Character and Conduct
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Character and Conduct’
Some wanted Britain on a path to being a thoroughly European nation, but William Monypenny wanted her at the world’s crossroads.
William Monypenny, a journalist with the Johannesburg ‘Star’ and the London ‘Times’, held that Britain had a responsibility to remain a country at the crossroads, aloof from the ideological extremism of her European neighbours, steadied and balanced by truly global ties of family, trade and culture.
William Gladstone urges Government not to take away from people the things they have a right to do for themselves.
In 1889, at the opening of Reading and Recreation Rooms at the Saltney Literary Institute in Cheshire, Prime Minister William Gladstone spoke warmly of the benefits of lifelong, self-directed education for the working man, and warned against letting Government take it over.
Sir Walter Scott tells the story of how a distinguished Scottish professor nearly became Little John to Scotland’s Robin Hood.
Early in the Jacobite Rising of 1715, Rob Roy MacGregor and his band of rebels marched into Aberdeen, and Rob called to see Professor Gregory, a kinsman and a distinguished Professor of Medicine. He hoped to enlist his support for a cause which, whatever its merits, was open treason — and to enlist his little son, James, too.
Sir Walter Scott takes his daughter Sophia to see the newly-rediscovered Honours of Scotland, and suffers an embarrassment.
In 1817, the Prince Regent appointed a Commission to search the Crown Room of Edinburgh Castle for records of Scotland’s crown jewels, unseen since the Act of Union in 1707. Sir Walter Scott had been a prime mover in the campaign and was one of the Commissioners, but not all his fellows felt the sacredness of their quest.
Sir Walter Scott described how the long-forgotten crown jewels of the Scottish Kings came to light again.
After the Union of Scotland and England in 1707, Scotland’s crown jewels were locked away in Edinburgh Castle. Almost at once, the Jacobites who so bitterly opposed the Union began spreading rumours that the ‘Honours of Scotland’ had been stolen, and in 1794 King George III sent a party up to Edinburgh to prove them wrong.
From the very first lines, Jane Austen’s classic novel ‘Pride and Prejudice’ pokes affectionate fun at Georgian England.
The opening lines of Jane Austen’s ‘Pride and Prejudice’ (1813) are arguably the best-loved in all English fiction. In the drawing-room of Longbourn, a gentleman’s residence near the Hertfordshire village of Meryton, pretty but empty-headed Mrs Bennet is all of a flutter because there is a new neighbour in Netherfield Park.