Myles Away From Dublin Read Online Free PDF Page A

great inspiration to all but he was by no means a man of affairs and often caused annoyance and irritation.
    Sean O’Casey was the centre of the greatest upheaval. After the great success of Juno had established him, The Plough and the Stars led to disorders and near-riots very reminiscent of Synge’s Playboy opening. But when the Abbey Board rejected the Silver Tassie ,the row and recriminations were immense and led to O’Casey’s self-imposed exile. Yet nobody could quarrel with Lady Gregory herself, not even O’Casey.
Some People
    There are many intimate little portraits of famous people who were Lady Gregory’s friends – Bernard Shaw, Sir Horace Plunkett, Lady Ardilaun, Gogarty, A. E. Martyn, George Moore, James Stephens and many others. It is perhaps no coincidence that they were all not only talented but also very decent people, for it is impossible to imagine Augusta permitting herself to associate with wrong types. She had a sense of humour, too, and is quite funny about the take-over of the Viceregal Lodge, the arrival of Tim Healy and the succession in due time of the MacNeills.
    I never met Lady Gregory but some six or seven years ago I accompanied Michael Scott, the architect, to Coole; he had been retained to design a plaque for Yeats’s Norman Tower at Ballylee, hard by. We visited Coole itself, now in the hands of the Land Commission. The wooded approach drive is magnificent but of Lady Gregory’s beloved mansion not one trace remains.

Some big blunders in literature
    The father of Benjamin D’Israeli, later to become the Earl of Beaconsfield, was Isaac D’Israeli, with the lifespan of 1766–1848. He was a writer and much interested in a subject he called literary history; his reading was vast, his gift for languages exceptional, and his erudition well-founded and deep. Apart from some novels and poems, his best-known work was Curiosities of Literature which was issued in several parts between 1791 and 1834: it is a veritable treasure-home of what is odd, comic and fascinating.
    On a book-barrow I have come on one of the volumes of some 550 pages published in 1839 and today I think I could do worse than purloin some of the facts he has collected under the title of Literary Blunders. At least I will not be infringing his copyright.
Credulous Readers
    The cynicism and doubts of our own age did not exist in Isaac’s day. When Dante’s Inferno was published it was widely accepted as a true narrative of the poet’s descent into hell. Similarly when Sir Thomas More’s Utopia appeared, nearly everybody believed that this visionary republic really existed, thought the book was genuine history and a movement was set on foot to send missionaries there to convert so wise a people to Christianity.
    A certain clownish writer named Dr Campbell published an ingenious work named Hermippus Redivuvus which pretended to be a treatise on hermetic philosophy and universal medicine. So well did he maintain his portentous style, that several educated people were taken in.
    He argued that human life could be prolonged by inhaling the breath of young women. Another physician who had himself written learnedly on health matters, eagerly accepted this new doctrine to the extent of taking lodgings in a ladies’ boarding school so that he could have the students’ breath in abundant supply, and many other people took similar steps.
    A commentator named Fabiani, quoting a French account of travels in Italy, mistook for the name of the author these words he found at end of title-page Enrichi de deux Listes (or ‘Enriched with two lists’). He wrote: ‘That Mr Enriched with two lists has not failed to do justice to Ciampini’ – a district he had visited.
The Unperceiving Clergy
    Our anecdotal archivist Isaac, whose family were Jews from Venice, quite often found part of his fun in the writings and doings of ministers of the Christian Church. There is however no rancour in his discoveries. Some of the monks of