an authority demonstrated to be hostile to the King, hostile to the Empire, and bitterly hostile to themselves? They said they would die in their boots before they would submit, and they were ready to do it. This was Ulster's treason which Sir James says begat treason in the South. Had Washington and his men anything like such good reason for resistance as the Ulstermen? And yet the whole world-including the defeated Britishapplauds them, and says they were right. What is the result of their action to-day? The Northerners are still free men and living under British law.

The book contains a graphic account of the Irish-Irish war, where the author shows that the Free State had no scruple in applying to rebellion remedies far more severe than those of the hated Saxon, against which they had never ceased to excite the world's pity and horror. They executed scores of rebels-seventy-seven in all. When the irregulars murdered Mr Hales they took out four Republicans and shot them. Their views on the morality of hunger strikes have undergone a great change. Sir James believes these severe measures to have been absolutely necessary. He dwells on the high courage displayed by the ministers of the Free State, and attributes the comparative peace that is now enjoyed as the result of their vigorous action. The author, to make sure of his facts, has consulted every possible authority and gives chapter and verse for all his statements. The book will offend many in the North and still more in the South, but no one will fail to admire it as a fearless history written by an intrepid man. In all honesty he writes the truth as it appears to him, careless whom it enrages or gratifies. He is no flatterer-Ireland has had enough and more than enough of their baleful breed. False words, as Socrates has said, are not merely evil in themselves, but infect the soul with evil. While he believes that Ireland has been debauched by lies and demoralised by crime, he is confident that there is virtue and courage enough in the people to enable them to learn the truth and to act upon it. He believes that she will make real progress when she repudiates mendacity and organised crime as political weapons. It may well be said in her case, 'Non tali auxilio, nec defensoribus istis Tempus eget.'

H

Southern Ireland has a great opportunity for turning her face to the light and entering on a noble future, as she is now governed by men of her own choosing, who have displayed remarkable courage and statesmanship. These men are entitled to the goodwill and support of all rightthinking people whatever their views may have been in the past. She must make her momentous choice for good or evil. She is no longer in any kind of bondage or tutelage, the responsibility rests on herself alone. If she wallows in the slough of race animosity and religious hatred-if she prefers the lie to the truth-she has no future whatever. If, on the other hand, she chooses the nobler part-to look realities in the face-to give up brooding on the unhappiness of the dead past-to act with scrupulous justice as between all her children of every kind and of every creed-to associate herself closely with her friendly neighbours in the North and across the St George's Channel-there is no limit to what she may achieve.

JOHN Ross.

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Art. 7.-THE ENGLISH JEST-BOOK.

1. A C. Mery Talys. London: Johannes Rastell, 1526. 2. Wit and Mirth, Chargeably Collected out of Taverns, Ordinaries, Innes, Bowling-Greenes and Allyes, Alehouses, Tobacco-shops, Highwayes and Water-passages. Made up, and fashioned into Clinches, Bulls, Quirkes, Yerkes, Quips and Jerkes. Apothegmatically bundled up and garbled at the request of old John Garrett's Ghost. By John Taylor. London, 1630.

3. Joe Miller's Jests: or, the Wits Vade-Mecum. Being a Collection of the most brilliant Jests; the politest Repartees; the most elegant Bons Mots, and most pleasant short stories in the English Language. First carefully collected in the Company, and many of them transcribed from the mouth of the facetious Gentleman whose name they bear; and now set forth and published by his lamentable friend and former companion, Elijah Jenkins Esq. London, 1739.

4. The Jest-Book: The Choicest Anecdotes and Sayings. Selected by Mark Lemon. Macmillan, 1864.

5. Bubble and Squeak. London: 'Sphere and Tatler,' 1925.

THE growth of the printing-press, the widening of horizons consequent upon the rediscovery of the Western Continent, the stir and movement of life that attended the rapid development of international trade in the early decades of the 16th century, marked a change which meant the passing of the last aspects of mediavalism, the beginning of modernity in European civilisation. In England especially was the change marked: by the quickening of that national consciousness which found its boldest expression in the King's establishment of a Church denying the authority of the Pope; by the acquisition of the habit of peace, by the growth of trade both at home and with foreign parts; by the development of the secular stage, and other things of seemingly minor moment which were yet of real significance.

