Character and Conduct
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Character and Conduct’
A mysterious knight and an equally mysterious outlaw agree to preserve one another’s incognito.
The Black Knight has liberated the wounded Ivanhoe and his friends from Torquilstone, the castle of wicked Norman baron Reginald Front-de-Boeuf. Assistance came from an outlaw and his band of merry men, and though the two heroes each suspect they have penetrated the other’s disguise, they agree to drop the potentially embarrassing subject.
The colourful Foreign Secretary humbly accepted a lesson in manners from a local tradesman.
Charles James Fox (1749-1806) was a larger-than-life statesman in the time of King George III. He supported the revolutionaries of France and America, frequently changed political sides, kept a mistress (whom he secretly married in 1795), gambled to excess, and campaigned against slavery – a maddening blend of rascal and man of honour.
King Saul’s jealousies drove those who loved him away, but David was a very different kind of leader.
Before he became Israel’s King, David was a loyal servant of King Saul and a close friend of Saul’s son, Jonathan. But Saul’s impetuous jealousies made him see treachery at every turn, just when Israel needed unity against the invading Philistines. David was another kind of leader entirely — as this little tale shows.
A Danish soldier in the seventeenth century imposes the severest sentence he can think of.
Flensburg is now in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein, but until 1864 it was Flensborg, an important harbour town in the Kingdom of Denmark. At one time, brewing was a major industry, and if this story is to be believed, to be deprived of a drop of Flensborg beer was as much as man could bear.
However obscure a man may apparently be, his example to others inevitably shapes the future of his country.
In his famous ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ Thomas Gray lamented that lives of obscure people blossom only to ‘waste their sweetness on the desert air’. Samuel Smiles, by contrast, used a military analogy to argue that the everyday sacrifices made by ordinary people have far-reaching effects on the country.
It is not educational institutions and methods that advance science or the arts, but people.
Holding a degree or some other officially-recognised paper qualification is not really a guarantee of very much; as Samuel Smiles repeatedly observed, there is no substitute for hands-on experience, the quirks of an interesting personality, and sheer determination.