Character and Conduct
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Character and Conduct’
Sir Edward and Lady Pellew were on their way to a dinner engagement one stormy day, when their carriage was caught up in tragedy at sea.
Edward Pellew (1757-1833), 1st Viscount Exmouth, served in the Royal Navy for fifty years, rising to the rank of Admiral and playing a leading role in the American Revolutionary War, the French Revolutionary Wars and the Napoleonic Wars. He is remembered for several acts of courage, such as the occasion when he rescued some five hundred passengers from a wreck off Plymouth Hoe during a violent storm.
On a visit to an English parish church, American author Washington Irving was treated to an eye-opening contrast between Georgian society’s Old Money and her New.
In 1815, Washington Irving came over to England from the United States of America in a vain effort to rescue the family’s transatlantic trading business, a casualty of the War of 1812. Eager to get the measure of his new neighbours, he attended church one Sunday in an English village, and what he saw confirmed a theory he had been nursing for some time.
William Burdon gives us a character sketch of his friend the ‘Count’, who did not let his small stature cramp his style or narrow his mind.
Joseph Boruwlaski, who was originally from Halicz (then in Poland, now in the Ukraine), settled in Durham after years of touring Europe as a violinist, an entertainer and frankly a curiosity, for he was barely thirty-nine inches high. William Burdon offered to help him financially but Joseph would not hear of it as his modest needs were by now satisfied — which Burdon would have thought typical of the man.
A veteran of the Battle of Salamanca in 1812 was boasting of his lieutenant’s bravery when his wife sprung some unwelcome news upon him.
Joseph Boruwlaski knew how it felt to be ever on the edge of bankruptcy. Barely thirty-nine inches in stature, he had relied for over seventy years on the generosity (and curiosity) of noble and royal patrons, and on fees earned from the violin concerts he gave across Europe. The following events, which occurred some time after the Battle of Salamanca in 1812, therefore touched him deeply.
Sir Richard Steele takes up arms against the kind of wit who thinks you can be as nasty as you like provided you make people laugh.
One day, a shy young man addressed a stranger and was handed a withering put-down. A thoughtless onlooker was highly amused, but Richard Steele was full of righteous indignation. You may mock mankind, he said, but not men; never take aim at the weak, and never be witty in anger. And he fell to musing on what makes a good satirist.
Social niceties are essential for the smooth operation of society, but neither boxing a man’s ears nor calling in the lawyers will bring them back.
Shortly after the Great War, a haughty customer entered a lift and barked ‘Top!’ Moments later he came tumbling out, ejected by the attendant on the grounds that he would not say ‘please’. A. G. Gardiner, who had watched in fascination, felt some sympathy for the lift-man, but feared the consequences for society if we began to think each man had a right to avenge every affront to his sensibilities.