These little sketches and anecdotes are very well and simply told, and from internal evidence one would say they are perfectly genuine folklore. But the author only tells us that "while most of the items of peasant-lore referred to in this little volume have been drawn directly from the Connemara and the Donegal Highlands, they are nevertheless common to the Gaelic-speaking districts all over Ireland. But they are not exclusively confined to those parts. … The majority of them, however, were related to me in the Bearla briste (broken English) of a Western peasant, who was invariably obliged, whenever he found it necessary to emphasize any point and to impress it on my mind, to have recourse to the vernacular." This absence of definite detail is a drawback to an attractive little book, which nevertheless is well calculated to inoculate non-folklorist readers with a love of the subject.
This is a short but full biography, compiled from original documents, of a fifteenth-century baron who fought under Joan of Arc, wrote, and acted in, a play on her life, and was eventually condemned to death on the double charge of wholesale child-murder and of dabbling in magic. As a contribution to the social history of the later Middle Ages, the book is curious, if unpleasant, and the contemporary account of a trial for witchcraft contained in it comes within the range of the folklorist. But otherwise it would be about as sensible to call a life of Henry VIII., the English claimant for Bluebeard honours, "a contribution to folklore." We recommend Mr. Hartland's article on "The Forbidden Chamber" (Folk-Lore Journal, iii., 193) to the author's notice: also Mr. Baring-Gould's Book of Werewolves, in which his repulsive hero has already received sufficient attention.
