"The play, as I read it, is profoundly tragic.... It is a tragedy that does not depress--it arouses and dilates. There is cynicism on the surface, but a depth of ardent sympathy and imaginative feeling below, and vistas of thought are opened up that lead from the West of Ireland shebeen to the stars.... I said to myself when I had read two pages, 'This is literature,' and when I laid down the book at the last line,'This is life.'"--T.W. Rolleston (_Independent_). "This intensely national Irish Play ... A comedy of amazing fidelity to the Irish peasant's gift and passion for a special quality of headlong, highly figured speech, that rushes on, gathering pace from one stroke of vividness to another still wider and better...."--_Manchester Guardian_. "Mr. Synge ... certainly does possess a very keen sense of fact, as well as dramatic power and great charm of style ... one of the finest comedies of the dramatic renaissance ... sustained dramatic power.... These peasants are poets, as certainly they are humorists, without knowing it. Certain passages of 'The Playboy' read like parts of the English Bible. There is the same direct and spontaneous beauty of image.... Mr. Synge has achieved a masterpiece by simply collaborating with nature. He and the Irish are to be congratulated."--Holbrook Jackson (_The New Age_). "'The Playboy of the Western World' ... is a remarkable play ... its imagery is touched with a wild, unruly, sensational beauty, and the 'popular imagination that is fiery and magnificent and tender' is reflected in it with a glow.... There is a great deal of poetry and fire, beside the humour and satire so obviously intended, in this drama."--Francis Hackett in _Chicago Evening Post_. THE WELL OF THE SAINTS. A Play in Three Acts. By J.M. SYNGE. Uniform with "The Playboy." Cr. 8vo. 2s. net. THE TINKER'S WEDDING. A Play in Two Scenes. By J.M. SYNGE. Uniform with "The Playboy." Cr. 8vo. 2s. net. BOOKS BY STEPHEN GWYNN. THE FAIR HILLS OF IRELAND. Written by STEPHEN GWYNN, and illustrated by HUGH THOMSON. 31 Drawings in black and white and Four Coloured Illustrations. Cr. 8vo. 6s.