ty years ago," says the verse of an
Irish song. That is the kind of indeterminate "yesterday" which is
described in _Irish Memories_ by two friends who have made some memories
of Ireland imperishable. "The Ireland that Martin and I knew when we
were children," writes Miss Somerville, "is fast leaving us; every day
some landmark is wiped out." No one knows better than she that while in
many parts of Ireland you must go back very close on forty years to
reach any likeness of that old way of life, yet in other parts yesterday
and forty years ago are very much the same. Still, she would reply, and
I must admit, that one profound modification has affected even the most
unchanging places, altering the whole position of the class in which she
was born and bred. In a sense, all her memories of Ireland concern
themselves with this change, depicting either what formerly was, and the
process of its passing, or what yet remains and seems likely to vanish
too. Her presentment of yesterday is well worth study, for its outlook
is typical of the most generous and shrewdest minds among the Irish
gentry. I use here an old-fashioned word, somewhat decried, but it is
the only one that expresses my meaning.

But readers will know that this is not only a book of memories; it is,
if not a memoir, at least the memorial of a singularly brilliant Irish
woman. Miss Somerville had planned to write her recollections, as she
had written so much else, in collaboration with her cousin and comrade,
"Martin Ross"--Miss Violet Martin, of Ross, in County Galway. It did not
so fall out; and though in this volume one is aware that the narrator is
often (by a sort of sub-conscious habit) speaking out of two minds, from
a dual complex of associations, and though considerable fragments of
Martin Ross's own writing give a justification to the joint signature,
yet one of the two comrades is joint author now only in so far as she is
part of all the memories, and a surviving influence little likely to
pass away. But her stock, so to say, in the partnership remains; Galway,
no less than Cork, is the field over which these memories travel. In the
main, the book is concerned with recalling the joint kindred of the two
friends and cousins, and reconstituting the surroundings and the
atmosphere of both families. Families, however, are conceived and
depicted in their most extended relations; figures are evoked of chief,
vassal, page and groom, tenant and master; and with