The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Faced with a choice between silence, dungeon or exile, William Cobbett chose exile — and then had to make sense of it.
In March, 1817, English radical William Cobbett fled to the US, in the belief that he was about to arrested for his cheap, popular and highly critical digest of Parliamentary news, the Political Register. A few months later, he wrote back home to his supporters from his Long Island farm explaining how, as an expat, he would balance his divided loyalties.
Leigh Hunt looks back to a memorable event in a long life.
Leigh Hunt first published this delightful poem (which he labelled a Rondeau, though hardly in the technical sense of that term) in The Monthly Chronicle for November 1838. It was inspired by a impulsive greeting from Jane Welsh, wife of Thomas Carlyle.
On a money-spinning pilgrimage to Canterbury, a Pardoner says the quiet part out loud.
Pardoners, in pre-Reformation England, raised funds for the Pope by selling Indulgences, blessings that relieved sinners of some of the punishment they could expect to undergo in Purgatory after death. Naturally a Pardoner attached himself to the pilgrims walking to Canterbury, and he was refreshingly open about his profitable game.
A road accident made parish priest George Herbert late for his musical evening, but he was not a bit sorry.
Welshman and poet George Herbert was a country clergyman in Bemerton near Salisbury. Quiet, sensitive, and not much enamoured of the cold new Protestantism, his ministered gently to his parish until his death in 1633 at the age of just 39. Izaak Walton told this story as an illustration of the kind of man he was.
In Erewhon, apologise by saying you have the socks and everyone will understand.
You would be forgiven for thinking that our politicians today seem more sympathetic towards criminals than they do towards the sick and unemployed. In Erewhon, Samuel Butler’s dystopian Utopia, this had been enshrined as policy — which involved the Erewhonians in some ingenious evasions in order to avoid prosecution for a cold.
A much-provoked Newfoundland loses his patience.
The following story was included in a collection of anecdotes about dogs, and credited to Abraham Abell (1782-1851), a native of Cork in Ireland, member of the Royal Cork Institution, and one of the founders of the Cuvierian Society. It is told here by Edward Jesse, the man who oversaw the restoration of Hampton Court Palace and its subsequent opening to the public in 1838.