HISTORY WITHOUT TEARS
Irish Cavalcade. By M. J. MacManus. (Macmillan. 8s. 6d.)
IT was a happy idea, and, as far as Irish history is concerned, an original one, to make up a book of source-material extracts which, read concurrently, would give an intimate picture of life and events over a longer period of history than could be dealt with—in the same intimate fashion—by the .descrip- tive method. Mr. MacManus, who is a collector of Irish incunabula—broadsheets, books, pamphlets and so forth—has here selected from his material something under two hundred contemporary items covering the period 1550-1850. Most are about a page in length, some less.
They are of the greatest variety : the first is that part of an Act of Henry VIII which prescribed the length of the Irish shirt (" not above seven yards of cloth "); the last is a letter from Queen Victoria to the King of the Belgians, from Dublin, describing her visit to Ireland. (" Everything has gone off beautifully . . . We drove out yesterday afternoon and were followed by jaunting cars and riders and people running and screaming, which would have amused you.") Read from the beginning to the end, it gives one a curious and pleasant feel- ing of "having been through it " ; there is no reason why one should not, as this reader did, as profitably go from the end to the beginning.
Not everything here recorded by Irishmen about themselves or by English visitors about the Irish is true, but it is all "amusing." One meets the familiar Tudor propagandist fantasies, such as that the Irish plough with their horses' tails; the record that King James said at the Battle of the Boyne, "Oh, spare my English subjects," when divisions of his rival's army were driven back into the river ; the contemptuous animadversions of the disgruntled traveller Twiss, on whom the Irish hotel-keepers took an impolite revenge ; Camden's vulgar explanation of the origin of saffron dye, and so on. But the greater number of entries are clearly apercu, some humorous—like Cecil's Irish chieftain who did not care for English breeches ; some deeply moving—like Francisco de Cuellar's vivid account of his experiences in Sligo when his little chunk of the Armada was wrecked off the toast. I cannot say how well-known " Lugless " Will Lithgow's Rare Adventures may be to historians, but I was delighted to come on his pert description of an Irish cottage so early as 1619. Apparently the Irish cottage was at that time circular : Their fabrics are advanced three or four yards high, pavilion- like encircling, erected in a singular frame, of smoke-tom straw, green, long-pricked truff, and rain-dropping wattles. Their several rooms of palatial divisions, as chambers, halls, parlours, kitchens, barns, and stables, are all enclosed in one, and that one (perhaps) in the midst of a mire: where, when in foul weather, scarcely can • they find a dry part whereupon to lepose their cloud-baptised heads.
I do not believe any Irish folk-lorist has ever read that description.
The later portion of this highly entertaining collection is, as one might expect, much more gay—the bucks have arrived, the tradition of Ireland as an " amusing " country has spread, the travellers are more inquisitive as well as more urbane.
Not that the other note is absent: as Sir George Hill to Mr. Under-Secretary Cooke testifies in "I hope you will be amused with (Wolfe) Tone, and that he will amuse Dublin by his execution." But there are certain things here which are, as the saying goes, priceless : especially the Countess of Glengall's malicious letter describing the delicate condition of George the Fourth's stomach on a famous and embarrassing occasion.
It is to be hoped that Mr. MacManus will add to his unique collection ; or soon give us another volume ; the next time with a few translations from the Irish.
SEAN O'FAOLAIN.
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