THE majority of reminiscence-mongers have "no call," as the Irish

say, to indulge in that somewhat perilous pastime. Mr. Hussey, on the other hand, has a host of indisputable qualifi- cations,—antecedents, age, temperament, and experience. He traces his descent to Norman ancestors, though the strain was early mingled with that of Scots adventurers, and later on with that of the fighting Bodkins of Galway. His father, "who was very impetuous and had red hair," was nicknamed "Red Precipitate" by a brother-barrister. Mr. Hussey himself, though "an aged novice in literature," to quote one of his many characteristic phrases, has been all his life a marked man,—a fighter who gave as good as, or better than, he got, and from the "seventies" to the "nineties" was perhaps the best hated and most violently abused Unionist in Ireland. He has received, so he tells us, more than a hundred threatening letters. He has been shot at, and had his house partially blown up by dynamite. No one has been denounced with greater ferocity by the Nationalist Press. Yet here he is, at the age of eighty, still "spoiling for a fight," the indomitable advocate of ascendency, the irreconcilable foe to all land legislation from Gladstone to Wyndham, full of aavage contempt for Nationalist politicians, and of sympathy for Irish faults and failings, despising Orangemen, disliking the Northerners, and above and beyond all a true lover of the Kingdom of Kerry

back one man from Corkshire To bate tin more from Yorkshire:

•• Ths Reminisesneas of as Irish Land Aged. Being those of S. X. Hussey. Complied by Home Gordon. London:. Duckworth and Co. [12s. 6d. net.]

Wirmsthrue ! 'Tis a pity we aren't a nation!"

So sang another Kerryman, and, bating the last line, Mr.

Hussey would echo every word of this patriotic outburst. As he puts it himself, "the errors of an Irishman are often almost as good as the virtues of an Englishman, and are far more diverting into the bargain. You must not judge Paddy by the same standard as you apply to John. To begin with, he has not had the advantages; and secondly, there's an ingrained whimsicality, for which I would not exchange all the solid imperfections of his neighbour across the Irish

Mr. Hussey was born in 1824, and received his schooling successively in Dublin, Limerick, Exeter, and Woolwich before going to Berwickshire as a lad of eighteen to learn farming from a rough old Scotsman named Bogue. When he was a boy in Dublin a leading physician certified that he had only one lung, "but as the other has served me faithfully for sixty-nine years, I am rather sceptical as to the accuracy of his diagnosis." His schooling was rough, though he admits that he was "not caned enough for his deserts "; but he was always fond of books, notably Scott's novels and Irish historical works, and taught himself most of what he con- sidered of practical value. His views on education, we may incidentally observe, are somewhat unconventional ; and he is inclined to think that cards should be considered part of every boy's training. "If a man goes through life without touching a card, he probably loses a good deal of innocent amusement, and debars himself from much pleasant society. If he learns to play when grown up, he may find it a costly and unsatisfactory education A near relation of my own gets his club cronies to play bridge with his son, aged eighteen, and pays his losses, in order that he may be thoroughly grounded in the game. The lad is a capital boy, and all the better for his early association with elder men on their own level." His sojourn in Scotland taught him "a good deal of common-sense," and gave him abundant experience—be was for a while entrusted with the full management of a farm of six hundred acres—while for the Scots character he learned much respect, but little enthu- siasm. Returning to Kerry in 1843, he started farming on his own account with sixty acres, but migrated to Cork in 1845 as assistant land agent to Sir George Colthurst. In 1846 he became Government Inspector of Land Improve- ment and Drainage Works, in which capacity he witnessed the terrible destitution caused by the famine. In 1850 he became agent to the Colthurst property, and gradually

developed into one of the largest land agents in Ireland. In 1872 he was shot at during the Kerry election, in which he supported the Conservative candidate, and was described by a parish priest as "a vulture with a broken beak." In 1879 be bought the Harenc estate in North Kerry, and shortly afterwards stood as Tory candidate against The Donoghue for Tralee—a constituency since merged in the county— polling 130 votes to his opponent's 180. In 1881 his firm had the supervision of eighty-eight estates, upwards of three thousand farming tenants, and annually collected rents to the value of a quarter of a million sterling. In November, 1884, his house at Edenburn, in which sixteen persons, mostly women and children, were living at the time, was

wrecked by dynamite, fortunately without loss of life. The sequel was not without its humorous features. Thus United Ireland observed that "the shattering of a building by lightning is by no means phenomenal, and the absence of all trace of terrestrial explosive agency gives

colour to the hypothesis that the destruction was due to meteorological causes." Twenty of the leading tenants on the estate living nearest to the house expressed their repudia-

tion of the outrage, and their high appreciation of the justice, impartiality, and indulgence of their landlord. The miscreants escaped, but Mr. Hussey tells us that "the local branch of the Land League at Castleisland refused to pay any reward to the dynamiters because we had not been killed, and the

leading miscreant actually fired at the treasurer. Eventually

the passages to America of the triumvirate were paid, and they thought it discreet to quit the country, cursing their own stingy executive even more deeply than they blasphemed against the Law and execrated me." Mr. Hussey brought his

over to his elder son, who still resides there, and made London his headquarters, where be reckoned amongst his most

intimate friends the late Mr. Fronde and Sir Henry Howortb, "a ripe old lawyer of Portuguese extraction." Mr. Hussey, as an acknowledged expert on Irish affairs, from first to last gave evidence before seven Commissions, beginning with the Duke of Richmond's on Agriculture, and ending with the Parnell Commission in 1888, where he had some lively passages with the late Lord (then Sir Charles) Russell and Mr. Biggar. He has since celebrated his golden wedding, "associates of early days have passed away, and where I was once one of a battalion, to-day I am only a survivor of the old guard."

