The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Sir Walter Scott described how the long-forgotten crown jewels of the Scottish Kings came to light again.
After the Union of Scotland and England in 1707, Scotland’s crown jewels were locked away in Edinburgh Castle. Almost at once, the Jacobites who so bitterly opposed the Union began spreading rumours that the ‘Honours of Scotland’ had been stolen, and in 1794 King George III sent a party up to Edinburgh to prove them wrong.
Rosalind explains to Orlando that Time moves at different paces depending on who you are.
William Shakespeare’s As You Like It is believed to be the play that opened the New Globe theatre in 1599. After Frederick usurped the throne of his brother Duke Senior (so the story goes) he exiled his own daughter Rosalind for disobedience. Disguised as a boy, Rosalind fled to the Forest of Arden only to run into a long-time admirer, Orlando. To hide her confusion, and still incognito, she accosts him ‘like a saucy lackey’.
Richard Steele goes to Bath for his health, and is cured of more ailments than he had ever had in his life.
Eighteenth-century Bath was a fashionable spa city to which the Quality would retire for ‘the cure’. However, the health-giving waters were seemingly not enough by themselves, and doctors clustered round with all the medical treatments visitors could possibly want or need — plus a good many more.
Joseph Addison complains that the famous Cries of London are a lot of fuss about nothing.
‘The Cries of London’, the various musical and not-so-musical calls of street vendors in Queen Anne’s capital, were widely regarded with affection and pride. But the endless drumming of tins and kettles left Joseph Addison’s nerves raw, and the medley of slogans and doggerel verses was if anything worse.
A Portuguese merchant assesses Great Britain’s market under the Hanoverians.
Manoel Gonzales tells us that he was a native of Lisbon, educated by the Jesuits. His mother pulled him from the school on suspicion that the priests were after his inheritance, so Manoel set himself to expand his father’s business instead. On April 23rd, 1730 – St George’s Day, as he noted — Gonzales set out for Falmouth, intending to reconnoitre his chosen market.
Lord Macaulay describes the toils of a typical country gentleman visiting London in the time of Charles II.
Macaulay’s influential history of England, which first appeared in 1848, was a paean to Progress and especially to progress in Britain. By his day, London was truly England’s capital, a cosmopolitan railway hub; back in the 1660s, however, it was an island entire of itself, and any rural squire who struggled in over the dirty and rutted roads found himself in a foreign land.