The life and doings of Cicely Grattan and of her adopted son Victor La Roche, a noble and generous youth, brave and skilled in sword-play—examples respectively of womanly virtue and manly character. The interest centres chiefly in Cicely’s wrecked love affairs and in Victor’s successful ones. Abundance of incident sustains the interest throughout, and the book gives a fairly good picture of society in the Dublin of the day, with not a little reference to its loose morals.
NEWTON, W. Douglas.
⸺ THE NORTH AFIRE. Pp. 204. (Methuen). 2s. 1914.
Sub-t.: “A non-political story of Ulster’s war.” By a Catholic Conservative.
NOBLE, Mrs. Nicholas; [Madge Irwin].
⸺ DRUIDEAN THE MYSTIC, and Other Irish Stories. Pp. 93. Sq. 12mo. (Dundalk: W. Tempest). 1s. 6d. 1913.
Three little stories, only the last of which has a definite plot, and a poem. They deal with peasant life. They are told in a dialect which is not very sure of itself nor very true to reality. The nine little illustrations by J. E. Corr and the excellent printing and general get-up make the book very dainty.
NOBLE, E.
⸺ AN IRISH DECADE. Pp. 110. (Digby, Long). n.d. (1891).
Three stories:—1. “The O’Donol (sic) Rent,” 1879-80; 2. “Rosie,” 1885; 3. “By Kerry Moonlight,” 1889. 1. How a thriftless young farmer went in for anti-rent agitation and brought ruin on himself and his young wife. 2. Story of a resisted eviction ending in tragedy. 3. The “moonlighter” phase of the land war. All three stories are written to show the wickedness and the uncalled for nature of the land agitation. They are nicely written and constitute a clever piece of special pleading. In 2, the priest is represented as “heartily sympathetic with the Cause but utterly unsympathetic with gratuitous demonstrations of mass violence.”