carries back the silver cup, the reward for his labours. This first act is written in true O'Casey manner-there is movement, there is life the characters are real beings, and we turn our thoughts back to those days during the war when we saw soldiers marching down to the Dublin docks accompanied by mothers, sisters, wives, sweethearts through the muddy streets, saluted by the excited populace. O'Casey is at his best in describing such a crowded scene. He is essentially a photographic dramatist, and his eyes take in every detail. It is a pity that we cannot give the same high praise to the other acts of the play. The second act, which is set in the trenches' somewhere in France,' is a queer fantastic scene that recalls slightly the dream play in Masses and Men by Toller. The author has introduced a grotesque chanting in doggerel verse which haunts one's imagination. The characters, however, seem to float away from reality into a phantom world, and in the third and the fourth acts they seem unable to wing their way back to earth. The author shows his disillusioned fascination : the young football hero of the first act is wounded and paralysed; he is wheeled about in a bath-chair. The girl whom he loves goes off with someone else. The war has not given anything to these poor waifs; it has maimed and crippled them, leaving them nothing but bitter memories of a former world. None of the characters in this play strikes me as forcibly as Juno Boyle, Joxer, or Fluther Good; it is as if the author on leaving the scenes of his impressionable years had ceased to see intensely. We must admire O'Casey, however, for struggling towards new values. There are many striking touches in the play, especially in the first act, which show that he has not lost his master hand. I feel that he is on the threshold of a great discovery. He must classify his ideas and work them up into a synthesis. The fault of The Silver Tassie is that it is too vague and indefinite. It will be interesting to see whether the public will reverse the decision of the Abbey Theatre directors, who consider it inferior to the author's other plays. The whole correspondence relative to the play, which was published in the Observer and in the Irish Statesman for June 9, is an illuminating fragment of dramatic history. It is not often that an author possesses such a fund of Elizabethan expletive as Sean O'Casey: not only does he try to shoot his enemy with his pistol, but he throws it at him to finish him off. At times in his plays he is Aristophanic in the mixture of phantasy and crude invective. Take the following example : FIRST STRETCHER-BEARER.-The red-tabb'd squit ! THIRD STRETCHER-BEARER.—We must keep up, we must keep up the morale of the Army. SECOND STRETCHER-BEARER (loudly).—Does 'e eat well? THE REST (in chorus).—Yes, 'e eats well! THE REST (in chorus).-Napoo; 'e 'as to do the thinking for the Tommies! It is difficult to imagine such scenes when we read the play, but in a production they would no doubt flog up the excitement of the audience. The chanting in the scene of the trenches would be more striking on the stage where the author wishes to make it all seem like a fantastic echo of the grim vision of war. The crude realism of the words, however, does not suit the chant. O'Casey, like James Joyce, possesses an amazing gift for words— they seem to pour out in a torrential stream that nothing can stop sometimes the flood rushes jerkily along as though stopped by boulders; at other times it races vertiginously. The special O'Casey rhetoric becomes a temptation to the dramatist, who should seek greater simplicity. The following passage is uttered by Sylvester Heegan, a docker sixty-five years of age: 'An' the hedges by the road-side standin' stiff in the silent cold of the air, like frost beads on the branches glistenin' like toss'd-down diamonds from the breasts of the stars.' Such purple patches are frequent in the later work of the author. Occasionally he makes very good use of rhetoric, as in the phrase 'I'll spend a little time longer in the belly of an hour bulgin' out with merriment.' When we read the play we have the impression that the author was trying to whip up his genius into excitement but without success. After the excellent first act, which suggests Juno and the Paycock, the second act comes as a contrast, and we feel that the author tried hard to rise to the magnitude of his subject. In the third act the characters become fainter and fainter and cease to interest us. Susie, the prayer-meeting Bible-quoting girl of the first act, has evolved into a frivolous V.A.D. who only thinks of pleasing officers, but we are not shown any gradual transformation. It is impossible to reconcile her new personality with the old. Poor Harry, wheeled about in a bath-chair, paralysed from the waist downwards, is a pathetic figure, but he has not half the personality of poor, pale little Mollser sitting outside the tenement in the third act of The Plough and the Stars. The Silver Tassie was a most interesting experiment, because it liberated O'Casey from the slum tenement play and it showed him new horizons in drama. He has not lost any of his power in writing or his vivid imagination. He is treading a new path, and I am sure that it will not be long before he discovers fresh treasure. WALTER STARKIE. CHAUCER'S PHYSICIAN AND HIS FORBEARS UPON the April night when medieval England put on immortality at the Tabard Inn, it is pleasant to recall, at any rate for a few of us, that there was a physician in the company. He was not perhaps the noblest of its members, nor was his tale one of the most original. But his general demeanour, as Chaucer has represented it, was at least consonant with the dignity of his profession; and he has been given the credit, in his own subject, for a tolerably wide amount of reading. Indeed, he was familiar, so his creator assures us, with no less than fifteen medical authorities, ranging from Esculapius, Hippocrates, and Galen to the most recent of the Arabian professors; and Chaucer has been kind enough to include in the list two of his own fellowcountrymen. These were Gilbertyn and Gatesden, as Chaucer describes them-Gilbert the Englishman and John of Gaddesden-and since they have come down to us linked for ever in the prologue to the Canterbury Tales, it is not unfitting, perhaps, that they should head the procession of post-Conquest English medicine. Moreover, without stressing the point unduly, since the character of each must be chiefly deduced