Some Books of the Week Tramping Through Ireland is simply
charming ! And it is published by Methuen for only 3s. 6d. The hackneyed phrase is indeed unworthy to be used in such connexion, and the "_ published price " should perhaps not be emphasized when literary value is in question. But no reader, not even a reviewer, can stop to think what he ought to say while he tramps with Mr. John Gibbons through the less familiar parts of the Irish Free State. Criticism becomes ejaculatory. The writer's gift of spontaneity is catching. .He is in Ireland for the first time, and he tells us what he saw and whom he met. The people looked to him surprisingly like ourselves ; the brogue did not impress him, and he does not try to reproduce it. He says little about the scenery, and he indulges in no facetious effects but he. gives us an impression all the same that . Ireland_ is a foreign country. Whether we are in a Dublin slum or in a lawyer's office, staying in a country inn, watching a pilgrimage or accepting hospitality on a wild hill- bide, we are made to suspect that these people have—as a people—something which we English—as a people—arc without; and it is something immaterial and very good. What does a man know of a country who has passed a few weeks in it ? Whatever the writer may know or not know, his Irish visit has been the. immediate cause of a rare book—one of quite peculiar flavour and appeal.
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