the lantern or of the moon; heard over and over their curious myths and animal stories; knew the negro's dream of freedom, sympathized with him, and longed to see him become a useful citizen. In a word, he understood negro character, and he knew the negro language intimately.

There appeared in Lippincott's Magazine in the 'seventies an article on the folklore of the Southern negro. It was the lack of accuracy in this article that gave Harris his cue for Uncle Remus. These errors gave rise to some of his discriminating observations concerning negro speech. For example, he explains that the negro did not use "Buh" as a contraction for "Brother," but that he used "Brer. He explains further that the term "Brer" was not used promiscuously, but only by animals in addressing one another. Hence we would correctly have, "Hol' on dar, Brer Rabbit,' sez Mr. Fox, sezee." However, it is a matter of regret that Harris fails in his stories to keep to the distinction between the use of "Brer" and "Mr." Other manifestations of Harris's art and insight are seen in the "Jeems Robinson" column, which he contributed to the Constitution in 1876 as a substitute for Small's "Uncle Si" sketch, which was being discontinued. The essential difference-and it is a vast difference between the art of Harris and the art of Small, as Dr. Wiggins points out, is that in "Uncle Si" we have "a white man trying to express his ideas in negro language," whereas in "Jeems Robinson" we have a negro expressing his own thoughts in his own language.

"Jeems Robinson" was the beginning of "Uncle Remus. The darky who tells the tales was a "human syndicate ✶✶✶ of three or four old darkies," including, of course, Uncle George Terrell, the Gamaliel of Turnwold. Taking his cue from the erroneous article in Lippincott's, and observing wherein his distinguished predecessor, Irwin Russell, had both succeeded and failed in depicting negro character and dialect, Harris set about the creation of his masterpiece. In the accomplishment of this task, in Uncle Remus, he satisfied to a degree his own ambition to see, not only the lan

guage, but also the thought, of the unsophisticated Southern negro reproduced and perpetuated in literature. Thus he was the fulfillment of Mr. Turner's prophecy and his own dream that there might be a bit of literature genuinely Southern and at the same time, because characterized by localism and not sectionalism, genuinely American. The message is as simple and unpretentious as the man, but it touches the heart; and the millions that come after the author of Uncle Remus will immortalize the words that appear in perishable bronze upon his tombstone: "You have made some of us happy."

ELIZABETHAN NOTIONS OF IRELAND

BY F. F. COVINGTON, JR.

When Rosalind, in As You Like It, referring to the love poems with which Orlando was decorating the trees of Arden forest, exclaimed: "I was never so berhym'd since Pythagoras's time, that I was an Irish rat, which I can hardly remember," she was not only giving utterance to a characteristic witticism, but she was expressing one of the Elizabethan notions about England's sister isle, which had been both a distressful country and a land of wonders, if not so far back as Pythagoras's time, at least for several centuries before the Virgin Queen came to the throne. Connected in the popular mind with the notion of Ireland as the insula sanctorum was the allied conception of Erin as a country of marvels. The curious and fatal susceptibility of Irish rats to rimed curses had been noticed before Shakespeare commenced author by Reginald Scot, in his Discoverie of Witchcraft; and Ben Jonson, in his Apologeticall Dialogue, which he added to The Poetaster, mentions this belief in riming to death. The well-known immunity of Ireland from snakes and other venomous creatures had long been the source of strange and edifying stories. Even Venerable Bede is willing to add currency to some of the popular stories which proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that no serpent could live on the soil that Saint Patrick had accommodatingly rendered both aseptic and antiseptic. Stanihurst, who contributed a "Description of Ireland" to Holinshed's Chronicles, often cites Bede as an authority. "Bede writeth," he says in one place, "that serpents conveied into Ireland did presentlie die being touched with the smell of the land, that whatsoever came from Ireland was then of sovereigne virtue against poison. He exemplifieth in certeine men stung of adders, who drank in water the scrapings of books that had been in Ireland, and were cured." For centuries the chief source of information about Ire

'Holinshed, Chronicles, etc. (1808). Description of Ireland. page 9.

land, for educated Englishmen, was Gerald de Barri, better known to the historical and literary world as Giraldus Cambrensis, who wrote two books on the newly "conquered" island during the reign of Henry II, which reveal both a keenly observant eye and a fertile imagination. Gerald does not fail to mention the famous anti-venomous quality of the soil of Ireland, and is no less ready than Bede with specific instances. He gravely informs us of certain merchants who assured him that upon unloading their ships in Ireland they found some toads under their ballast, and that no sooner had they cast them upon the shore than "they immediately turned on their backs, and bursting their bellies, died, to the astonishment of many who witnessed it." Such trifles as this, however, do not content this Anglo-Norman Captain Grose. He tells us of two islands in the northern part of Ulster, in one of which no female animal could live. The experiment had been tried with cats and dogs, and the females invariably died. On the other isle nothing could die: old people who felt that life no longer offered anything worth while would beg to be rowed to the mainland, where they might give up the ghost in peace.

A very curious phenomenon noted in Ireland by Gerald was the generation of certain kinds of waterfowl. These birds developed from barnacles which could be seen hanging on trees or clinging to rotten timber near the seashore or watercourses. Centuries later, in popular natural history, these waterfowl had become geese, and in Elizabeth's time the barnacle goose was a member in good and regular standing of the bird families of Ireland and Scotland. In The Tempest, Caliban fears that Prospero may turn him and his companions into "barnacles or to apes With foreheads villanous low." Even in Gerald's time-if we may take his word for it -this interesting quality of the barnacle had given rise to a very delicate question, as to whether it was fish or flesh.

"The Historical Works of Giraldus Cambrensis, etc., Ed. Wright, Bohn, 1863, page 49.

The religious, we are told, were much concerned to know whether they might conscientiously eat these creatures every day in the week, or must exclude them from their diet on fish days. We are not informed how the question was decided. Stanihurst, writing in the sixteenth century, affirms his belief that barnacles are neither fish nor flesh, but a mean between the two.

If the marvels of Ireland fed the appetites of Elizabethan Englishmen for something new and strange, the inhabitants of that country no less furnished material for humor. The strange costumes, stranger language, and outlandish customs of the native Irish were sources of much of the ridicule that was cast upon everything un-English. On the stage the Irishman shared with the Welshman the right to represent the excitable, irascible, poetic, and barbarous Celt as he appeared to the more staid and practical, and presumably more civilized Saxon. The redoubtable Captain MacMorris comes at once to mind, breathing threatenings and slaughter: "It is shame, by my hand; and there is throats to be cut, and works to be done; and there ish nothing done, so Chrish sa me, la!" And jealous of the honor of his nation: "Of my nation? What ish my nation? Ish a villain, and a bastard, and a knave, and a rascal? What ish my nation? Who talks of my nation?"

The current notion as to the Irish language is amusingly illustrated by Hotspur, who declares his aversion to hearing Lady Mortimer sing in Welsh, by saying, "I had rather hear Lady, my brach, howl in Irish."

But if to the man in the street Ireland was a subject for humor, to Elizabeth's statesmen the land across St. George's Channel was a serious problem. To them it was a country inhabited mostly by half-naked savages who resisted all efforts to civilize them, and who were fit only for treasons, stratagems, and spoils. Accounts of travelers in Ireland, and of the representatives of Her Majesty's government whose fortune--good or bad-it was to spend part of their lives there, almost invariably are pessimistic with regard to the