CONTENTS
It isn't this time of year at all!
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Author: St. John Gogarty Oliver(1878-1957)
Year: 1954
Mahaffy* was the greatest don I ever met... He was as omniscient as the scholarship and science of his day permitted... It is related how one night the dons of the college conspired to get the great man on some subject on which he was not an authority and so could not talk. After a consultation they selected Chinese music as the subject that they would bring up, as it were, accidentally at dinner. They discoursed on Chinese music, traced its origin and its effect, and expounded the difference in the Chinese conception of music and the European attitude. Mahaffy said not a word. The dons, inwardly delighted, kicked each other under the table. When they had exhausted the subject, Mahaffy said, "Gentlemen, you have fallen into two errors that I myself nearly fell into, and you know how I hate to do anything foolish, when I wrote the article which you have been discussing for the Encyclopaedia Britannica twenty years ago."
* Sir J.P.Mahaffy (1839-1919), Provost of Trinity College Dublin. "A remarkably versatile writer of great shrewdness and sagacity." (D.N.B.)
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