For once the critics are on the right side. Lady Gregory is interesting in her own person and her own work, but Mr. Moore can never make her so interesting in a book as he has made Esther and Evelyn. And the ladies of his experience are more alive when he uses them as matter for fiction than when he sits behind a cigar dictating memories. That in creating Esther he was thinking of an heroic woman is his concern, not ours. His private kisses undoubtedly taught him something of the art of making fictitious kisses public; they furnished him, as such experiences furnish every author, with the story which as an artist he was to "tell." But his purely personal revelations are not startling. Ladies flit into his memory, receive the most delicate literary treatment and flit out again. Nothing unusual happens at Orelay or anywhere else, and what happens is handled finely, timidly even, with what may have been audacity in 1890, but no longer strikes us as valiantly candid. The introduction to "Memoirs of My Dead Life" now seems much ado over little; it is out of proportion and is a wobbly piece of thinking such as Mr. Moore's Irish born and French trained mind is seldom guilty of. The "Memoirs" and "Hail and Farewell" are to be enjoyed and admired. Even an Irishman ought not to find in them occasion for more than a contest of wit. No page of "Hail and Farewell" is flat; no opinion of Mr. Moore's leaves you quite indifferent. The most interesting pages, more interesting than his portrait of himself as a lover in France or a member of the landed gentry of county Mayo, are those which criticize the personalities and the ideas of the so-called Celtic Revival. His comments on Lady Gregory and "Willie" Yeats just miss being insults. To say that "Lady Gregory has never been for me a very real person" is gratuitous and not quite consonant with that honesty which Mr. Moore advocates and for the most part practises. For in his portrait of her and his comments on her he shows that she is a very real person to him and a writer who compels his consideration. In the act of putting a pin through the humbuggery of others he buzzes himself. However, his literary criticism of their work is delightful. Whether it is true or not we Yankees have no sure means of judging. He says that Lady Gregory's style which Mr. Yeats so highly values, the speech that she learned from the people and puts into the mouths of her characters, "consists of no more than a dozen turns of speech, dropped into pages of English so ordinary, that redeemed from these phrases it might appear in any newspaper without attracting attention." Well, is not that true of the speech of the Irish or any province of England or America? Our dialectic differences are few but important. The speech of Lady Gregory's characters is effective, and more than that, the humor and the pathos of them is deeper than their speech or any peculiar turns of phrase.