Ireland has given Europe one of its master historians in Dr. Eoin MacNeill, who celebrated his 70th birthday in 1938. Fifty Celtic scholars of various nations pay tribute to this master, who has revolutionised knowledge, by offering him 50 Essays and Studies. These have been edited by Fr. John Ryan, S.J., and were published lately in a sumptuous volume by Colin O'Lochlainn (2 guineas net)—the book itself, with its exquisite new fount of Gaelic type, and its many languages handled with precision, a monument to the progress of Irish scholarship.
Of the 50 contributors 11 are priests, Irish, American French and Belgian. Among essays of particular Catholic interest is one by an American Jesuit, who analyses the immense mass of " bardic " religious poetry, and affirms of the Gaelic poets who produced it during five centuries, that " no other country can point to a body of learned men who for so many centuries devoted their abilities to express the everlasting truths of the Catholic faith . . . nor has any body of men expressed their ideas with such painstaking labour."