The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Juliet complains that the man she loves has the wrong name, and the man she loves hears her doing it.
One night, Romeo Montague slips into a masked ball at the Capulet residence in Verona — chasing a girl as usual. There he meets Juliet, and Rosaline is forgotten. When he learns that Juliet is the daughter of his father’s sworn enemy, he rushes from the dance, and soon afterwards we find him in the garden, thinking furiously. Suddenly he sees a light at a window above: it seems Juliet has been thinking too.
John Gay reflects that in matters of friendship, quality is preferable to quantity.
This little Fable may look like one of Aesop’s ancient morality tales but it was composed by English poet and dramatist John Gay, remembered today for his Beggar’s Opera of 1728. Gay was one of those investors caught out by the South Sea Bubble, and discovered that in Georgian London being popular with the rich and famous was by no means a guarantee against hardship.
A destitute and friendless farmer, turned from the tradesman’s entrance, tries his luck at the front door.
This poem was composed by the Revd Mr Thomas Moss, minister of Brierley Hill and Trentham in Staffordshire, and included in a collection of verses that he published anonymously in 1769. Admired for its pathos, the poem became a standard for children to memorise, in the hope of sowing the seeds of charitable feelings at an early age; consequently, it was also much parodied.
When she was ten, Catherine Morland showed none of the qualities needed to impress the ladies who read romantic fiction.
Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, published after her death in 1817, is a playful swipe at contemporary women’s fiction. She begins by warning us that Catherine Morland had not experienced the kind of childhood — marked by fragile beauty, precocious accomplishments, and sentimental attachments — that fans of romantic fiction expected in their heroines. She was, in fact, perfectly normal.
Sir Edward Leithen finds himself revising his opinion of the ‘detestable’ Koré Arabin.
Sir Edward Leithen, a forty-something lawyer of great distinction, ran across Corrie Arabin at a dance party given by his cousin-of-sorts, Mollie Nantley. ‘The girl is detestable’ was his first thought. But after Corrie — or more rightly Koré, a Greek name — turned to him for help in resolving a legal dispute with Athens, Ned’s feelings for the young woman began to change.
Ahab, his mind broken by an obsession, at last confronts the enemy he has hunted so long.
Ahab, captain of a whaling ship, has been pursuing a huge albino sperm whale he calls Moby Dick, with an ever more deranged hatred. At last he has come to close quarters: he has boarded a small a boat, harpoon at the ready, and rowed out to face the object of his obsession while sharks circle in a frenzy of anticipation. Suddenly, the whale charges headlong — not at Ahab’s boat, but at the ship.