Your fathers won this sod?
In fortune and in name we’re bound
By stronger links than steel,” &c.
One story shows the hardship of compulsory sale of grass lands. Another deals (delicately) with seduction in peasant life. Most of the characters in the stories are peasants of the Midlands. Charming descriptions of Irish scenery.
⸺ THE HUNGER: Being Realities of the Famine Years in Ireland, 1845-1848. Pp. 436. (Melrose). 6s. 1910.
This is, in the form of fiction, a narrative of happenings in one district, with a plot and personal drama and talk proper to the novel, and all of these show the gifts of a practised and able novelist; but “every incident,” the writer assures us, “is fact, not fiction.” His matter is mainly derived from oral statements, helped and verified from books, records, and trustworthy private sources; and in an introduction Mr. Merry deals with the causes and characteristics of the famine, the horrors of which were such that even many of the incidents here selected had to be modified in their details to become publishable.—(Times Lit. Suppl.).
MEYER, Kuno. B. Hamburg, 1858. Ed. Hamburg and Leipzig. Lecturer in Teutonic Languages at Univ. Coll., Liverpool, 1884; Professor, 1895. Founded the Zeitschrift fur Celtische Philologie, 1895, and, along with Whitley Stokes, the Archiv. fur Celtische Lexicographie, 1898; founded the School of Irish Learning in Dublin, 1903; Prof. of Celtic in Univ. of Berlin since 1911. Has publ. a long series of most valuable works on Celtic-Irish subjects.
⸺ THE VISION OF MACCONGLINNE: a Twelfth Century Irish Wonder-Tale. (Nutt). 7s. 6d. net. 1892.
“Transl. by K. Meyer, literary introd. by W. Woolner. A primitive tale combining two elements—satire of the Abbot and Monks of Cork, and the vision of the Lake of Milk, which reveals to the gleeman MacConglinne how King Cathal may be delivered from the demon of gluttony that has been the bane of his land. Full of extravagance and comic fancy.”—(Baker, 2).