ng"--the
tying-up of the priest in the bag, for instance--that suggest as source
"The Lout and his Mother," included by Dr. Hyde in his "Religious Songs
of Connacht," but Synge records, in "At a Wicklow Fair," that a herd
told him the story of the tinker couple that would be wed, as he and the
herd met the man in the case in Aughrim.

No one who knows Ireland at all would hold that Synge's plays are
typical of the Irish peasant generally, but any one who knows Irish
literature at all, and the life of the roads in Ireland, will admit that
wildness and extravagance are to be found in that literature from the
beginning and in that life even at this day of supposed civilization.
You will find one kind of extravagance in the distortions of Cuchulain
in bardic literature, another kind of extravagance in "Little Red Mary
and the Goat with the Chime of Bells" that your gardener tells you in a
prosaic American suburban town; you will find the primitiveness of
prehistoric life in the burning of poor old Mrs. Cleary by her neighbors
in Tipperary (1895), to drive a demon out of her, and the savage that is
but under the skin of all men in the description of the Spinsters' Ball
at Ballinasloe in "A Drama in Muslin." Said an old shanachie to Synge on
Inishere, when Synge had told him of a stock exchange trick, "Isn't it
a great wonder to think that those men are as big rogues as ourselves?"
It is idle to pretend that it is not true that, in some moods, all men
the world over have sympathy for the rogue. Why do we read of Reynard
the Fox with delight, and Robin Hood, and Uncle Remus, and not only in
the days of our own infantile roguery, but as grown men and women? This
man or that may say it is because of the cleverness of Reynard, the
daring of Robin Hood or his wild-woods setting, and the resourcefulness
of Bre'r Rabbit; but the honest man will admit it is because of an
innate and deeply rooted human sympathy with roguery as well as our
natural human sympathy with the under dog and the man hunted by a
merciless or an alien law. Very often, if the roguery is very great, or
we are brought face to face with its effects and realize it is a real
thing in real life, we will be shocked out of our sympathy with it, and
realize, as did Pegeen Mike, the difference between a "gallous story and
a dirty deed." But sometimes, if we are a people living a primitive
life, we will no more awaken to the reality of the wrong of roguery than
we would as