Modern realistic art has not yet produced a Hamlet, but at least it may
claim to have studied Guildenstern and Rosencrantz very closely; and, for
pure fidelity and truth to nature, nothing could be better than the minor
characters in Ismay's Children. Here we have the kindly old priest who
arranges all the marriages in his parish, and has a strong objection to
people who insist on making long confessions; the important young curate
fresh from Maynooth, who gives himself more airs than a bishop, and has
to be kept in order; the professional beggars, with their devout faith,
their grotesque humour, and their incorrigible laziness; the shrewd
shopkeeper, who imports arms in flour-barrels for the use of the
Moonlighters and, as soon as he has got rid of them, gives information of
their whereabouts to the police; the young men who go out at night to be
drilled by an Irish-American; the farmers with their wild land-hunger,
bidding secretly against each other for every vacant field; the
dispensary doctor, who is always regretting that he has not got a Trinity
College degree; the plain girls, who want to go into convents; the pretty
girls, who want to get married; and the shopkeepers' daughters, who want
to be thought young ladies. There is a whole pell-mell of men and women,
a complete panorama of provincial life, an absolutely faithful picture of
the peasant in his own home. This note of realism in dealing with
national types of character has always been a distinguishing
characteristic of Irish fiction, from the days of Miss Edgeworth down to
our own days, and it is not difficult to see in Ismay's Children some
traces of the influence of Castle Rack-rent. I fear, however, that few
people read Miss Edgeworth nowadays, though both Scott and Tourgenieff
acknowledged their indebtedness to her novels, and her style is always
admirable in its clearness and precision.

* * * * *

Miss Leffler-Arnim's statement, in a lecture delivered recently at St.
Saviour's Hospital, that 'she had heard of instances where ladies were so
determined not to exceed the fashionable measurement that they had
actually held on to a cross-bar while their maids fastened the fifteen-
inch corset,' has excited a good deal of incredulity, but there is
nothing really improbable in it. From the sixteenth century to our own
day there is hardly any form of torture that has not been inflicted on
girls, and endured by women, in obedience to the dictates of an
unreasonable and monstrous Fashion. 'In order to obtain a real Spanish
figure,' says Montaigne, 'what a Gehenna of suffering will not women
endure, drawn in and compressed by great coches entering the flesh; nay,
sometimes they even die thereof.' 'A few days after my arrival at
school,' Mrs. Somerville tells us in her memoirs, 'although perfectly
straight and well made, I was enclosed in stiff stays, with a steel busk
in front; while above my frock, bands drew my shoulders back till the
shoulder-blades met. Then a steel rod with a semicircle, which went
under my chin, was clasped to the steel busk in my stays.