There are episodes or sketches, some of them what sharp calls "prose imaginings," throughout his many books, that one may hardly call short stories, or myths, or studies in folk-lore, or criticism, or any of the other many kinds of writing that he essayed. Perhaps "memories" would be the proper general term for writing of this kind. In almost every one of these episodes or sketches there is a germ of a story, and some, I suppose, regard them as but unrealized art. But I for one am glad Mr. Sharp did not "work them up." In them are some of his best writing and some of that most personal and intimate. I have spoken of "Aileen" and "Barabal"; "Sheumas, a Memory," is another that is memorable, and memorable too, are "The Sea Madness" and "The Triad." "The Triad" is almost his _credo_, certainly a statement of the things he holds "most excellent"--"primitive genius, primitive love, primitive memory." Here Sharp recurs, as so often in his writing, to "ancestral memory," that possession of men by which they are aware of what was in the world before they were, through oneness with the universal memory into which they are absorbed in dream or vision or of which they become aware by what we call intuition. If such a power be restricted so that its possessor recalls only certain parts of antiquity, he is virtually in the state of him who believes he remembers what he remembers because of previous incarnations. I have no personal opinion to express on the subject, but if such memories exist in us because of our participation in a universal memory or because of reincarnation, it is easy to explain why Sharp is best in his writing of myths, his pictures of the wild beauties of love and war and dream in barbaric Erin and Alba. It is because he is the reincarnation of the shanachie of the Dark Ages. When he thought of reincarnation, however, in relation to himself, he thought, I have no doubt, of himself as the reincarnation of a druid, one who had been aware of mysteries; but what he really was, in life, with his magnificent enthusiasm and bravado,--picturesque raiment after all and no more for the high-hearted and inherently ailing body of him,--was this reincarnation of the shanachie, such an one as his own Oran the Monk turned tale-teller. If you doubt that he was shanachie, not druid, compare the two legends in "Beyond the Blue Septentrions." The ordered beauty of the legend that tells of the derivation of the name of Arthur from Arcturus falls familiarly on our ears. It is evidently made under a lamp by one who has read many old legends. It is no druidic revelation. The other, that which ends with the three great hero-leaps of Fionn from the Arctic Floes to the Pole, from the Pole up to Arcturus, from Arcturus to the Hill of Heaven itself, is fantastic, bizarre, extravagant to grotesqueness, with the very flamboyance of old Irish legend and modern Irish folk-tale. In other words, it is in the very manner of the shanachie of the Dark Ages, whether his work was recorded then as court poem or has been handed down by word of mouth among the folk. Nor is there anything inconsistent in this wild imagining with a very different power displayed in "moralities" like his "Last Supper." I have heard stories as incongruous, one uproarious, another of cloistral quiet and piety, from the old Irish gardener with whom I spent a large part of my happier days, the days from seven to seventeen. Lawrence lost his life doing a "retreat" morning after morning on the cold stone floor of a Vincentian church, not in any sudden repentance at fourscore and three for the sins of his youth for they had been fewer than those of almost all I know, but in the usual way of his austere life. Yet Lawrence was just as much himself when he was telling me stories of Dean Swift that were full of malice and brutality and orgiac ecstasy.