no mere
physical tie of the breast; the child sent to be fostered was sent to be
bred and trained, and it was a tie stronger than that of its blood or of
the breast. _Irish Memories_ shows incidentally how great a part this
fosterage played in the Ross of yesterday--that family with its
multitude of children was bound to the countryside by all the "Nursies."
But the Martin household, and all similar households were, in a less
literal sense, fostered by the peasantry at large. The truest part of
education should be to know your own country (a principle much neglected
in Ireland), and which of us all, who had the good fortune to be brought
up in touch with Irish peasant life, does not realise our debt? We
received a devotion, an affection, for which no adequate return could be
made--it is the nature of fosterage that the fosterer should give more
than can ever be requited; but we gained also our real knowledge, in so
far as we ever had it, of the countryside, the traditional wisdom, the
inherited way of life. There was more to be got if we had the wit to
assimilate it. Almost all of modern Irish literature that has lasting
value is evoked from elements floating in peasant memory, in the peasant
mind, and in the coloured peasant speech of an Ireland which keeps
unbroken descent from a long line of yesterdays. Mr. Yeats is only the
chief of those who draw from this source. Miss Somerville herself and
her cousin must have known well that the real worth of their work lies
in their instinct for the poetry which, more specially in
Gaelic-speaking regions, sits in rags by roadside and chimney corner.
Irish poetry is not only the tragic voice of the keene; Gaelic had its
comic muse as well, a robust virago, of the breed which produced
Aristophanes and Rabelais--and Slipper with his gift for epic narrative
is a camp-follower of that regiment.

[Footnote 1: "The Story of a Success." By P. H. Pearse. Being a Record of
St. Erda's College, September, 1908, to Easter, 1916. Edited by Desmond
Ryan, B.A. Maunsel & Co.]

Yet in Miss Somerville's appreciation there is often--not always--a
sense of the incongruity as well as of the beauty in peasant speech. The
woman crying for alms of bread who described her place of habitation, "I
do be like a wild goose over on the side of Drominidy Wood," moves to
laughter as well as to pity with the dignity of her phrase. Ireland so
felt is Ireland perceived from the outside--seen as a picturesque rui