The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
It began to look as if Abraham Thornton might go down for rape and murder, so his attorneys dug deep into their bag of legal tricks.
In August 1817, Abraham Thornton was charged with the rape and murder of pretty and vivacious Mary Ashford. His lawyers cobbled together a shaky alibi, and the jury, not wishing to risk hanging an innocent man, acquitted him. Public outrage prompted the Home Secretary to let Mary’s brother William appeal the decision, and it was then that Thornton’s lawyers made a jaw-dropping application.
The authors of the ‘Cato Letters’ recalled how Greek general Timoleon replied when the people he had saved from oppression turned and bit him.
In one of their ‘Cato Letters’ (1720-23), John Trenchard MP and Thomas Gordon praised Roman Emperors Nerva and Trajan for dismissing the spies and informers hitherto used to gag critics of State policy; and they recalled how Timoleon, the Greek general who toppled dictators for a living, had never felt more proud than when the Opposition slandered him in Parliament.
Joseph Addison tells the legend of the great Greek poetess Sappho and the Lover’s Leap.
Sappho was born in about 612 BC on the island of Mytilene (Lesbos), and became one of the great love poets of ancient Greece. She belonged to an intimate sorority dedicated to Aphrodite and the Muses; she had a daughter named Clëis; and she had three brothers. Few other facts are known. Even the tale of her death is a melodramatic legend; but it has furnished us with the ‘lover’s leap’.
Benjamin Franklin recalls the disciplines he put himself through on the way to becoming one of America’s literary giants.
Ben Franklin’s father, to head him off from going to sea, apprenticed him at twelve to his elder brother James, a printer in Boston, Massachusetts. Eager to improve his command of prose writing, Ben entered into an informal writing competition with another boy from his neighbourhood, John Collins, on the subject of women’s education; but this only made him acutely aware of his shortcomings.
Despite failing health, Peter the Great of Russia leapt into Kronstadt Bay to save some young sailors from a watery grave.
By the autumn of 1724, kidney disease was exaggerating Emperor Peter the Great’s contradictions. Fleeting bursts of ill-temper had settled into peevish melancholy; he had fallen out with his mentor Alexander Menshikov; he had quitted his palace to live in a wooden cottage; and exhausting days of duty merged into exhausting nights of wine. But in a crisis, the old Peter was still there.
Thomas Pitt’s tenure as Governor of Madras was regarded as a golden age, but what he is remembered for is his diamond.
The East India Company was founded late in the reign of Elizabeth I (r. 1558-1603) to explore the possibilities of overseas trade. By the 1670s, the Company had secured a legal monopoly on English trade in India, but some free spirits chose to go into business for themselves. In 1926, a historian modestly calling himself ‘an Indian Mahomedan’ told us about one of them: Thomas Pitt.