ix Park,
was thickly peopled with the families of officers stationed in Dublin.
Yet somehow one does not carry away from the reading of it any picture
of that society; the story is so exciting that the mind has no time to
rest on details, but hurries on from clue to clue till finally and
literally the murder is out. Books which keep a reader on the
tenter-hooks of conjecture must always suffer from this undue
concentration of the interest; and in spite of cheery, inquisitive Dr.
Toole, and the remarkable sketch of Black Dillon, the ruffianly genius
with a reputation only recognised in the hospitals and the police-courts
(a character admirably invented and admirably used in the plot) one can
hardly class Le Fanu among those novelists who have left memorable
presentments of Irish life. It is a pity; for plainly, if the man had
cared less for sensational incident and ingenious construction, he might
have sketched life and character with a strong brush and a kind of grim
realism.

Realism Lever does not aim at: he declines to be on his oath about
anything. What he gives one, vividly enough, is national colour, not
local colour; he is essentially Irish, just as Fielding is essentially
English; but he aims at verisimilitude rather than veracity. The ideal
of the novel has changed since his day. Compare him with the two ladies
who stand out prominently among contemporary writers of Irish fiction,
Miss Jane Barlow and Miss Emily Lawless. To begin with, Lever's stories
are always concerned with the Quality; peasants only come in for an
underplot, or in subordinate parts; and the gentry all through Ireland
resemble one another within reasonable limits. It is different with the
peasantry. In every part of Ireland you will find people who have never
been ten miles away from the place of their birth, and upon whom a local
character is unmistakably stamped. The contemporary novelists delight to
mark these differences, these salient points of singularity; and their
studies are chiefly of the peasantry. They settle down upon some little
corner of the country and never stir out of it. Miss Lawless is not
content to get you Irish character; she must show you a Clare man or an
Arran islander, and she is at infinite pains to point out how his
nature, even his particular actions, are influenced by the place of his
bringing up. Lever avoids this specialisation; he prefers a stone wall
country for his hunting scenes, but beyond that he goes n