Not many bodies of men have a more distinguished tradition than the Irish Bench and Bar, and among the legal luminaries of Ireland in recent years there was no more representative and characteristic figure than Lord Chief Justice O’Brien. After his retirement he occupied his leisure in putting together his reminiscences. They were unfortunately left unfinished at his death, but have been edited and completed with the fullest knowledge and sympathy by his daughter, the Hon. Georgina O’Brien.
He has much to say of sport, of youthful frolics, and of prominent figures in the social life of Dublin, but the main interest of the book lies, as was to be expected, in his professional recollections. These include the trials arising out of the Phœnix Park murders, and those which followed another no less sombre tragedy—the Maamstrasna massacre; but for the most part they are of a more cheerful character. The impress of a vigorous and intensely independent personality is stamped on every page, and few people could attain to the detached serenity with which he records the bestowal of the once well-known sobriquet of “Peter the Packer.”
A NEW NOVEL BY FORREST REID.
THE SPRING SONG,
By FORREST REID.
Author of “At the Door of the Gate,” “The Gentle Lover,” etc.
One Volume. Crown 8vo. 6s.
Griffith Weston is a child with a temperament. With his rather ordinary but quite nice relations he lives in the ordinary world on the usual footing. On his own account he lives another life in a world of his own. Hence minor escapades which alarm and exasperate his governess and his kind but conventional aunt, and which are told with an insight and sympathy that invest their details with indefinable charm. Into this happy young life enters the sinister figure of the Parish Organist. In him, too, ordinary folk see nothing but a queer-tempered old musician, but he, like Grif, lives in a world of his own, though a very different one, it would seem, from that of the gentle, dreamy boy. The tragedy which ensues may be baldly summarized as follows: The Organist, a homicidal maniac, supposed to be cured, gives form and substance to Grif’s other world, and instils into his mind, enfeebled by illness, the suggestion that in it there is another boy, summoning him with a call which is not to be resisted. The maniac’s lurid death fails to break the spell which grips the child, and the relief of telling his story to an understanding listener comes too late. To the real nature of the tragedy Grif’s own people remain blind to the end. The doctor knows more, but he only sees when he has been enlightened by the third of the outstanding figures in the story, a friend of Grif’s elder brother, and a delightful study of the school-boy turned Sherlock Holmes. These two are helplessly aware that the sensitive child has been scared into his grave. Does this exhaust the matter, or is there still more behind? Throughout the story the reader is haunted by a feeling that there is another, more elemental, world, peopled by powers both kindly and malign, with which both the dreamy boy and the mad musician have kinship, and by virtue of which the currents of their lives are intermingled. It is this sense of mystery and doom which gives the book its glamour and distinction, and provides scope for Mr. Forrest Reid’s elusive and delicate art.
ARBOREAL MAN.
By F. WOOD JONES, M.B., D.Sc.,