The Irish Peasant, in a long article signed ‘Pat’, on the first production of Hyacinth Halvey,† describes that play as ‘a realistic comedy of current life on a background of implicit criticism’.1 It considered that the play is an exposure of the lack of any genuine public opinion in Ireland, where ‘popularity’ is ‘the only standard of human worth’, which results in ‘all sorts of despicable characters being set upon stilts for standards’; and it winds up with ‘Did Lady Gregory intend the sermon? I think not. The thorough success of her play as a play indicates that she was concerned with the dramatic interest of her theme and nothing else, deriving her motive from the determining features of the life around her as every dramatist has a right to do’. In the performance ‘nothing is ever overdone, there is never the least appeal to the gallery, the faults are never of the fixed kind that limit progress, and there is never an attempt to magnify a part at the expense of the artistic symmetry of the whole. Accordingly the audiences most worth having in Dublin, from an artistic point of view, are to be met at the Abbey Theatre, whatever their numbers’.