The old wine filled him, and he saw, with eyes Anoint of Nature, fauns and dryads fair, Unseen by others; to him maiden-hair And waxen lilacs and those birds that rise A-sudden from tall reeds, at slight surprise, Brought charmed thoughts; and in earth everywhere, He, like sad Jacques, found a music, rare As that of Syrinx to old Grecians wise. A Pagan heart, a Christian soul, had he, He followed Christ, yet for dead Pan he sighed, Till earth and heaven met within his breast! As if Theocritus, in Sicily, Had come upon the Figure crucified, And lost his gods in deep, Christ-given rest. As an essayist, Mr. Egan has touched many subjects, and always in an entertaining vein. Some of his essays are remarkable for their plain speaking. He has studied his race in their new surroundings, knows equally well their virtues and failings. If he can take an honest delight in the virtues, he is capable of writing with no uncertain sound on the failings, failings that have been so mercilessly used by the vulgarly comic school of American playwrights. His essays are corrective and should find their way into every Irish-American home. They would tend to correct many abuses and aid in the detection of those bunions so sacredly kept on the feet of the Irish race—last relic of the Penal times. A recent essay throws a series of blue lights—the color so well liked by Carlyle—on our shallow collegiate system. Will it be read by our Catholic educators? That is a question that time will answer. If they read it aright they will be apt to change their system of teaching the classics parrot-like, an empty word translation. They will transport their pupils from the bare class-room to the sunny skies of Greece and Rome, and under these skies see the religious dogmas, the philosophical systems, the fine arts, the entire civilization of those ancient thought giving nations. “What professor,” says de Guerin, “reading Virgil and Homer to his pupils, has developed the poetry of the Iliad or Æneid by the poetry of nature under the Grecian and Italian skies. Who has dreamt of showing the reciprocal relation of the poets to the philosophers, the philosophers to the poets, and these in turn to the artists—Plato to Homer, Homer to Phidias? It is a want of this that makes the classics so dull to youth, so useless to manhood.”