SHORTER NOTICES.
The score or so people whose portraits make up Mrs. Hinkson's latest book of memoirs wear rather the air of fiction than of life : indeed, it is often only their well-known -names that destroy the illusion that we have dipped into a romantic novel. Not that the Ireland of "those days" (as Mrs. Hinkson is always wistfully saying) was lacking in romantic gestures : politics and literature were vehement enough in Dublin then : the Parnell Split, in fact,, is the tragic theme that strings all these portraits together. So that when the book is shut, we do not seem to have been reading detached intimate sketches, but rather we seem to have been caught up, for a while, in the vigorous Young Ireland Movement of before the War. Dora Sigerson, with her passion for stray dogs ; Rose Kavanagh, "with: a look of the dew and the stars about her," but for all that,- it seems, an editor and a friend of politicians ; John Redmond, cooling his heels on the steps of the War Office while the offer of his Irish Volunteers lay waiting on the shelf; Lionel Johnson, mystic, ,poet, mediaevalist—the great beads of whose rosary rattled like a cable every time he dropped one r ; Alice Meynell, "who always had a starry look and whose expression was the expression of Dante " ; Charles Stewart Parnell, Lord Elcho and John Butler Yeats —all these and many. more of Mrs. Hinkson's intimate acquaintances move aerbss her pages like figures in a pageant whose story is the story of Ireland in her tragic years, and Whose characters are the poets and artists and politicians whose ideals fanned into a flame the Dublin of the 'nineties. But the last and longest section of the book is devoted to "My Father," and in the remembered story of that bluff, kind Irishman ,Mrs. Hinkson's romantic style is put to its proper use. She is 'looking at childhood again ; and the
of inembry dulls 'all unkind edges and makes of all the year a summer and turns even Tinkers into heroes. It is, in fact, achapter out of a good autobiographical novel. ' . —
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