ters in the movement--that is, I mean most
American readers are--simply because of Burns and Scott. Had Ireland had
a peer of either in his generation as satirist or romancer the
Irish-Irish would to-day be as familiar to us as are the Scotch-Irish,
who are, of course, transplanted Scotch. The women of this world are
not, however, of types so well known to us as are the men, because the
chivalry of Sir Walter prevented him from giving us his peasant
Scotswomen in as full detail as he gave us his men; but it is not
difficult for us to appreciate Mrs. Granahan and her daughter; Mrs.
McKie, a "woman with a dead soul"; Mary Murray with her daftness over
the boys; and even Sarah McMinn, so true in her managing and meanness,
qualities necessary to the prosperity of her folk. Puritan America can
understand these women and men because they are Puritan, too, with the
ignoble that is in the Puritan as well as with the noble that is just as
surely there.

It is in the first three plays of Mr. Mayne that we meet these people I
have named, County Down folk all of them, and all Protestant but Francey
Moore. They are the leading characters in "The Turn of the Road" (1906),
"The Drone" (1908), and "The Troth" (1908). The motive of Mr. Mayne's
first play is the old call to wander, the unrest of the vagrant heart,
here the heart of the musician. It is the story of Robbie John Granahan,
who, after burning his fiddle at the desire of a strong farmer whose
daughter he wished to marry, is driven out into the world to try his
fortune with another through her determination that her lover should
follow his star. There is more beauty in "The Turn of the Road" than in
either of the other plays of the North of Ireland, more beauty of theme,
more beauty of thought, more beauty of expression. Its themes are not
new, _Wanderlust_ and the Puritans' hatred of art; its thoughts are not
new, but they are beautiful, and the words themselves are freshly used.
Its phrases that hold in memory are given to Robbie John and to his
father and to his grandfather, most of them to the grandfather. This is
the grandfather's lament for the boy gone on the roads with his fiddle
and his father's curse:--

It's the wee things you think nothing of, but that make your home a
joy to come back till, after a hard day's work. And you've sent out
into the could and wet the one that was making your home something
more than the common. D'ye think them proud