The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
During a severe sickness, John Donne, Dean of St Paul’s, asked of God three boons.
John Donne had been a soldier and assistant to prominent lawyer Sir Thomas Egerton; but James I encouraged him to be ordained in the Church of England, and in 1621 he was appointed Dean of St Paul’s in London. A life-threatening bout of illness in 1623 caused him to reflect deeply and not a little anxiously on where he stood with God.
In time of crisis, so the legend goes, Sir Francis Drake will come to our aid again, as once he did against the Spanish Armada.
Drake’s Drum is a snare drum painted with the arms of Sir Francis Drake, which went with him on his historic voyage around the world in 1577-80. It is said that before his death, he instructed his heirs to keep it safe at Buckland Abbey, his family home in Devon, and promised that if ever England were under threat the people should beat the drum, and he would return. The drum survives to this day.
Ralph Waldo Emerson traced a common thread running throughout English literature.
In English Traits (1856), American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson set himself to examine what it was that made English literature so characteristically English. He came to the conclusion that it was a fondness for robust, grounded language, and for descriptions and ideas that were similarly plain and unaffected.
Charles Dickens set his historical novel A Tale of Two Cities (1859) in the French Revolution seventy years before, but it was far from the dead past to him.
The opening lines of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities are among his most famous. He creates a sense of breathless and surging emotion; he encourages the reader to think of the past as a living, throbbing present; and he reminds us that the present too may stand on the brink of sudden and violent change. The chapter is quite long, but cleverly written and, especially with a few notes, very enlightening.
According to Kipling, the British Empire was the last resort of Englishmen who could not stand conditions at home.
In a speech to the Royal Society of St George in April 1920, Rudyard Kipling took issue with Sir John Seeley’s by then famous dictum that ‘we seem to have conquered and peopled half the world in a fit of absence of mind’. After rehearsing a catalogue of meddlers and oppressors, foreign and domestic, from the Romans to Cromwell, Kipling declared that the men who made the Empire had a very clear purpose: to get away from England.
Salesman Richard Cobden wondered why his employers left a full warehouse in his hands without any kind of security.
Richard Cobden, the great liberal statesman, began with few advantages in life. His father, a bankrupt Sussex farmer, handed him over to relatives, who hastily packed the ten-year-old boy off to a Yorkshire boarding school — a veritable Dotheboys Hall. At fifteen, he was released from this captivity, but sweeping the floors for his rich uncle did not seem to promise much better.