The above are a few of the outstanding landmarks in this curious record of a long, busy, and stormy life. The com- position and style of these reminiscences are admirably described by their author in a vivid image, when he observes that if once you "let a gramophone record an animated con- versation," you will find "that it ebbs and flows with the uncertain babbling of a brook." A more vivacious, candid, or indiscreet recital we have seldom encountered. In regard to Irish remedial legislation, Mr. Hussey is an unflinching supporter of the old ante-Gladstone regime. The old Fenianism be regards as a negligible and ridiculous move- ment; the new Nationalism as the dangerous and fatal product of Mr. Gladstone's legislative interference with the status quo. Mr. Hussey is right in describing himself as a survivor of the old guard : he might almost have said the sole survivor, for it would be hard to find among the landlord class a single representative man prepared to endorse the patriarchal and mediaeval views on the relation of landlord and tenant of this rigid reactionary. If Mr. Hussey's atti- tude were general, the policy of the extreme Nationalists becomes not merely intelligible but excusable. Violence and obscurantism are weapons which partake of the nature of the boomerang. The value of the book does not reside in the statesmanship of the views which it advocates. It is rather

as a piece of self-revelation, as a human document, as a store- house of anecdote and of shrewd obiter dicta, that it claims attention. Under the last category we may cite the following characteristic examples :— "The fact is that the Scotsman is a farmer by nature, but the Irishman is a farmer by inclination."

"I have always had a theory that Ireland was created by Providence for the express purpose of bothering philosophers, and preventing them or politicians from thinking themselves too wise."

"In Ireland man proposes and the priest disposes."

"In all moonlighting affrays no one scoundrel ever became personally conspicuous as a leader, and all the wisest leaders, such as Stephens, Tynan, and Parnell, shrouded their movements in mystery. Fenianism in Ireland since Emmet has never had one capable leader possessing the physical courage to show him- self in the forefront on all occasions. On the other hand, it is a singular fact that nearly every general of note in the army of the United Kingdom, since the time of Marlborough, has come from Ireland. The Duke of Wellington was born in County Meath, Lord Gough in Tipperary, Lord Wolseley in County Carlow, Lord Roberts in Waterford, Sir George White in Antrim, General French in Roscommon, and Lord Kitchener in Kerry. The attempts of the English Government to manufacture an English general in the South African War were a miserable fiasco. They only produced one, Sir Charles Tucker' and he did his best to atone for the accident of his English birth by marry- ing a Kerry lady."

Mr. Hussey's good stories, often introduced in the shape of tangential digressions, are legion, but we can only offer a very limited selection. After praising a hydropathic physician as one of the cleverest men he ever met, Mr. Hussey continues :—

" Personally I regard all hydrcs as so many emporiums of disease, an opinion in which I am singular, but that does not con- vince me I am wrong. A bailiff once went to St. Anne's Hydro to serve a writ, and he told me afterwards that he served it on his victim in a Turkish bath, remarking: 'And your heart would have melted within your honour in pity for the poor creature not having a pocket to put the document in."

Here, again, are two entirely typical examples of Irish humour :— " An English gentleman was shooting grouse in Ireland. He got very few birds, and said to the keeper: 'Why, these actually "After all, to my mind, for sheer humour of a quiet sort, nothing beats the observation of the late Sir John Godfrey, who never got up before one in the day, and invariably breakfasted when his family were having lunch. Being asked one day to account for this rather inconvenient habit, he replied: 'The fact is, I sleep very slow."

Lastly, we give the story of a Lady Mayoress at a Corpora- tion luncheon to the King :— " The Mayoress, who was the heroine of the festal occasion in- question, felt completely overpowered by the royal society in which she found herself, and when seated at the meal next to the King, was absolutely unable to articulate any reply at all to the observations he addressed to her, so eventually he gave her up, and turned his colloquial attentions to the lady on the other side. After a while, fortified by the champagne, the Mayoress grew more courageous, and, admiring the gentleman in full uniform on her right, said to him :--` Might I be so bowld as to ask whether you are Lord Plunket ? '—` No,' he replied, with a smile, 'I am not.'---' Would you mind telling me who you are, for I'm sure I don't know ? I am the Duke of Connaught,' com- plaisantly replied her neighbour, upon which she gasped :— 'Oh, God in Heaven, another of them !' and subsided into unbroken silence for the rest of the repast."

It is the plain duty of the reviewer to add that this very entertaining book is disfigured by many instances of execrable taste. Setting aside the uniform animosity of the allusions to Mr. Gladstone and his "infernal" policy, the references to public characters, notably in the chapter on Viceroys and Chief Secretaries, are often insulting as well as acrimonious. We have no complaint to bring against the compiler for his failure to excise such delightful solecisms as " centagenarian,"" or the remark that "smelting was perpetrated." But he might at least have known that it was Lord Granville, and not Lord Kimberley, who was called "Pussy," and have corrected the Latin of the first two words of the second Aeneid, here given as Contiguare manes, and translated by a patriotic Munsteriman "They were all County Kerry men." The mis- spellings of names are frequent : Keagh for Keogh, Corra gun for Corrigan, Clonbrook for Clonbrock, _Foster for Forster,,. Cavanagh for Kavanagh, by no means exhaust the list.

NOVELS.