The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
... I heard John Wesley sing. A visitor on the quayside on Sunday May 30th, 1742, would have stumbled into a crowd agape and a determined clergyman singing psalms.
In 1742, John Wesley extended his northern preaching tour to Newcastle-upon-Tyne, a large, cramped city by the North Sea, founded on coal mining and the coal-trade of England’s east coast. Many areas were grindingly poor, and over time ignorance and want had so tightened their grip that violence and addiction kept areas such as Sandgate, down on the Quayside, utterly wretched. Naturally, it was to Sandgate that Wesley at once demanded to go.
The words of the ancient Athenian lawmaker, on the limits of legislation, sucking up to dictators, and the crime of lounging about.
In about 594-593 BC, Solon was tasked with ending civil strife in Athens. He abolished serfdom, placing the poor on a secure footing against wealthy oppressors. He facilitated inter-city trade and welcomed immigrant craftsmen, revitalising the economy. Finally, he overhauled the constitution, revoking the infamous laws of Draco and establishing a legacy that became the patrimony of classical Athens. Diogenes Laertius, writing in the early AD 200s, looked back on Solon’s career.
Many problems in life and society would be eased if we were better at reading characters — especially our own.
In 1804-06, the Revd Sydney Smith gave a series of lectures to the Royal Institution, later published as Sketches on Moral Philosophy. The lectures were aimed at a wide audience (much like Michael Faraday’s Christmas lectures there), and encouraged Smith’s naturally easy style. It was in one of these lectures that Smith gave us what is now an indispensable analogy for a misfit employee.
Governor Pitiorek assured the heir to the Austrian Empire that Bosnians rarely tried to murder the same man twice in one day.
In 1878, Serbia broke free from the Ottoman Empire, but thirty years later, Austria seized Bosnia from Serbia. The snatch was bitterly resented, and on June 28th, 1914, Bosnian Serbs could be found on the streets of Sarajevo celebrating the first anniversary of Serbia’s recovery of Kosovo from Turkish rule. It was amidst this swelling of Serbian national pride that Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir presumptive to the throne of Austria-Hungary, chose to make an official visit.
Now that King Odysseus has failed to return from the Siege of Troy, the earls of Ithaca are eager to marry his lovely widow.
Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey tells of the many adventures of Odysseus, King of the island of Ithaca in the Ionian Sea, as he returned home from the Trojan War after almost two decades away. Penelope, his grieving queen, has all but given up hope of seeing him again, and is under increasing pressure from Odysseus’s greedy earls to marry again.
Frances Colenso admired the gallantry of the men who defended the fort at Rorke’s Drift, and the restraint of the men who attacked it.
On January 22nd, 1879, some 150 British soldiers repelled an attack by several thousand Zulu warriors on a tiny garrison at Rorke’s Drift. It was a gallant action in an otherwise dubious war: the British colony of Natal had picked a quarrel with King Cetshwayo of the Zulus as an excuse to annex his realm. Frances Colenso, daughter of the Bishop of Natal, appreciated the Zulus’ restraint.