from his writings, it seems possible to discern in them, already in being, two very recognisable medical types-in Gilbert the scholar, serious and detached, in John the first of the fashionable physicians. That is not to suggest, of course, that they were without predecessors in a still more primitive England. Long before the birth of Gilbert in the reign of Henry II., some sort of medicine had been practised in these islands; and it is not improbable even, as Sir Norman Moore has reminded us, that men who had consulted Galen as to their health had paused to greet one another, and possibly discuss their symptoms, upon the Roman causeway in Cheapside. But that had been long since in the greater days both of Rome and medicine. Even before the legions had been recalled from Britain, there had already begun to ebb from the Roman Empire all real knowledge of the great Pergamite's work and the lofty traditions that lay behind it. The dissections and experiments by which he had already established, during the second century after Christ, the origin of the nerves, for instance, and their functions, and the nature and purposes of the various muscles-these had never been repeated; and what little of his knowledge had returned to England with Augustine and his followers had been almost submerged by the decadent mysticism of the later Greek theorists. Nevertheless it is clear that, thanks to these missionary clergy and the schools founded by them in connexion with their churches, certain elements of the old Greek teaching had been introduced into Anglo-Saxon practice, and equally clear that the AngloSaxons themselves possessed a by no means negligible native art. Much of this was fantastic, of course, a system of charms connected with ancient tribal beliefs. But it also included a popular herbal lore evidently based upon practical experience. By the end of the ninth century, therefore, it may be said that English medicine had become a blend of four separate streams-legendary versions of Hippocrates and Galen, derived at second hand from their Græco-Latin successors; a considerable infusion, from the same source, of Mediterranean and Oriental magic, discreetly tinctured with Christianity but unchanged in essence; a native contribution of the same kind, similarly Christianised and to the same extent; and a perhaps more trustworthy botanical lore, both indigenous and imported. As for its practitioners, since medicine was a proper study for most of the higher and particularly the monastic clergy, these may be regarded, whether Saxon-born or Continental, as having been its chief exponents. But there may also be divined from the works of Bede an inferior order of medici' or leeches, who acted under their instructions and seem to have been entrusted with most of the surgical operations. There were almost certainly, too, in every scattered community, local herbalists and hereditary cure-mongers; and there is no reason to suppose that they were markedly less efficient than their corresponding fellows upon the Continent. Indeed, at the time of the Conquest there was probably little to choose between the general level of AngloSaxon doctors and those to be found practising the same art in the better educated countries of Europe. And there had appeared in none of these, where the Latin tongue was the only educational literary medium, anything in the vernacular which was at all comparable with the Anglo-Saxon Leech Book of the physician Bald. Whether Gilbert ever read this cannot be stated. But it must have been part of his mental heritage. And since it is the earliest medical treatise composed in these islands, or at any rate the earliest that has survived destruction, it is interesting to pause for a moment and turn its pages, if only for what they reveal of its creators. For though Bald is described as having been its sponsor-it was written soon after the death of Alfred the Greatit was actually transcribed by one Cild, perhaps a secretary, at Bald's behest. Whether the latter, like Bald, was himself a leech -they were both probably monks-must be left a matter of doubt. But that he was not altogether the meek scribe the following passage seems to show. Thus against bite of snake,' runs a part of the manuscript, if the man procures and eats rind which cometh out of Paradise, no venom will damage him. Then said he that wrote this book that the rind was hard to be gotten'; and as Cild permitted himself the small liberty, we may surely imagine its accompaniment-the momentary deepening of a crease or two on that solid and impassive Saxon countenance. There is a familiar ring, too, about some lines of Bald occurring at the end of the second volume, in which after telling us that he is the owner of the book, which he had ordered Cild to write, he goes on to add: 'Earnestly I pray here of all men, in the name of Christ, that no treacherous person take this book from me, neither by force, nor by theft, nor by any false statement. Why? because the richest treasure is not so dear to me as my dear books, which the grace of Christ attends '-a legend that must since have been inscribed, a trifle less politely perhaps, and in a more schoolboy hand, by at least as many fifth-form descendants of Bald as there have been schools in England. But, apart from all this, the book itself is a fascinating mirror of Anglo-Saxon medicine. First translated, in the middle of the last century, by the Rev. Oswald Cockayne, it consists of two volumes, and in its earlier chapters follows the current Greek fashion. Diseases are dealt with geographically-that is to say, as they affect each portion of the human frame, maladies of the head, for example, including 'half-head's ache,' sore throat, harelip, sundry affections of the eye and ear, and even the spitting of blood-presumably because this appears at the mouth. There then follow leechdoms against a variety of tumours, remedies for snake-bite, of which we have seen an example, advice upon certain internal and abdominal complaints, and a number of more or less complicated prescriptions. Thus the components of a quieting drink' include betony, helenium, wormwood, ontre, horehound, lupin, wen-wort, yarrow, dwarf dwostle, and fieldmore, or wild carrot. In most cases these herbs were administered as simples '-watery infusions, or infusions of the herb in vinegar, ale, or milk. But they were also given as confections made up with honey, or applied as ointments mixed with butter. As regards the charms in popular use, and of which the Leech |