Books: With an Irish Brogue

1000 YEARS OF IRISH PROSE (607 pp.)—Edited by Vivian Mercier and David H. Greene—Devin-Adair ($6).

"A healthy nation," wrote Bernard Shaw in 1906, "is as unconscious of its nationality as a healthy man of his bones. But if you break a nation's nationality, it will think of nothing else but getting it set again." In the late 19th century and early 20th, when the bone of Gaelic nationality was painfully being set, Ireland found voice to curse, plead, moan, gasp, roar and sing out a literature as great and sudden as any of modern times.

There had never been an age without fine...