The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
An amateur composer once asked Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart how he thought of his lovely music and — for one performance only — the maestro told him.
In April 1789, Mozart quitted Vienna and embarked on a tour that took him to Prague, Berlin, Leipzig, Potsdam and Dresden. In the course of his travels he made the acquaintance of Baron V—, an amateur musician who subsequently sent him a song, a symphony and a bottle of wine. The Baron also asked him how he thought up his own wonderful music, and Mozart, most unusually, told him.
Frédéric Bastiat made a tongue-in-cheek appeal to the French government, asking them to protect candlemakers from a cut-throat competitor.
In the 1840s, powerful lobbyists managed to get most European governments to pass legislation protecting their industries from being undercut by rivals. Frédéric Bastiat held this short-sighted indulgence up to ridicule, penning a tongue-in-cheek ‘Petition’ to the Chamber of Deputies in which French candlemakers begged them to crack down on a particularly glaring example of unfair competition.
Inspired by economists in Britain, Frédéric Bastiat explained to his own Government why their initiatives to boost the economy so often fail.
So long as it makes work for the working man to do, almost any initiative will have its champions. A superfluous rail upgrade, a local government vanity project, even burglary or a war, we are reconciled to them on the grounds that ultimately they create jobs and get the economy moving. Yet as Frédéric Bastiat explained back in 1850, the thought may be comforting but it isn’t really true.
On a visit to an English parish church, American author Washington Irving was treated to an eye-opening contrast between Georgian society’s Old Money and her New.
In 1815, Washington Irving came over to England from the United States of America in a vain effort to rescue the family’s transatlantic trading business, a casualty of the War of 1812. Eager to get the measure of his new neighbours, he attended church one Sunday in an English village, and what he saw confirmed a theory he had been nursing for some time.
Educational reformer Emily Davies argued that Victorian women had more to offer society than a purely ornamental erudition.
Many social ills, wrote pioneering suffragist Emily Davies, have their origins in a lack of imagination, that gift of empathy which smooths away much of the roughness of our common life. There was more to be gained from letting a woman use her imagination as an MP, than from teaching her quadratic equations merely so she can shine more brightly at a dinner-party.