inst its Puritanism.
There are "kindly Irish of the Irish" in the Black North as well as in
the three other provinces, but most of the authors of the North are
content to picture its hardness, its hypocrisy, its bigotry, its love of
wife and child remorselessly concealed as a weakness of the flesh.

It is to this darker picturing of the North, however, that Mr. Ervine
turns in "The Magnanimous Lover," which indicts the self-righteousness
of the Ulster Protestant with a severity such as is possible only to a
man bitter against a weakness of his own people. It is an old theme Mr.
Ervine has to handle, the refusal of the wronged woman to wed her
betrayer, when, after years of disloyalty, he is willing, by marrying
her, to make her again an "honest woman." To speak only of recent plays
of similar plot, there is "The Last of the De Mullens" of St. John
Hankin, and "A Woman of No Importance" of Wilde. Mr. Ervine, it is true,
handles the theme freshly, but the real power of the play is in his
creation of the heroine, Maggie Cather. The danger with such a character
is that it will be only a mouthpiece for woman's demand for a common
moral standard for men and women; but Maggie is not a mouthpiece but a
real woman, triumphantly alive, with hot anger in her heart at the
injustice of the world, and at the "unco guidness" of her old-time
lover, Henry Hinde. Ten years before the time of the action of the play
Henry Hinde had fled, just as her child was to be born, to Liverpool,
and there he has prospered, and so risen in the world that it is
possible for him to wed a minister's daughter. Fear of God's wrath has
now driven him home to make such amends as he can, but there is in him
no pity for the woman or love for his child. Maggie has faced it out
alone all these years in the seaside village of Down as Hester faced it
out in the seaside village of Massachusetts, while Henry forgot it all
until he was "saved" and "convicted of sin." If no more cowardly than
Dimmesdale, Henry is more heartless, utterly callous, indeed,--as he
confesses, in "the devil's grip." And yet Mr. Ervine is so true to the
life that he is depicting, a life at once passionate and prosaic, that
he makes anger for the past and fear of a nagged future with Henry as
effective agents in her rejection of him as are self-respect and right
feeling. It is a "big" part that Mr. Ervine has created for the leading
actress, and though the story is unequivocally "unpleasant" a