"Umbles, the entrails of a deer."
Hence the point of the sarcasm "He will be made to eat humble pie;" and it serves in this instance to show that the h is silent when the word is properly pronounced.
The two words isiol and irisiol, properly uirisiol, which E. C. H. has stated to be the original Celtic words signifying humble, have quite a different meaning: for isiol is quietly, silently, without noise; and uirisiol means, sneaking, cringing, crawling, terms which could not be applied without injustice to a really humble honest person. The Iberno-Phœnician umal bears in itself evidence that it is not borrowed from any other language, for the two syllables are intelligible apart from each other; and the word can be at once reduced to its root um, to which the Sanscrit word kshama, as given by E. C. H., bears no resemblance whatever.
Fras. Crossley.
Recent Curiosities of Literature (Vol. ix., p. 31.).—Your correspondent Mr. Cuthbert Bede has done well in directing Mr. Thackeray's attention to the error of substituting "candle" for "candlestick," at p. 47. of The Newcomes; but it appears that the author discovered the error, and made a clumsy effort to rectify it; for he elsewhere gives us to understand, that she died of a wound in her temple, occasioned by coming into contact with the stone stairs. See H. Newcome's letter.
The following curiosity of literature lately appeared in the London papers, in a biographical notice of the late Viscount Beresford, which is inserted in the Naval and Military Gazette of January 14, 1854:
"Of honorary badges he had, first, A cross dependent from seven clasps: this indicated his having been present in eleven battles during the Peninsular War. His name was unaccountably omitted in the return of those present at Ciudad Rodrigo. When Her Majesty gracefully extended the honorary distinctions to all the survivors of the great war, Lord Beresford received the Peninsular medal, with two clasps, for Egypt and Ciudad Rodrigo."
The expression should have been "the silver medal," not "Peninsular;" as, among the names of battles engraved on the clasps attached to the silver war-medals, granted in 1849, will be found the words "Martinique," "Fort Détroit," "Chateauguay," "Chrystler's Farm," and "Egypt."
Juverna.
D. O. M. (Vol. iii, p. 173.).—I am surprised that there should be the least doubt that the above are the initials of "Datur omnibus mori."