637
A much-travelled Spanish visitor amazes an English audience with his tales of wonder overseas, until he is brought up short by his servant.
As a young man, James Howell (?1594-1666) had toured extensively abroad and studied several foreign languages. In 1642, his lavish tastes landed him in the Fleet prison for debt, and there he began to write professionally; that same year, he published a handbook on travel, in which he made a little digression on the subject of the tales travellers tell on their return.
Picture: © Gillian Thomas, Geograph. Licence: CC BY-SA 2.0.. Source.
Posted May 25 2020
638
On Easter night, monk Reginald woke from a doze to find the aged hermit Godric singing lustily.
St Godric of Finchale (?1065-1170) was a bed-ridden invalid near the end of a long and eventful life when Reginald, a monk from the nearby Durham Abbey, went to see him in his hermitage in a bend of the River Wear. It was a Saturday, the night before Easter Day. Back in the Abbey church, the monks were eagerly awaiting the sunrise, but Reginald had dozed off.
Picture: From Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.
Posted May 22 2020
639
William Cowper’s peace was shattered by the arrival of a Parliamentary candidate doorstepping his Buckinghamshire constituents.
In December 1783, after losing the American colonies to independence, King George III sacked the Government and appointed 24-year-old William Pitt as Prime Minister; on March 25th, a Parliament in uproar was dissolved in readiness for a general election. Just days later, William Grenville MP came calling on William Cowper — somewhat uncomfortably, as Grenville supported Pitt and Cowper did not.
Picture: By John Hoppner (1758-1810), from the National Portrait Gallery via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain (?). Source.
Posted May 18 2020
640
In ‘Familiarity Dangerous,’ poet William Cowper tells a little tale warning that if you join in the game you play by the rules.
William Cowper was very much a cat person, so naturally these lines from the Latin of Vincent Bourne (1695-1747), who had been on the staff at Westminster School when Cowper was a pupil there, appealed to him. A kitten reminds us that if you want to be one of the gang it has got to be on their terms.
Picture: © Petrb, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0.. Source.
Posted May 16 2020
641
Sir William Hunter looks back over a Government committee’s plan to introduce tea cultivation to India in 1834.
The British drink almost 36 billion cups of tea each year, a trend set by King Charles II’s Portuguese wife, Queen Catherine. The tea itself came exclusively from China, which by the early Nineteenth Century had become a cause for concern. What if China were to close her ports to Europe, as neighbouring Japan had done? So the Government set up a Tea Committee.
Picture: © Arne Hückelheim, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0.. Source.
Posted May 13 2020
642
In the days of King James I, Thomas Coryat visited Italy and came home with an affected Continental habit: eating with a fork.
When Peter Damian, Bishop of Ostia, learnt that the late Maria Argyropoulaina (?-1007), daughter-in-law to the Doge of Venice, had eaten with a little fork rather than her fingers, he denounced it as unnatural. But on a tour of Italy in 1608, Englishman Thomas Coryat found that forks were now everyday items, and he even brought the fashion back home.
Picture: By James Gillray (1756-1815), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.
Posted May 9 2020