The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
The defiant Mrs Partington took on the full might of the Atlantic Ocean.
In 1831, the House of Lords rejected a Bill on the reform of Parliament, sent over from the House of Commons. Sydney Smith was strongly in favour of this Bill, but told a political meeting in Taunton that he was not too worried, as the Lords had set themselves a task even harder than Mrs Partington set herself in 1824. Mrs Partington? Let the Revd Mr Smith explain...
A Welshman was not keen on handing over his employer’s money just because Tom Dorbel had a gun.
The following story was told by Captain Charles Johnson (fl. 1724-36), who is widely credited with kindling our national fascination with pirates and highwaymen. The captain tells it well but he is let down by affecting a Welsh dialect so near to being incomprehensible that I felt obliged to paraphrase the whole thing.
Sir Thomas Roe had some difficulty making an impression on Emperor Jehangir.
In 1615, English courtier Sir Thomas Roe was despatched to the court of the Great Mogul, Jehangir, to win his support for the East India Company in the face of Portuguese rivals. Roe presented the Emperor with various presents designed to impress him with the superior cultural advancement of the English, but he might have been better off keeping it simple.
Flemish merchants hoping to prosper in Russia’s commercial capital received a nasty shock.
In 1553, Richard Chancellor led an expedition to see whether the Northeast passage might be used to reach Russia, bypassing the jealous states of the Hanseatic League along the Baltic shore. The gamble paid off, and before long the English were rewarded by the chance to visit Great Novgorod, the founding city of Russia and the country’s commercial capital.
Ivan the Terrible offered free trade to English merchants throughout his dominions.
In 1553, Edward VI gave letters into the hand of Richard Chancellor, to present to the ruler of Moscow should the Englishman’s dangerous voyage of exploration through the icy waters of the northeast passage succeed. Despite grave hardships the English won through, and following year Tsar Ivan IV (‘the Terrible’) wrote a reply — unaware that Edward was dead, and Queen Mary would be reading it.
Rudyard Kipling believed that a better appreciation of ancient Greece and Rome could help the English be less insular.
As the twentieth century progressed, more and more people asked why English schools taught Latin and Greek. Rudyard Kipling was one of those who resisted the trend. The value, he said, lay not in ‘intellectual training’, which can be acquired in other ways, but in the development of humility and respect — like playing cricket long enough to realise just how good Ranjitsinhji was.