The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
On realising that he had the edge on his rivals, music publisher John Brand moved quickly to secure one of Haydn’s peerless Quartets.
A contributor calling himself ‘A Constant Reader’ submitted this story to the Musical World in 1836. He declared that he could vouch for the truth of it, as he had heard it from ‘the originator,’ music publisher John Bland (1750-1840), who was still alive at the time and in a position to refute it. He never did, and the story found its way into Carl Ferdinand Pohl’s influential biography and thence into musical folkore.
While the owner is away, the men he has hired to tend his vineyard conspire to seize it for themselves.
In the Old Testament, Israel is frequently represented as a vineyard, a vineyard so mismanaged by God’s hired tenants that the grapes are small and sour: the shrivelled, acid fruit of corruption and injustice among Israel’s kings and high priests. God sent prophets to warn them; now he has sent his own son. What, Jesus asked his rapt audience, will the owner do when his tenants kill his son, too?
Agricola, tasked with subduing the people of Britain to Roman colonial government, persuaded them to wear servitude as a badge of refinement.
Gnaeus Julius Agricola took over as Roman Governor of Britannia in 78, and remained there for six very successful years. Having applied the stick, so his son-in-law Cornelius Tacitus tells us, he was eager to offer carrots: taxes were cut, corrupt officials were weeded out, and investment was poured in. The coddled and cozened tribal leaders thought they had got a fine bargain for their liberties.
Herbert Bury’s duties took him back to St Petersburg after the Russian revolution of 1917, but all he could think of was how it used to be.
On his visits to Russia in his capacity as the Church of England’s Bishop for North and Central Europe, Herbert Bury had been impressed by Emperor Nicholas II and his wife Alix (Queen Victoria’s granddaughter) and by the worship of the Russian Orthodox Church. Looking back after the unhappy revolution of 1917, one visit to St Petersburg remained with him vividly.
Piqued by the way French and German literati mocked the English, Charles Dickens urged his compatriots to be the better men.
A production of The Benefit Night at the Carl Theatre in Vienna in March 1850 introduced the character of Lord Pudding, ‘a travelling Englishman.’ His clownish antics stung Charles Dickens into protesting at the stereotypes perpetuated by Continental writers, yet he did not demand punishment. He urged the English to hop on a train, and spread a little entente cordiale.
Shortly after meeting Fanny Osbourne, Robert Louis Stevenson reflected on the different ways in which falling in love affects a man.
In 1876, Robert Louis Stevenson, who was in France for his health, met Fanny Osbourne, an American who was estranged from her serially unfaithful husband, and supporting herself and her two children by writing. For much of the following year Robert remained in France with Fanny, Isobel and Lloyd, and in 1877 published an essay titled ‘On Falling in Love’ in The Cornhill Magazine.