Myles Away From Dublin Read Online Free PDF

yesteryear were rather ignorant and one of Isaac’s stories concerns a legal row a certain pastor had with his parishioners concerning the responsibility for paying the cost of paving the church. The priest went to the reputed writings of St Peter and quoted the phrase Paveant illi , non paveam ego. He thought this meant ‘They are to pave the church, not I.’ In fact the Latin verb paveo means ‘I am trembling from terror’ and has nothing whatever to do with paving.
    Collie Cibber wrote a play he called Love ’ s Last Shift. It was very popular and in due course translated into French. The translator named it La Dernière Chemise de l’ Amour.
    The valued Latin writer Petronius was for many centuries famed (or notorious) for the fact that his surviving writings were fragmentary. The world of learning was startled when a professor in Lübeck got a letter from another in Bologna saying, ‘We have an  entire Petronius here ;I saw it with my own eyes.’ The Lübeck man hastened immediately to Bologna, sought out his correspondent and asked to be shown ‘the entire petronius’. He was conducted to a church and shown the body of St Petronius.
    Another writer, translating a treatise on Judaism from Latin to French, rendered Omnis bonus liber est by ‘Tout livre est bon’, a remark that would no doubt enrage our own censorship board.
Tom Brown’s Guesswork
    Still another writer named Tom Brown whom at the moment I cannot identify was translating a composition named Circe ,presumably in German, and came upon the word Starne ,the meaning of which he was not sure about. Apparently relying on the sound of the word, he translated it ‘stares’. But a later translator went to the trouble of making sure what Starne meant and found it was red-legged partridges!
    These are merely samples from Isaac D’Israeli’s essay on literary blunders but gives some idea of his tireless search for absurdity. Another day I hope to summarise his comment on other subjects, for there was apparently no limit to his choice of matters for discourse. It is a pity to find nowadays that he is out of print and quite unknown to nearly everybody.

Oh, dear me! more holidays!
    I am sure everybody knows the original link between holiday and holy day. A good few centuries before now, important Church holidays were preceded by a period of light-heartedness on the part of the faithful. It is true that the hearts got lighter than they had any right to, and the situation looks the more odd when one reflects that those customs arose a long time before anybody dreamt of conceding the working classes anything in the way of real ‘time off’.
    Not so much in Britain – and certainly not in poor Ireland – the excesses of the people on the continent in medieval times just when an important religious event was in the offing were considerable indeed, and not infrequently seriously worried the local Prince or Landgrave. Perhaps the root of the worry was not so much that they were drinking or dancing too much, or behaving riotously, but simply that they were not doing any work. What about the sowing of the harvest, the vines, or the mere mending of shoes? But the Church itself did not condemn such procedures out of hand, and over the centuries some system of accommodation was found.
    This age of ours should not be regarded, as too readily it is, as the one which invented appeasement. In what I have said above I indicate where most of us got what we call our holidays, and how this most suspicious thing started at all. Holidays in the ordinary sense are a turbulence, a disturbance, an abomination and a terrifying nuisance.
The Awful Seaside
    I suppose we all have our recollections of our earlier holidays, all bristling with horror. What about beingpacked off as toddlers to stay with the aunt for six weeks? That stern lady who made custard every day and who otherwise thought the staff of life was porridge? You remember those tyrannical obsessions about washing