IRISH HUMOUR.—Mr. Stephen Gwynn’s _Irish Books and Irish People_ contains an essay on “Irish Humour.” Mr. Gwynn is severe but just. He refers to the “damning effects” of the “easy fluency of wit” and the “careless spontaneity of laughter” which characterise Irish humour. It would be terrible, however, to have to admit that these divine qualities are “defects” in the accepted sense of qualities _manqués_; and the “defect” arises, I think, not from the presence of these qualities in the Irish genius, but from the absence of the counterbalancing qualities of weight, high seriousness, and good judgment. It would almost seem that the “elder gods” departed from Ireland centuries ago, leaving in sole possession the “younger gods” of irresponsible and incontinent laughter. As Mr. Gwynn says, “Irish humour makes you laugh”; it always takes one by surprise. But the laughter has no echoes in the deeper levels of consciousness; it rings true but shallow. Dogmatism on racial psychology is dangerous, and I have no wish to exacerbate feelings already too sore; but, as a literary critic, I venture my judgment that the Irish genius, as manifested in literature during the last century, is wanting in the solidity that comes only from hard work. Every Irishman, speaking roughly, is a born genius; but few Irishmen complete their birth by “making” themselves. Wit comes to them too easily to be anything but a tempting line of least resistance. THE LITERARY DRAMA OF IRELAND.—While exceedingly painstaking, thorough, and well-documented, Mr. Boyd’s essay on _The Contemporary Drama of Ireland_ cannot be said to add much value to the value of a record. Unlike his recent volume of _Appreciations and Depreciations_, his present work carefully, and I should almost say, timidly, avoids coming to any large and personal conclusions, save in the case, perhaps, of the plays of Mr. St. John Ervine. The reason for this diffidence I take to be rather an apprehension of what he might discover were his real conclusions than any inability to arrive at them; for I cannot think that upon any other ground so usually decisive a mind would have been content to leave his readers in the dark. But what then is it that Mr. Boyd may conceivably have feared to discover? It is obvious enough, I think, to an outsider—to one, I mean, who does not belong to the coterie that calls itself the Irish literary movement; it is that the contemporary drama of Ireland is the history of a rapid decline.