The Green Country. By Andrew Merry. (Grant Richards. 6s.) —Here,
again, we have the " neo-Irish " story, or, to speak more accurately, stories, for there are no less than seven of them, and scarcely to be called short,—the full measure which readers demand, or anyhow receive, nowadays almost means death to the critic. There is not a little cleverness in the book ; there is some humour; the author, too, has a way of looking at more sides than one of the subject. But can we trust the accuracy of the picture ? There is certainly an egregious mistake on p. 161, Barney O'Dwyer, a misbehaving priest, abandons the Roman Church, "and is baptised into the Protestant Establishment with much flourish of trumpets." Now there are sects which would have rebaptised the convert, but the "Establishment" would certainly not have done so. The dialect is not accurate. The Green Countey cannot but be depreciated by these things.
Previous page
