As I soon found out, when there, Dublin is a vast whispering gallery. Delightful, hospitable Dublin is also a provincial town, given to gossip and backbiting. Say something about somebody in the smoking-room of the Shelbourne, and a few hours later the clubs will be repeating it. Mr. Moore said things every hour in the day, and in less than six days he had sown for himself a fine crop of enemies. To "get even" he conceived the idea of writing a series of novels, with real people bearing their own names. That he hasn't been shot at, horsewhipped, or sued for libel thus far is just his usual good luck. Vale is largely a book of capricious insults. But then the facts it sets down in cruel type! When the years have removed the actors therein from the earthly scene, our grandchildren will chuckle over Moore's unconscious humour and Pepys-like chronicling of small-beer. For the social historian this trilogy will prove a mine of gossip, rich veracious gossip. It throws a calcium glare on the soul of the author, who, self-confessed, is now old, and no longer a dangerous Don Juan. In real life he was, as far as I can make out, not particularly a monster of iniquity; but, oh! in his Confessions and Memoirs what a rake was he. How the "lascivious lute" did sound. Some of the pages of the new volume (see pp. 274-278, English edition), in which he describes his tactics to avoid a kiss (kissing gives him a headache in these lonesome latter years, though he was only born in 1857), is to set you wondering over the frankness of the man. Walter Pater once called him "audacious George Moore," and audacious he is with pen and ink. Otherwise, like Bernard Shaw, he is not looking for physical quarrels.