The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Walter Hartright tried to help a distressed woman find her way into London, but the incident has left him with nagging doubts.
Walter Hartright has gone for a walk, daydreaming about his promised new job as drawing master to the Fairlie family in Limmeridge, Cumberland. His reverie was broken by a young woman in evident distress asking the way into London, whom he saw off in a cab; but her restless manner, her peculiar questions, and the astounding coincidence that she had once lived in Limmeridge, have all left him uneasy.
After driving the man-eating ogre Grendel from Hrothgar’s hall, Beowulf must now deal with Grendel’s anguished and vengeful mother.
Beowulf has driven Grendel, the man-eating ogre, from Hrothgar’s hall and mortally wounded him. Thinking his mission complete, Beowulf took his leave of Hrothgar, only for the creature’s anguished mother to steal into the king’s hall and snatch his bosom friend in revenge. Now she has vanished beneath the waters of a mire, but Beowulf is not to be put off. Commending his soul to God, Beowulf leaps after her.
The terrible monster Grendel, secure in the knowledge that no blade can bite him, bursts into Hrothgar’s hall expecting another meal of man-flesh.
The lordly Hall of Hrothgar, King of the Danes, has been plagued night after night by a grotesque creature named Grendel. Offspring of Cain through many wretched fathers, he dwelt in swamps, feeding off the flesh of men, and feared neither sword nor spear. But tonight, Beowulf and his Swedish warrior-band have answered Hrothgar’s call for aid; and lying on soft pelts and rugs, they wait in uneasy slumber.
Henry VII made sure that he had eyes and ears wherever they were needed to put an end to thirty years of political conspiracy.
King Henry VII, so Sir Francis Bacon tells us, aspired to be held in awe by his subjects, rather than in love. To this end he employed spies not only in the courts of his European neighbours but also in England, and kept abreast of all that was going in his own court by compiling private notebooks in which the words and deeds of every courtier were carefully recorded.
In the days of Henry VIII, eminent Scottish historian John Major looked back to the reign of Richard the Lionheart and sketched the character of legendary outlaw Robin Hood.
In his Historia Majoris Britanniæ (1521), the eminent Scottish historian John Major (1467-1550) reflected at length on the life of King Richard I. Then all of a sudden he began to speak of Robin Hood (or Robert, as he called him), thus becoming the earliest authority we have for the tradition that Robin was a contemporary of Richard and John.
King Henry VIII was riding out with Queen Catherine one May Day, when they found themselves waylaid by Robin Hood and two hundred archers.
At the close of the reign of Elizabeth I, historian John Stow (1525?-1605) looked back over the May Day celebrations in the time of her father Henry VIII. Those were the early, happier years (1515 by Stow’s reckoning) when Henry still rode out with his Spanish wife Catherine of Aragon, and before the country was thrown into turmoil and bloodshed by the English Reformation.