Later Life
Birrell did not defend his seat in the 1918 general election, nor did he ever return to Ireland. In 1929, he accepted an honorary doctorate from the National University of Ireland, but storms in the Irish Sea prevented him from making the crossing and he had to receive his degree in absentia. He returned to literature with a further volume of essays and book reviews, More Obiter Dicta (1920) and a book on his father-in-law, Frederick Locker-Lampson. He died in London on 20 November 1933, aged eighty-three. His autobiography, Things Past Redress was published posthumously.
Read more about this topic: Augustine Birrell
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“Measure your health by your sympathy with morning and spring. If there is no response in you to the awakening of nature—if the prospect of an early morning walk does not banish sleep, if the warble of the first bluebird does not thrill you—know that the morning and spring of your life are past. Thus may you feel your pulse.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“All my life I have lived and behaved very much like [the] sandpiper—just running down the edges of different countries and continents, “looking for something” ... having spent most of my life timorously seeking for subsistence along the coastlines of the world.”
—Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979)