30 light years apart, and that the nebula should generate stars at the rate of about one every one thousand years.

It is estimated that there are some 700,000 spiral nebulas bright enough to be photographed with our most delicate plates, and the number may exceed one million. The faintest of these must be situated at an inconceivably great distance from us. We have also seen that the motions in at least the nearer of these nebulas are so great that we can actually measure them and so keep watch of the nebula's development. What a field for investigation and study will thus be presented to those who with more perfect instruments and with more powerful telescopes will explore the wonderful universe which surrounds us! And this is but one little part of astronomy.

To sum up what we know of our universe as a whole, we have seen that it has definite and limited boundaries, and that neither in extent nor in total mass can it exceed a quite, and from one point of view, a not very large amount. In structure and in the motions of the bodies within it it is almost infinitely complex, but its present form is almost certainly not a stable one; we see it at one stage only of its slow evolution into another form. As to whether in the infinite depths of space there are other universes like ours, and particularly whether some, at least, of the spiral nebulas may not be such universes, and especially those spiral nebulas which are so excessively faint that they only begin to appear on the most delicate photographic plates after many hours exposure-these are questions which we cannot answer, but whose answers will doubtless be found by the astronomers who shall come after us.

THE DRAMAS OF LORD DUNSANY

By CORNELIUS WEYGANDT

Professor of English Literature

Lord Dunsany has given us a drama new to our literature. It is exotic, aloof, aristocratical, of a beauty so strange and full of wonder that we doubt it sometimes, and question is it beauty, or only a form of the grotesque.

Oftenest it draws our thoughts eastward, this drama, and to old time. Now it takes us, as in "The Gods of the Mountain,” to fabulous hours in some back country of Cathay, and now, as in "The Golden Doom," to a Persia Alexander knew. Again we are on slavefields and the gardens of a king somewhere over against Babylon, but with mountains lifting like the Caucasus high and dim on the horizon. This in "King Argimenes and the Unknown Warrior." It is to a desert stiller and of sand more golden, and of lure more potent than any Syria ever hid that we are transported in "The Tents of the Arabs." The tragic minutes of "The Queen's Enemies" pass by a Nile that had centuries yet to flow before there could be Cleopatra. A jungle, with fringe of purple orchids and recesses tiger-haunted, is just beyond the Thek of "The Laughter of the Gods," a Thek that was destroyed only short years after the fall of Troy. This city must be close to the borders of India, but further south than the Kongros of "The Gods of the Mountain." Eastward of this the plays do not take us, though the idol that clumps with stony tread into "A Night at an Inn" and leads to death the perfect toff and his pals must have come from Buddhist coasts.

The action of "The Glittering Gate" takes place upon a cliff above the abysses just this side the door of Heaven, and reveals to us, when that door swings open, a night of nothingness and a few far stars. "The Lost Silk Hat" alone among the plays is of a country other than the land of dreams. It never

moves beyond the doorstep to a house in London and the sidewalk adjacent.

It is not, however, of "The Lost Silk Hat" or "The Glittering Gate" that you think first when you think of Lord Dunsany. You think of his other plays of this eastern land of his imagination, this indeterminate, shifting land, a composite of many old countries from Nile to Brahmapootra. And as you think of them there return to you certain stage pictures; or certain visualizations that you, reading in your room, made of their action-these first. Then the emotions that underlie the plays begin to come back, wonder and awe and horror. Then you remember what of revelation is in the plays, the burdens of their themes: heaven is what earth is; the slave can never be set free; men must suffer for success; the large effect of little things; fate cannot be foreseen; my lady has her will; memory is stronger than the years; man proposes, chance disposes.

It is only after you think of the pictures of his plays, the emotions underlying them, the ideas they present, that you think of their men and women. What his characters are is generally not so important as what happens to them. The coolness and resourcefulness of the toff of "A Night at an Inn" give him some body; and Agmar, the proud beggar, stands out above the other people of "The Gods of the Mountain." There is more than his usual characterization in "The Tents of the Arabs." The King is not just any king who would lose power to gain liberty, he is not one with a like minded hero of "The Miracle of Purun-Bhagat," and Eznarza, the gypsy girl, is not just any gypsy girl. But, after all, none of these four is a fully developed character. Not a single one in all Dunsany is fully developed. That is why actors so love the parts. They can share in the creation of all, and some are so slight in the text that they can almost wholly "create" them. Less can be added to the little lady of "The Queen's Enemies" than to any character in Dunsany. She so interested him that he had, willy-nilly, to render her clearly.

Is there anything racial in this sketchiness of character in Dunsany? Think of Yeats, and you will say, "Yes!" Think

of Synge with his Pegeen Mike and Martin Doul, and you will say "No!" just as surely. Is there much that is Irish in any

of the writing of Dunsany? plays, and in his tales, too. old cycles of Irish romance, humblest folk-tales of today. and of this imagination, and brave words common to Irish legend and his writings, and you will be inclined to say that Dunsany, too, is of the shanachies. But there is little else that is Irish about his art.

There are many marvels in his Marvels are characteristic of the and characteristic, too, of the Think of this predilection of his,

We know that part of the boyhood of Dunsany was spent in the County Meath, in which he was born forty years ago. But we know, too, that the kind of legend he loves, the legend of court romance, was all but dead in Meath more than forty years ago. The tradition in which he grew up at Dunsany Castle, and at Cheam and Eton was the tradition of the English public school. It was at Cheam, he tells us, where he had to read a great deal of the Bible, that his thought turned to the east. Cheam brought him Greek, too, and Eton more Greek, and this Greek stored his memory full of sounding names he has never forgotten. No Cambridge or Oxford followed Eton and Cheam to deepen his love of the classics. There came instead Sandhurst and the Coldstream Guards, and then active service in the Boer War. Birth and tradition, education and travel all conspired, maybe, to keep Dunsany from the peasant drama that was coming into being in Ireland when he returned from South Africa. He was keenly aware of the work of Yeats and Synge and appreciative of it. It was not, though, in the way of either that he began to write, but in one distinctively his own. The prose of his first book, "The Gods of Pegana," (1905), owes something, no doubt, to the prose of William Morris. The country of Morris, too, though western, lies toward the frontier of the country of dream that Dunsany was trying to find. Yet the rhythm Dunsany beat out for himself in the end had in it more of the fall of Old Testament prose than of the prose of Morris. This fall of prose of Dunsany has only once in a while any resemblance to the fall of peasant