Sweet Cork of Thee. By Robert Gibbings. With engravings by
the Author. (Dent. 16s.) THIS book is a pleasant successor to Lovely Is the Lee, for there remained many things about his home town that Mr. Gibbings left out of his first Irish volume. Indeed, one of this writer's virtues is that he always has something in hand, "writing out" being a. misfortune that perhaps never befell an Irish author. Although he writes books, Mr. Gibbings is really a talker. He goes along and has a look at his territory ; he chats with the people, reads the local fat stock prices, gets to know what's up every side street, every back alley, and with a few strokes gives us the essence in a page of discursive prose, or a delicate wood engraving. To this reviewer, at least, Cork is every bit as fine a city as Mr. Gibbings says it is, and all the land displayed on his end-papers map is as enchanting as his pictures of it. With Cork as starting point, the book discusses the people and scenes west of a diagonal line drawn from Cork to Tralee, and in this area are peat bogs, donkey carts, jaunting cars, antiquities, legends, colleens and fairies enough for anybody ; Mr. Gibbings inter- views or encounters most of them. Sweet Cork of Thee is not a guide book—except for readers who welcome such apparently useless information as "From Cork to the South Pole is 18,115 miles." But for all that; it comes close to the heart of a great city and
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