Among those seemingly minor manifestations of that change is the one with which we are here concernedthe first appearance in the national life of the jest-book. It was a manifestation that has received but scant

attention, yet one that was to have incalculable developments; for it is scarcely fanciful to see in the attempt to provide a collection of easily remembered and readily repeated stories one of the first steps towards the slow democratising of literature. The earlier products of the printing-press were in the main tomes for wealthy buyers, for scholars, for monastery libraries; the production of an anecdote miscellany cannot but have been an attempt to reach something of a wider public among those who had acquired the art of reading.

The printing of the first English jest-book preceded by nearly ten years the printing of the first English Bible, and that this should have been so is doubtless in accordance with man's development; tales must have been told long before Bibles were made. The demand for a story may, indeed, be believed to be as old as the capacity for supplying it. The caves probably echoed to the laughter of our troglodytic ancestry when primitive wit scored off some boring narrator of his own exploits in dodging a saurian pursuer, or in enlarging upon the size of some monster he had 'nearly' entrapped. It may well be that many of our chestnuts' have their roots in that dim past, and during succeeding ages have been subjected to the evolutionary laws of variation and adaptation before being manifested in modern leaves. Mr Hardcastle's untold story of grouse in the gunroom may have been but a variant of some anecdote of prehistoric man finally revised to accord with 18th-century ideas of the humorous; for the persistence of the jest is constant, it may be looked upon as one of the vitamins essential to the continuance of healthy human society. As to the persistence of the essentials of fun as embodied in anecdote, it seems generally recognised in the readiness with which we reproach the utterer of a 'good thing' with filching from some coiner of witty currency who has become a tradition. Such readiness is doubtless far older than the printing of our earliest jest-book. Still is the name of a fifth-rate jester of a couple of centuries ago used in this manner, and before Joe Miller won to unmerited immortality it would seem that the first of our jest-books served the slow-minded in similar fashion as a ready snub for a quick-witted companion. We learn from Much Ado About Nothing' that Benedick

said of Beatrice that she had her good wit out of the Hundred Merry Tales.' In earlier times there were, it may be believed, a succession of fellows of infinite jest whose names were held in remembrance for the purpose of snubbing their successors; we appear ever to have something of a distrust of the man of wit that makes us loth to recognise him in a contemporary-it is as if we believed in wit the day before yesterday, and wit yesterday, but never wit to-day. The classicist goes so far as to say 'all our jokes are said to come from Athenæus.' The grain of truth in the generalisation concerning the staleness of jests seems to be that the fundamentals of wit and humour-after due allowance for changes in taste and fashion-were the same in the earliest records as in the latest comic journal.

It is possible that in the burning of the great library of Alexandria the first of jest-books may have perished, for even if we do not know that such works were then actually compiled we do know that the suggestion was made in the fourth century B.C. that they should be; for in the time of Demosthenes there was in Athens a club known as the Sixty, and it is said that Philip of Macedon, regretting that he was not able to join it, asked that all the good things uttered at its gatherings should be sent to him. Such a request from such a personage might seem in the nature of a command-certainly if the Sixty included in its number some diligent and obsequious Attic Boswell-but history does not record whether it was complied with. Athenæus tells us of the request but no more, so it is to his own account of the Banquet of Laurentius that, with W. P. Courtney, we may look as the first of jest-books, though it is not strictly such in that it does not exist for the telling of stories, but simply includes them as it were by way of literary spicing. The numerous company of diners not only discuss food literally but also indulge in such a plenitude of literary extracts as suggest that the writers who in the third century of our era were counted the ancients had been greatly concerned with eating and drinking as inspiring themes. The men and women gathered at the banquet showed an extraordinary knowledge of what was evidently then recondite literature; and incidentally we learn from them that capping verses,