it interesting indeed. We do not think it possible to get a real insight into the Irish questions that loom so very large in politics to-day without reading of some of the methods adopted in ‘settling Ireland’ in Tudor times. The earlier chapters of this learned work give some valuable information on those matters. Historical and legal students will be indebted to the author for so many quotations of rather inaccessible documents.”—Western Morning News.
“Of decided value to students of Irish history, for its pages show the chicanery and thirst for plunder that have been dominant in the past government of Ireland.”—The Nation.
“Mr. T. M. Healy, M.P., is the raciest—and the bitterest—speaker in public life. His abilities are altogether uncommon. But if he will forgive us for saying so, he cannot write a book.”—Birmingham Post.
“Dull, even at times ungrammatical, from a perusal of its pages we do get a very clear idea of the terrible extent to which legal chicanery was used by English officials to enrich themselves and their friends during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.”—Irish Times.
“For a full account one should read that epic of chicanery, Mr. Healy’s ‘Stolen Waters’.”—The New Witness.
“Mr. Healy has thrown some new light on an obscure and devious by-path of Irish history.... The book is not pleasant reading, but it illuminates the manner in which the English aristocracy has ‘governed’ Ireland.”—Evening Post (New York).
“A book which, founded though it is upon official records, will challenge for rascality the most daring flights of fiction.... The story is quite as thrilling as anything could be.... One of the most readable books of our time.—Sydney Freeman’s Journal.
“A monument to the extraordinary industry of Mr. Healy, and the time and labour expended in the compilation.... Whether his law is good or bad, affects not in the least the interest of his book, which is full of fascinating details of Irish History.”—Irish Law Times.
“We hope that it will be read, because the roots of many persistent troubles in Ireland will never be understood until it is realised that the cruelties committed under Elizabeth were accompanied—and to a great degree followed in the next reign—by very clever and systematic frauds upon the old inhabitants.”—Saturday Review.
“The intrigues of past times, which are full of incident and romance, written in such a way, make it a book to read carefully, especially if one wants to understand the difficulties of Irish history.”—Scottish Historical Review.
“An interesting historical study which has its amusing sides.”—New York Sun.
“The author gives his authorities for every charge he brings.... The hammer-like blows with which he clinches his statements are wearying to a reader not as much absorbed as himself. But those who have the patience to keep up with his argument ... will get many new lights on the Tudor and Stuart period of Irish history. Especially clear is the story of how the O’Neills were driven from Ulster.”—American Historical Review.
“This masterly volume of 500 pages ... sheds a luminous light on the uses of legal machinery in the robbery of the Irish people. Mr. Healy has the knowledge and ability to enrich his argument with a vast amount of incidental information.”—America.
“Sophistries, insinuations, mere rhetoric, and all kinds of irrelevancies.... Prejudice and ignorance are invited to pronounce judgment on what has already been determined by the highest judicial authority.... But no mere list of mistakes could correct the false impressions conveyed by innuendo, assumption, and special pleading. It is simpler to regard the whole book as one vast erratum.”—The Times (London), 4th Sept., 1913.