MR. STANDISH O’GRADY.—Mr. Standish O’Grady’s _The Flight of the Eagle_ is not a romance in the ordinary sense; it is not an invented story, but an actual historical episode treated romantically. The period is Elizabethan, and the story turns mainly on the careers of Sir William Parrett, an English “Lord-Lieutenant” of Ireland, who appears to have suffered the usual fate of a popular English Governor, and Red Hugh O’Donnell or Hue Roe of Tir-Connall, which is now Donegal. If acquaintance with Irish history is ever to be made by English readers, the means must be romances of this kind. History proper is, as a rule, carefully ignored by the average reader, who must therefore have facts, if he is ever to have them, presented in the form of a story. It is only by this means, and thanks to Scott in the first instance, that the history of Scotland has penetrated in any degree beyond the border. Only by this means, again, have various countries and nations been brought home to the intellectually idle English reader by writers like Kipling. Both as a story-writer and as the first and greatest of the Irish historians of Ireland, Mr. Standish O’Grady is qualified to do for Ireland what Scott after his own fashion has done for Scotland, namely, bring his country into the historic consciousness of the world. MR. STANDISH O’GRADY, ENCHANTER.—_The Selected Essays and Passages from Standish O’Grady_ is a priceless anthology of this neglected author. Very few people in England realise that Mr. Standish O’Grady is more than any other Irishman the rediscoverer of ancient and, in consequence, the creator of modern Ireland. His very first work on the _Heroic Period_ of Irish history appeared in 1878; it was published at his own expense, and had a small and a slow sale; but to-day it is the inspiration of the Celtic revival. “Legends,” says Mr. O’Grady, “are the kind of history which a nation desires to possess.” For the same reason, legends are the kind of history which a nation tends to produce. I am not certain that it would not have been well to leave the legends of ancient Ireland in their dust and oblivion. They go back to remote periods in time, and seem, even then, to echo still earlier ages. It is possible, for instance, that Ireland was a nation over four thousand years ago. Some contend that a Buddhist civilisation preceded the Christian. Characteristically, it has been thought that Ireland supported Carthage against Rome. But what is the present value of these revivals of infantile memories? They cannot be realised to-day, and to dwell upon them is to run the risk of a psychic regression from waking to dreaming. “Enchantment,” Mr. O’Grady tells us, “is a fact in nature.” So potent a charm as himself has created may have been responsible—who dare say?—for the recall to present-day Irish consciousness of early historic experience that were best forgotten. Is it not a fact that the mood of Ireland to-day is between the legendary