Welsh Journals

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"Bread and Circuses." By Helen Parry Eden. John Lane. London. Pp. 130. 3/6 net. Confronted with a collection of verse by a hitherto unknown writer, one is apt to greet it superciliously. Another ? Probably a relation of the giver." And, sometimes. for this contemptible attitude there is a satisfactory snub in waiting. Mrs. Eden snubbed me delicately on the first page I glanced at, and I forgave her instantly. For her verse is charming. A lover of children, with the knowledge of them only to be acquired through long and leisurely observation, and a warm sympathy with their out- look a lover of country life a Catholic and a scholar, she creates an atmosphere that lingers like some delicate and subtle garden perfume. The poems in this volume are not profound, in the common though questionable use of the word. nor do they betray a remarkably adventurous poetical spirit they are mostly short a little pensive, a little gay written, one feels, when the heroine of them. Betsey Jane had been tucked up in her white bed, and her mother, sitting in the sweet-smelling country garden, had leisure to review the smiles and tears, the eager shrill confidences. and the sudden grubby caresses of her baby's day. Betsey Jane. with her Jocko and her kitten, her first party and her business in the garden-Betsey Jane speaks from page after page till we can feel her warm presence in the room. Best of all perhaps, we have a poem to Betsey Jane on her desiring to go incontinently to Heaven,"— My Betsey Jane it would not do, For what would Heaven make of you. A little honey-loving bear, Among the Blessed Babies there ? But there are others besides the child-poems in the volume, all written with the same nice care of language that suggest a College Close, and a humour that never fails. One or two of them have appeared in Punch among them the swinging Senior Mistress of Blyth." There are several religious poems, of which the most beautiful is a Christmas hymn-and for the sweet reverent touch of that, we know that we have again to thank Pietsey Jane,- Behind a press of folk We knelt and no one spoke, Our Lady in her cloak Made not less noise, With folded fingers, than Each silent kneeling man, And sweet small girls who can Be still. and boys." "Merionethshire." A. Morris, F.R. Hist. Soc., Cam- bridge University Press, 1913. 1/6. The Cambridge County Geographies are all built up on very fixed principles, which tend to convert them into repositories of facts rather than to allow of their becoming interpreters of the life and personality of the region studied. The author has never- theless contrived to give some idea of that individuality, which is probably more marked than that of any other Welsh county. There is the great cleft valley from Corwen through Bala down to the sea at Towyn, and the cleft has its branches to Dolgelly and to Trawsfynydd, while. for the rest. the inland of Merionethshire is a mass of rugged grandeur. The coast of Ardudwy is, as it were, a region apart. The physical features of the county are pleasantly enumerated without much discussion of the scientific problems concerning their form and arrangement, though there is scope for a great deal of study in this connection. The natural history section appro- priately makes a point of the alpine flora of the mountains, while the notes on the animal life draw attention to the county's former wealth. A brief summary of the county's archaeology is all that is given, and perhaps more is not practicable till the Royal Commission shall have issued its eagerly awaited report on the county the author rightly stresses the difficulty with which exter nal influences have penetrated into the county. Owain Glyndwr naturally figures largely in the historica section while the county's roll of honour is a most important one. The men of Merionethshire have evidently long been famed for their independence of thought and their capacity for leadership. One can but wish that the author had contrived to break bounds here and there, and give a more vivid and intimate account of his county, but the bounds are set fast throughout the series, and we must be thankful for a useful reference book with aptly chosen views of some of the glories of Merionethshire. Atlantis." By Gerhart Hauptmann. Translated by Adele and Thomas Seltzer. T. Werner Laurie Ltd. Pp. 350, 6/- Every one knows the one scene play, but a one scene nove is a greater rarity, in fact this is the only example we can think of. offhand. Atlantis, without the wreck, would have been nothing, with it, it is-well a one scene novel. That one scene is almost perfect in its minute and imaginative details and cumulative effect of horror piled on horror; you feel as you read it that now at last you really do know how people act at such a time the loss of the Titanic, which before seemed too immense for comprehen- sion, you can now see in a way that all the masses of eye witness evidence, published at the time, was incapable of showing you. But apart from that one scene, the novel is almost curiously lacking in power. The main theme, that of a scientist in the toils of a fascinating and entirely depraved young girl of sixteen, Ingigerd Hahstrom. whose dance, Mara, or the Spider's Victim," has just been the sensation in artistic circles in Berlin, somehow fails to convince us at all. It is not that such prodigies of genius and of vice are unknown, nor that it is impossible for a man of Frederick von Kammacher's stamp to be carried away by them, we are prepared to believe in far more improbable things it is just that we cannot believe in Ingigerd herself or in Frederick s consuming passion for her, it is still more that they fail at times even to arouse our interests. And the end of it all, Kammacher's cure through typhoid fever and new found love for Eva Burns, the typical healthy girl of modern fiction, is, to say the least of it, banal; incidentally we may mention that an insane wife conveniently dies to make possible this happy ending. No, it is entirely a novel of one scene, and that one scene is a great one. The Bronze Age in Ireland." By G. Coffey. Hodges Figgis. 6/ Dublin, 1913. The Keeper of Irish Antiquities in the National Museum has long been a valued contributor to archaeological knowledge, and he has naturally been attracted to study that age when Ireland was the Eldorado of the West. The present work is a companion to a previous one dealing with the wonders of New Grange, probably the most remarkable tumulus in Europe. In both works Mr. Coffey brings evidence to show that Ireland has not always had to content itself with England's cast-offs, as historians and politicians would so often have us believe. In fact, much of his work goes to establish important and ancient con- nections with Gaul, connections that may not have affected Britain, though one suspects that Cornwall and Wales would be touched by coasting ships en route to the green isle. It was its gold and its copper that made Ireland rich, and drew to it, later on, the attention of wanderers from Scandinavia who, Mr. Coffey thinks, brought with them the famed spiral design encased in the stones of New Grange. If he is right, the spira would have spread from the Aegean across the centre of Europe to Scandinavia. and thence to Ireland and even to Wales, for a frag- ment still remains on a stone at Uanbedr. Mr. Coffey's figures of the famous Irish gold ornaments are most valuable and there is much food for thought in his statements about their distribution.