The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
A young Nathaniel Hawthorne recalls a confidential conversation with a tired old horse.
On June 1st, 1816, Robert Hawthorne presented his nephew Nathaniel, a month shy of his twelfth birthday, with a diary ‘with the advice that he write out his thoughts, some every day, in as good words as he can’. It was in this diary that Nathaniel recalled running across an underfed working horse, agonisingly forced to listen as his master ground delicious corn at nearby Dingley mill.
Robert Tomson was a typical Englishman and it nearly killed him, but it also made him a fortune and won him a bride.
In a prestigious lecture on the English national character in Oxford, historian Mandell Creighton developed the theme that unlike our European neighbours we don’t much care what others think of us. Sometimes this is good, sometimes bad and sometimes, as in the case of sixteenth-century emigrant Robert Tomson, both.
We English would not hand out so much unsolicited advice to foreign countries if we knew more about their history.
In a lecture entitled ‘The English National Character’ historian Mandell Creighton argued that the English were the first to create for themselves a national character, standing aloof from the debates and upheavals of the Continent and muddling along in our own way. Over the years, this had made the English into one of the great nations of the world, but it had also made us insensitive and frankly very annoying.
Felicia Skene recalls the Easter celebrations on one emotionally-charged night in Athens
Felicia Skene, remembered today chiefly for her work in prison reform, lived for a time in Greece. Seven years into her residence there, she published a record of her impressions of Greece and Turkey (from which Greece had recently won independence), which included a justly celebrated description of the Easter night celebrations in Athens.
As war engulfed Europe, an Anglican bishop called on Russia to unite the world’s Christians around their veneration for the Bible.
The reign of Edward VII (1901-1910) brought a thaw in relations between Britain and Russia, and when the Great War broke out in 1914, the two nations were allies on the battlefield. A year later, Bishop Bury (who had recently visited Russia) urged his fellow Anglicans to look to Moscow as their most natural ecumenical partner too.
Taking the trouble to express ourselves more clearly helps us to think more clearly too.
In 1783, after serving for twenty-one years as Edinburgh University’s first Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, Hugh Blair retired, and immediately published a collection of his lectures. No. XII dealt with the structure of sentences, and urged readers to take time over their sentence-making because disciplined writers make more disciplined thinkers.