⸺ EVELYN CLARE; or, The Wrecked Homesteads. Pp. viii. + 274. (DERBY: _Richardson_). 1870. “An Irish story of love and landlordism.” Crude melodrama with all the usual accessories—a landlord, “Lord Ironhoof,” and an agent, “Gore”—eviction, agrarian murders, a disguised priest, and secret Mass, a poteen still, an elopement, a changeling brought up in wealth, a lover supposed drowned, and an innocent man unjustly convicted. No sense of reality. Scene: West of Ireland, _c._ 1850. Several anachronisms. =BARRINGTON, F. Clinton.= ⸺ FITZ-HERN; or, The Irish Patriot Chief. Pp. 122. (GLASGOW: _Cameron & Ferguson_). _n.d._ Scene: Galway Bay. Crude melodrama, without historical significance. Wicked married bishops, scheming foreign monks, and coarse fat friars are the villains of the piece. But the hero, a smuggler of noble birth, always escapes from their clutches, and finally marries the heroine. Specimen of dialect:—“Arrah, gorrah, avic, father John, it’s the Pope o’ Rome ye bate, out and out.” (p. 13). =BARRON, Percy.= ⸺ THE HATE FLAME. Pp. 382. (_Hodder & Stoughton_). 6_s._ 1908. The story of a noble life wrecked by racial hatred. The hero, a young Englishman, Jack Bullen, fights a duel, in Heidelberg, with an Irish student, and kills him. This deed comes in after years between him and the Irish girl (cousin of the slain student, and pledged against her will to vengeance by his father) whom he was to marry—and this through the plotting of her rejected lover and a priest. Bullen had, for the upraising of the Irish people, started a great peat factory in Ireland, and it had prospered. This work is wrecked by the same agency that ruins his private happiness. Throughout the book the Author attacks all the cherished ideas of Irish Nationalism and of the present Irish revival, and sets over against them the ideals of England and his personal views. Much bitterness is shown against the priests of Ireland. The scene-painting and the handling of situation and of narrative are very clever. There is nothing objectionable from a moral point of view. =BARRY, Canon William, D.D.= Born in London, 1849. Educated at Oscott and Rome. He is a man of very wide learning, a theologian and a man-of-letters, known in literature both by his novels (_The New Antigone_, &c.) and by important historical and religious works. Is now Rector of St. Peter’s, Leamington. ⸺ THE WIZARD’S KNOT. Pp. 376. (_Unwin_). 6_s._ Second ed. (N.Y.: _Pratt_). 3.00. 1900.