him the sting and tang of reality. How vivid in his translation from Villon are those 'eyes with a big gay look out of them would bring folly from a great scholar.' More vivid surely than anything in Swinburne's version, and how noble those words which are yet simple country speech, in which his Petrarch mourns that death came upon Laura just as time was making chastity easy, and the day come when 'lovers may sit together and say out all things are in their hearts,' and 'my sweet enemy was making a start, little by little, to give over her great wariness, the way she was wringing a sweet thing out of my sharp sorrow.' XIII Once when I had been saying that though it seemed to me that a conventional descriptive passage encumbered the action at the moment of crisis, I liked _The Shadow of the Glen_ better than _Riders to the Sea_, that is, for all the nobility of its end, its mood of Greek tragedy, too passive in suffering, and had quoted from Matthew Arnold's introduction to _Empedocles on Etna_, Synge answered, 'It is a curious thing that _The Riders to the Sea_ succeeds with an English but not with an Irish audience, and _The Shadow of the Glen_, which is not liked by an English audience, is always liked in Ireland, though it is disliked there in theory.' Since then _The Riders to the Sea_ has grown into great popularity in Dublin, partly because with the tactical instinct of an Irish mob, the demonstrators against _The Playboy_ both in the press and in the theatre, where it began the evening, selected it for applause. It is now what Shelley's _Cloud_ was for many years a comfort to those who do not like to deny altogether the genius they cannot understand. Yet I am certain that, in the long run, his grotesque plays with their lyric beauty, their violent laughter, _The Playboy of the Western World_ most of all, will be loved for holding so much of the mind of Ireland. Synge has written of _The Playboy_, 'anyone who has lived in real intimacy with the Irish peasantry will know that the wildest sayings in this play are tame indeed compared with the fancies one may hear at any little hillside cottage of Geesala, or Carraroe, or Dingle Bay.' It is the strangest, the most beautiful expression in drama of that Irish fantasy, which overflowing through all Irish Literature that has come out of Ireland itself (compare the fantastic Irish account of the Battle of Clontarf with the sober Norse account) is the unbroken character of Irish genius. In modern days this genius has delighted in mischievous extravagance, like that of the Gaelic poet's curse upon his children, 'There are three things that I hate, the devil that is waiting for my soul, the worms that are waiting for my body, my children, who are waiting for my wealth and care neither for my body nor my soul: Oh, Christ hang all in the same noose!' I think those words were spoken with a delight in their vehemence that took out of anger half the bitterness with all the gloom.