The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
According to an ancient tradition, the Roman authorities banished St John the Divine to the island of Patmos because they were quite unable to kill him.
In the Revelation of St John, the ‘beloved disciple’ tells us that he spent some time on the island of Patmos in the Aegean Sea. A tradition going back to Tertullian (155-220) says that John was banished there in 92 after frustrating the State’s attempt to execute him for his Christian beliefs. Pioneering English printer William Caxton translated the tale for his edition of The Golden Legend, published in 1483-84.
In 1607, settler Captain John Smith was captured by the Algonquin near the English colony at Jamestown, and watched his captors’ ceremonies with rising anxiety.
In 1607, English settlers founded a colony called Virginia on the east coast of North America, and established Jamestown in honour of King James I (r. 1603-1625). Settler John Smith (1580-1631), telling the story of the colony, recorded that in December that year he was captured by the Algonquin and would have been summarily executed, but for the intervention of a young girl.
After the Lion cracks down on horns right across his kingdom, a nervous Hare gets to wondering exactly what counts as a horn.
The following fable was applied by Sir Thomas More, Henry VIII’s Lord Chancellor, to the danger posed by Governments that police what we are allowed to say. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what you actually do say: what matters is what those in authority decide you have said.
At the Berlin Congress of Powers in 1878, the draft of the Prime Minister’s keynote speech had his anxious aides scuttling about like ants.
On July 13th, 1878, statesmen gathered in Berlin for a Congress of Powers amid high tensions. The Germans had recently invaded France, Russia was demanding Turkey respect the rights of Christians and Turkey was stoking British fears that Russia meant to invade India. Much rested on the tact of Britain’s Prime Minister, Lord Beaconsfield — which was just what his aides were afraid of.
When the angels rebelled against their Maker, they demanded a kingdom of their own in a land without him — and he gave them what they wanted.
In the Anglo-Saxon poem Genesis, we have heard how God created angels to serve him in glory, and how one — dearly beloved, and the mightiest — roused others to bring war against their Maker, craving thrones and servants of their own. The rebels were thrust forth from heaven, but worse awaited them: for a weak and inferior creature called Man was to take their place.
When Joseph Paxton, then just twenty-three, came to Chatsworth as Head Gardener he wasted no time getting settled in.
Joseph Paxton, one of Victorian Britain’s most celebrated men, designed the Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition of 1851, gave the world its most popular banana, the Cavendish, and for thirty-two years cared for the superb gardens of his employer, William Cavendish, 6th Duke of Devonshire, at Chatsworth House in Derbyshire. The two were firm friends, and the Duke remembered clearly how it all began.