Irish literature Author:Justin McCarthy Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: (1857 ) Mr. George Moore, poet, novelist, dramatist and art critic, was born in Ireland in 1857. His father was George Henry Moore, M.P., of Moore Hall, Count... more »y Mayo, who united considerable literary ability with political activity and was a Nationalist and a member of the Young Ireland party. George Moore was educated at Oscott College near Birmingham, studied art in Paris and early gave proof that his father's taste for letters had descended to him. He has produced some twenty books, including, besides fiction, verse, drama, and criticism, and though conventional English critics and timid managers of circulating libraries at first refused to accept his works, he has long been recognized as one of the greatest living writers of fiction. In his ' Confessions of a Young Man' he early showed himself a worshiper of Shelley, and it was he who introduced to English readers several of the writers who created the symbolist movement in French literature, notably Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Verlaine, Jules Laforgue, Gustave Kahn and Stephane Mal- larme He has also written perhaps the two best essays in English on Balzac, the greatest of French novelists, and on Turgueneff, the great Russian novelist. His first two books were verse, ' Flowers of Passion ' (1877) and ' Pagan Poems' (1881). These were followed by ' A Modern Lover' (1883), 'A Mummer's Wife' (1884), 'Literature at Nurse, or Circulating Morals' (1885), in which he threw down the challenge to Messrs. Mudie and Smith of circulating-library fame, that the support of the libraries was not vital to his existence as an author ; ' A Drama in Muslin' (1886), ' Parnell and his Island' (1887), ' A Mere Accident' (1887), ' Confessions of a Young Man ''(1888), largely a history of his opinions and in part biographical; ' Spring Days' (1888), ...« less