30 DECEMBER 1893, Page 26

History of Clare and t. e Dalcassian Clans. By the

Very Rev. P. White, P.P. (M. H. Gill and Co., Dublin.)— We have in this volume an account of Clare from the earliest times, and it is such an account as an Irish county is proud of, full of blood and romance from beginning to end. It is perhaps too full of names, which the author mentions with a lavishness that is quite bewildering at times. How is it that• even in the biography of an Irishman we have such paragraphs full of names ? One can hardly believe that Ireland has so few people, or that so large a proportion of the population have emigrated during the century. The seventeenth century brought the great trouble of the settle- ment of the North of Ireland, and our author waxes bitter and fierce over the fining, sequestrating, and bribing that caused so much of the land to change bands. It is a dirty page in English history. Our author is too diffusive, too apt to wander from the path of the historian, and far too ready to quote countless names, to admit of his history of Clare being more than a disjointed but interesting account of Clare, past and present.