THIS large volume, well produced and well indexed but somewhat
oddly titled, is a biography of Isaac Butt, the spirited Unionist and Protestant proselytiser of the eighteen-forties and fifties in Ireland who, by 1867, the Fenians' great year, had made himself the champion and indeed the first true instigator of the Irish Home Rule movement, and was to fight a hard and mainly disheartening battle for it in the British House of Commons and up and down Ireland until in 1879 Charles Stewart Parnell was ready to take over the stiffening task from his dying, disappointed leader. The book, scholarly and just, should be of interest to moderately informed Irish readers, who may be surprised to learn from it how much was happening constitutionally as well as rebelliously in Ireland's affairs between the death of O'Connell and the rise of Parnell. Secondly, but more permanently, it will interest all students of the political history of the British Isles in the 19th century, and should become for them a useful text-book ; and it deserves the attention of the general reader too, for it is a singularly well-balanced study of the exceptionally gifted barrister that Butt was and of the weak, good- natured, pleasure-seeking human being that he also was. Yet one still, closing the book, puzzles over the application of the vast word " excess " to a life so sadly bounded by its own anxious conven- tions and respectable softnesses.
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