Clay Lane

The Copy Book

A Library of History and Literature in English

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271

The Goat and the Lion

A herd of goats is threatened by a pride of lions, and it falls to one brave billy to face the danger alone.

PV Ramaswami Raju published a collection of Indian Fables in 1887, shortly after he was called to the Bar and while he was teaching Indian languages at Oxford University and later at London. His fables are a creative blend of tradition and imagination: this one tells how one wily old goat saved the whole herd with an audacious bluff.

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Picture: © Samyan Bahga, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0.. Source.

272

The Glow Worm and the Jackdaw

In this fable from India, a sly little insect teaches a jackdaw that all that glisters is not necessarily edible.

William Cowper’s ‘The Nightingale and the Glow-Worm’ told how a glow-worm persuaded a hungry bird to spare his life because light and song complement each other so beautifully. In the following Indian fable by Ramaswami Raju (playwright, London barrister and Oxford professor of Telugu), the hard-pressed glow-worm does not have such dainty material to work with.

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Picture: © Forza, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0.. Source.

273

St Mary of Egypt

Back in the 6th century, Mary was consumed by an addiction so compulsive that she would use and discard anyone to satisfy it.

St Mary of Egypt was a hermit of the Holy Land who made such an impression on England that Abbot Elfric (?955-?1022) left us a lengthy sermon on her extraordinary life. Her story remained a favourite long after the Norman Conquest, and the following account comes from a Martyrology customarily read out in Syon Abbey (long vanished, a victim of the Reformation) and printed in 1526.

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Picture: © Israeli Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC-BY-SA 2.5. Source.

274

The Night Vesuvius Blew

Pliny was only about nine when his uncle left to go and help rescue the terrified townspeople of Pompeii and Herculaneum.

On August 24th, 70, Mount Vesuvius on the Bay of Naples began to erupt. Pliny, a nine-year-old boy doing his homework in nearby Miseno, watched his uncle Pliny, the admiral, sail off to the disaster zone; later he learnt that Uncle Pliny had parted from the other boats to go and rescue Senator Pomponianus in Stabiae.

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Picture: Photo by NASA, via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.

275

St John Damascene

John’s enduring influence is evident today in the rich sights and sounds of Christian liturgy.

St John Damascene (676-749) was Syrian monk and a contemporary of our own St Bede, both of them highly respected scholars with a deep love for Church music. John left us an exposition of Christian theology of enduring importance throughout east and west; he compiled a wealth of hymns, collects and prayers; and he saved Christian iconography everywhere from the hands of extremists.

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Picture: Via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: Public domain.. Source.

276

Body and Soul

John Wesley urged the medical profession (and his fellow clergy) to remember that drugs are not the answer to every sickness.

On Saturday May 12th, 1759, John Wesley was in Whitehaven, on the coast of Cumbria. That evening, he left himself a reminder in his daily Journal never to try to get there via the coast road: the inland trip by Kendal and Keswick was longer but quicker. He then fell to musing on a lady he had spoken to recently, who suffered from a persistent stomach ailment.

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Picture: By William Hamilton (1751–1801), via the National Portrait Gallery and Wikimedia Commons. Licence: ? Public domain.. Source.