s,
substituted a new beauty for the old beauty of the legend in its bardic
or folk form. It is in the few instances in which his dream of the old
tale does not lift to so great a power in its way as the old tale
possessed in its way that I protest. Of such a nature are some of the
changes Sharp made in his retelling of the "Three Sorrows of
Story-Telling" in "The Laughter of Peterkin," which, it must be
remembered, however, was hurried work, almost hackwork.

Sharp was particularly successful, I think, in his handling, in the
three tales--he calls them "legendary moralities"--in which he brings
Christ to the straths of Argyll. These three are "The Last Supper," "The
Fisher of Men," and "The Wayfarer." The last is the least successful of
the three, but significant in its attack on certain forms of
Presbyterianism for their attempts to kill out, as un-Christian, the old
ways of life among the Highlanders. This charge was made fifty years ago
by Campbell of Islay, and it had been repeated only yesterday by Mr.
Carmichael. William Black and Mr. Munro confirm it, too, in their
novels, and, in fact, it is only what one expects of Puritanism, whether
in its dominating of the Scotch Presbyterian minister or of the Irish
Catholic priest. The latter is to-day doing as much to kill the joy of
life in Connacht as did even the minister of the Free Kirk yesterday on
the Lews. It may have been partly to hide his identity that Sharp
assumed what some thought an anti-Presbyterian attitude in his "Fiona
Macleod" writing; it may have been the sympathy of the artist toward a
church that has conserved art that led him to what some thought a
pro-Catholic attitude; but scratch this gypsy artist and you find,
surprising as it may be, moral prejudice for Protestantism. Does he not
admire Torcall Cameron and Archibald Ruthven, stern Calvinists both?
"The Fisher of Men," and "The Last Supper" have in them the austere
beauty of the old morality plays, a beauty that is akin to the beauty of
the Puritan imagination of Bunyan, and a tenderness that we may in vain
look for there. They are written in all reverence and simplicity, and it
is no wonder we find Mr. Yeats suggesting that "Fiona Macleod" turn them
into plays for the Irish Theatre.

I do not care so much for "The Birds of Emar," myths he has rewoven from
the "Mabinogion" into Gaelic texture, or the series that purport to be
collected among the Isles and are found to be very like certain
wel