whereupon she almost collapsed with fright. Not a syllable could she utter, but made shift to flounce out of the room, and pour into her mistress’s ear how some sort of hideous spectre had appeared to her on the top floor! This was repeated to me at supper. They called the little old thing in, and made her relate her scare. We all nearly died with laughter; and I was established as quite alive.” The book, put together, as was almost all Campion’s literary work, under highly disturbing conditions, is unfinished; and what there is of it is sketchy and out of proportion. One of its charms is its character-drawing, including the speeches with which, after the fashion of Livy, Campion fits the situation by putting them into the mouths of his personages. His was a dramatic mind. He knew both history and human nature: the latter knowledge crops up everywhere in all that he wrote, and spoke, and did, and supplied him with no small share of his power over others. The outstanding charm of the _History of Ireland_ is its style, crisp, arresting, bright with idiom: an idiom so noble and so much his own, that one understands the almost breathless admiration with which his generation looked up to him and listened to him. But this book, like the _View of the Present State_, written some seventeen years later by another gentle-hearted Englishman, the poet Spenser, is all wrong in its theory that to get any footing in the modern world the “mere Irishry” must be Anglicized. Campion did not know the Celts, their laws, nor their literature; he never came nearer to them than through chronicles written in scorn of them, or the daily table-talk, wide of the mark, of the English Pale. Yet, according to his opportunity, he loved the country and the people, and deplored that the descendants of a race of mediæval scholars should be cut off from education. Afterwards he felt that his rather helter-skelter pamphlet represented limited knowledge and unformed opinion; he speaks of it as “premature,” and wished, when he lost the manuscript, that it might perish rather than reach the public as it was. It bore a dedication to the Earl of Leicester, his “singular good lord,” in the hope that it might “make his travel seem neither causeless nor fruitless,” or, as he says again in plainer language: “I render you my poor book as an account of my voyage.” It was first printed, without supervision from the author, in a very muddled, unsatisfactory way, by Raphael Holinshed in 1577; then in more scholarly fashion by Sir James Ware, in his _Ancient Irish Histories_, 1633. We all remember how useful Holinshed’s pages were to Shakespeare: the twenty lines or so of the famous description of Wolsey in Act IV, Scene 2, of _Henry VIII_, is taken almost word for word from what Campion had written, and Holinshed had incorporated in his _Chronicles_.