The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Richard Crashaw offers the hope of eternity for wedded love.
Richard Crashaw (1613-1649) was an Anglican clergyman and scholar who was forced into exile in France in 1643 for his traditional beliefs, after Oliver Cromwell captured Cambridge in the Civil War. In this short poem, he assures us that the bond of wedded love lasts to eternity. (Crashaw is pronounced cray-shaw.)
(That’s cat-tails, obviously.) And who ever said cats were unpredictable?
Charles Fox was a Whig politician who served briefly as Foreign Secretary. A staunch opponent of King George III, he once dressed himself in the colours of the American revolutionary army. But he was also friends with Prince George, the King’s son.
The extraordinary productivity and social mobility of the Victorian era is to the credit not of the governing class, but of the working man.
Samuel Smiles inspired millions of ordinary workers to achieve their dreams. In this passage, he urges them to rely on their own strength of character rather than on the State’s empty promises.
Sending a hero off to ‘certain death’ never seems to work out...
The goddess Hera hated Heracles, so the ancient Greek myths tell, because he was one of the many love-children fathered by her consort Zeus, king of the gods of Olympus. But time after times, her efforts to destroy him were frustrated.