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 his first night in a school dorm, Arthur dared not do anything without seeking approval — with one exception.
Dr Thomas Arnold, the (real life) headmaster of Rugby School, has decided that it would settle Tom Brown down to be given some responsibility; so he has asked Tom to take a rather delicate new boy, thirteen-year-old Arthur, under his wing. Tom is called to action from Arthur’s first night in the dormitory.
A thief was reluctantly obliged to relieve King George II of his valuables.
In addition to playing cricket for the MCC, Charles Greville kept a diary. When it came out in 1874, it drew alarm and outrage from the highest in the land, but the public loved it, not for any salacious gossip (which Greville shunned) but for the intimate insight into English society and policy that each scene gave them. This anecdote of George II is as curious as any.
Mousetraps are proof of human ingenuity, but also human ingratitude — so Tom does something about it.
In 1753, the house of inventor John Kay was trashed by weavers who feared that his ‘flying shuttle’ machine would put them out of work. Tom, hero of the satire The Life and Adventures of a Cat, published anonymously in 1760, felt the same way about mousetraps, and was just as willing to act.
A memorable poem about triumph over adversity.
At twelve, William Henley was diagnosed with tuberculosis. He lost one leg below the knee to the disease in 1868-69, and spent 1873-75 in an Edinburgh infirmary under Joseph Lister’s care. The battering experience drew from Henley one of the most quotable poems in our language, later dedicated to the memory of his friend Robert Hamilton Bruce.
Jacques Cartier made history and made friends along the St Lawrence, but then threw all that goodwill away.
In the Spring of 1535, French explorer Jacques Cartier sailed up the St Lawrence River (so he named it) to Stadacona, near what would soon after become Quebec, and then further upriver to Hochelaga, which he named Montreal. Everything went well until winter came, for which the French were hopelessly unprepared.
Francis Bain’s alternative Adam and Eve story left its own question unanswered.
This ‘Indian fable’ is Indian only in the sense that Francis Bain was a professor of history at Deccan College in Pune when he wrote it. He sprinkled it with evocative images gathered from the Vedas, and claimed he had translated it from an ancient Sanskrit manuscript entrusted to him by a dying Brahman. Whether Bain expected anyone to believe him is unclear, but quite a few people did.