The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
In Jim Baker’s considered opinion, the bluejay had a much better command of language than Mark Twain’s cats did.
While walking in the woods near Heidelberg, Mark Twain was subjected to a barrage of derisory comment by three ravens. Not that he pretended to understand their language, but he got the gist of it well enough. That set him thinking about talking animals, and remembering what grizzled Californian miner Jim Baker had once told him about the ravens’ cousin, the bluejay.
In 917, King Edward embarked on a swashbuckling tour of the midlands, and brought their towns under one crown for the first time in five hundred years.
In 917, King Edward the Elder, successor of Alfred, King of Wessex, summoned his royal troops and began a campaign to secure the loyalty of towns beyond his father’s realm, many of which had long been under Viking control. He broke first the power of Northampton and Huntingdon, followed by Colchester and Cambridge; and then it seemed as if all England opened up before him, flower-like.
In a lonely castle upon a remote island, Sir Lancelot’s wanderings brought him once more into the presence of the elusive cup of Christ’s blood.
Sir Lancelot has been searching many years for the Sangreal, the Holy Grail or cup which Christ gave to his Apostles at the Last Supper. Now he has taken ship and sailed many seas, and come at last to a lonely isle, and a castle kept only by lions as door-wardens. Entering within, he finds a brightly lit chamber, filled with heavenly song, and prays fervently to Jesus: “Show me something of that I seek!”
The tighter the US Government’s stranglehold on dissent grew, the harder Daniel Webster fought for freedom of speech.
In 1814, the USA was still embroiled in the War of 1812 with Great Britain. Many citizens of east coast States were dismayed, holding that the war was wrecking the economy for no demonstrable gain. President James Madison’s pro-France hawks in Washington responded by trying to silence critics as traitors, but young Daniel Webster, recently elected to Congress as Member for New Hampshire, was defiant.
On his way to war-torn France, William Wordsworth passed through London and was overwhelmed by the quiet of the early morning.
The following Sonnet was written, William Wordsworth recalled, “on the roof of a coach, on my way to France.” It was July 1802, and he was off with his sister Dorothy to visit his old flame Annette Vallon and their daughter Caroline; he had not seen Annette since the French Revolution had so cruelly parted them nearly ten years before. His journey from London took him across Westminster Bridge at dawn.
Edmund Burke told the House of Commons that the American colonies’ refusal to be dictated to by Westminster was the very spirit that had made the Empire great.
In 1766, Parliament truculently reasserted the right to tax and regulate Britain’s thirteen American colonies. The Americans were allowed no MPs in the Commons, but they had many friends, and barely a month before those first shots rang out in Lexington on April 19th, 1775, Edmund Burke warned the Government not to try to crush the manly English spirit that made Americans so independent.