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Vice is a fact of life, wrote Pope, and God can even bring good out of it; but vice is never a virtue and in tackling vice together we make our society stronger.
In his Essay on Man, Alexander Pope has been reflecting on the part played in society by folly and vice. There is vice and virtue in every man, he says, and human life is like a canvas of blended light and shade: but if vice ought to excite pity and friendship rather than judgment and anger, that should not dupe us into thinking that society can survive if we turn vices into virtues, and virtue into a vice.
Posted June 8 2021
392
The Pharisees conspire to put Jesus in a seemingly impossible situation, by inviting him to take sides in the bitter politics of Jew and Roman.
The event described here is recorded at the start of the eighth chapter of St John’s Gospel. Two questions have nagged commentators: why some very early New Testament manuscripts missed it out, and what it was that Jesus wrote in the sandy ground. Neither question has been answered to the satisfaction of everyone, but the story is one of the most universally beloved in the Gospels.
Posted June 8 2021
393
Artist Benjamin Robert Haydon laments the passing of Lord Egremont, whose generosity and good judgment reached far beyond his support for struggling artists.
George Wyndham (1751-1837), 3rd Earl of Egremont, was one of Georgian England’s wealthiest and most philanthropic of men, a patron of the arts and of industry, a responsible farmer and animal breeder. After the Earl died on November 11th, 1837, artist Benjamin Robert Haydon turned to his diary and penned a glowing tribute to a man who had given support to him and many like him in lavish measure.
Posted June 7 2021
394
A Wolf finds a series of reasons for making a meal of a little Lamb, but it turns out he did not really need them.
Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first Prime Minister, appealed to this Fable as an illustration of the way that stronger nations bully weaker ones. Like the Wolf, they justify gobbling up their neighbours by saying they are simply defending themselves and their interests, but it is superior military and economic power, not right and wrong, that decides the outcome.
Posted June 4 2021
395
Mr Squeers explains his educational philosophy to his new and bewildered assistant master at Dotheboys Hall in Yorkshire.
Mr Squeers, owner and headmaster of Dotheboys Hall near Greta Bridge in Yorkshire, has (much to the bafflement of Mrs Squeers) hired an assistant master from London, nineteen-year-old Nicholas Nickleby. The moment has now come for the new arrival to familiarise himself with a system of education designed to fit young people for the world of work — chiefly in Dotheboys Hall.
Posted June 1 2021
396
The fort at Budge Budge near Calcutta proved stubborn against the massed artillery of the East India Company, but a tipsy seaman took it all by himself.
In 1756, colonial rivalry between France and Britain sparked the Seven Years’ War. In India, France’s ally Siraj ud-Daulah, Nawab of Bengal, drove the British from Calcutta; they in turn, smarting from the infamous ‘Black Hole’ incident, sailed gunships up to the Nawab’s fort at Budge Budge, which guarded the River Hooghly. The small hours of December 30th found them snatching a little sleep prior to a dawn assault.
Posted May 24 2021