Irish Temperament
The Loud Red Patrick. Ruth McKenney. (Rupert Hart Davis. 6s.) Miss Runt MCKENNEY has written a hook which cannot fail to amuse anybody who has a taste for the Irish' temperament, and even those who arc irritated by the abnormality of Ireland's sons will be churlish indeed if they do.not smile. For this is a very funny book. It consists of a series of articles about Miss McKenncy's grand- father, Patrick Flannigan, residing in America but in no way conforming to its modus vivendi, and although no one could possibly believe that he existed on quite these lines or that any family could be so consistently mortified by the behaviour of its patriarch without becoming permanently insane, Miss McKenney manages to infuse ahundant life into her hero. This passionate Irishman with his
generous impulses towards tram-drivers and unsuccessful inventors, with his complete disregard for conversational proprieties, with an immense placard in the front parlour announcing " Irish BLOOD cries out for VENGEANCE," and with his fixed determination to bath only once a week, on Saturdays, when there are people to tea, is as delightful a character as ever brought shame to a family, and his long maudlin reminiscences about his forebears who lived in the Auld Sod and could not afford underdrawers, his political rages and his divers adventures make enchanting reading.
Surrounding him is a chorus If anguished daughters, a horde of distant relatives all called Patrick, and some neighbours as full of idiosyncrasies as himself, and like a sort of buffer between Ireland and America stands his wife, who is English. " Heaven ,knows how many tithe collectors—dogs of Cromwell ! —the Flannigans buried under their manure piles. He who wore the Queen's red coat was never safe near a Flannigan pitchfork. . . Yes, many and many a tithe-collector we Flannigans got with our pitchforks, but it could never last, my dear ones. No. In the end they noticed." Grandpa relates how an entire regiment of redcoats turned up one morning to hang the Flannigans, and ah, he cries, " the Queen's soldiers fought dirthy—dirthy, my dear one, firing their great smoking guns at poor helpless Flannigans. Only our bare hands we had to dispute them. .. ." "And the pitchforks," Mother put in coldly. Mother's efforts to temper the fiery lamb to the social winds arc recurring but rarely successful, and Grandpa gaily goes his way, here taking a drunken cousin home in a hearse, there teaching a St. Bernard dog to open the front door (with disastrous consequences) and lastly buying an enormous circus tent which smells of bison for his daughter's wedding reception Miss McKenney views these occurrences with a delighted eye, and she relates them without a shred of whimsicality. She has a perfect sense of humour and the same detached and yet warmly affectionate regard for her characters as has Miss Otis Skinner for hers ; indeed they share an attitude of loving exasperation towards their very
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