February, 1927, Sunday 6

Went to ‘The Last Days of Pompeii’ during the week, a fine, spectacular picture with wonderful scenery and Roman buildings, but having a cast by no means as artistic or classical as that in ‘Helen of Troy’.

We have just finished Horace’s Sermonum II 6 [Satires] containing the famous parable about the mice which I consider the most charming and appealing bit of all the Latin poetry we have read. Especially the line ‘purpurea porrectum in veste locavit’ [reclining on purple covers] in reference to the ‘mus agrestis’ [field mouse]17 is killing.

We were invited to Blackrock convent for Fr. O’Flynn’s company’s presentation of ‘Hamlet’.18 It was not as well done as ‘Othello’, but the King, Ophelia, and one or two others could compare themselves with any Shakespearian actors. I learnt a lot, at any rate, from hearing the play from start to finish, having studied it jerkily at school.

Am looking forward most mightily to the summer hols, for which wonderful plans are proposed, but I know that ex reactione [by way of reaction] when the time comes, I will be so disgusted at having nothing to do as if a world of worries were gnawing at my brain. Sed sperare persequerere! [But to hope is to persevere]

  1. Mus agrestis: the field mouse, in Horace’s fable a Country Mouse visiting his sophisticated Town Mouse cousin, being seated on splendid purple covers, and given a royal feast till dogs come and rout them [↩]
  2. Father James Christopher O’Flynn (1881-1962), curate in Cork´s North Cathedral, founded the Cork Shakespearian Company in 1926, which from 1927 performed regularly at the Opera House and produced a series of renowned actors. Fr. O’Flynn developed a very effective method of curing stammering. He taught elocution in Farranferris; in 1946 he became parish priest in Passage West where he founded a children´s choir that broadcast on Radio Éireann. His mother had sung in Hans Conrad Swertz´s Cathedral choir; he studied the piano with Tilly Fleischmann for a while, argued with her husband over the merits of classical against traditional music, but was the first to visit him in the internment camp in Oldcastle in 1916. A BBC documentary film was made of him in 1961: It happened to me [↩]