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 little fable about a cat, a chicken and some wasted words.
Russian fabulist Ivan Andreyevich Krylov published his first collection of tales in 1809. More fables followed, and he became something of a celebrity, who was friendly with Emperor Nicholas I. Krylov was one of a handful of literary figures honoured with a place on the Millennium of Russia monument in Veliky Novgorod, unveiled in 1862.
In August, 1775, King George III responded to the news of rebellion in the American colonies.
On April 19th, 1775, British troops confronted an uprising of American colonists in Lexington and in Concord, Massachusetts, and the American War of Independence began. Many at home urged the Government to come to some mutually acceptable compromise, but on August 23, King George III of England issued orders for a clampdown on all support for the rebels.
If he is going to drop him, the embattled poet would prefer his friend to get on with it.
Sonnet 90 finds the narrator expecting that ‘the fair youth’, a rather worthless young man whom he nevertheless idolises, is going to drop the acquaintance. His only concern is to make his thoughtless friend understand that, given the other pressures the poet is under right now, if it were done when ’tis done, then ’twere well it were done quickly.
We all want our politicians to be clever men, but being cunning isn’t the same as being wise.
Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke, declared himself one of the Country Party, a loose and cross-bench federation of MPs speaking up (so they said) for the country as a whole, and not only for the elite only. In 1738, he wrote The Idea of a Patriot King for the benefit of Frederick, Prince of Wales, in which Bolingbroke distinguished between two kinds of politician.
The best holidays are the ones that make us long for home.
A. G. Gardiner was a columnist for the Star (later absorbed into the Daily Mail) during and after the Great War, under the pseudonym of ‘Alpha of the Plough’. The following extract opened a piece titled “On Coming Home”, in which he reflected on what it is that makes for a really good holiday.
Thomas Huxley believed that if schools did not ground their pupils in common sense, life’s examinations would be painful.
In an address to the South London Working Men’s College in 1868, new Principal Thomas Huxley attempted to define a liberal education. As befitted a friend of Charles Darwin, he spoke in terms of Nature’s university. She has enrolled us all in it, but she provides no lectures; so if we want to pass her stern examinations, we had better find out what to expect.