79
Rudyard Kipling believed that a better appreciation of ancient Greece and Rome could help the English be less insular.
As the twentieth century progressed, more and more people asked why English schools taught Latin and Greek. Rudyard Kipling was one of those who resisted the trend. The value, he said, lay not in ‘intellectual training’, which can be acquired in other ways, but in the development of humility and respect — like playing cricket long enough to realise just how good Ranjitsinhji was.
Picture: © Krzysztof Golik, Wikimedia. Commons. CC BY-SA 4.0.. Source.
Posted October 28 2024
80
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.
Picture: By William Heath (1795-1840), via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.. Source.
Posted October 27 2024
81
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.
Picture: By Robert Scott Tait (?1816-1897), Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.. Source.
Posted October 26 2024
82
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.
Picture: © Michael Garlick, Geograph. CC BY-SA 2.0.. Source.
Posted October 25 2024
83
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.
Picture: © psyberartist, Wikimedia Commons. CC BY-SA 2.0.. Source.
Posted October 22 2024
84
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.
Picture: By Max Liebermann (1847-1935), by Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.. Source.
Posted October 22 2024