Extracts from Literature
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Extracts from Literature’
There is plenty of work in the garden of England for everyone, whether he has a green thumb or not.
A School History of England (1911) was a collaboration between C. R. L. Fletcher, an Oxford historian, and Rudyard Kipling, who wrote this closing poem as a call to citizenship. The citizen he admired wasn’t the one who shouted noisily for the flag or paraded in some highly-paid profession, but the one who was quietly busy keeping the garden of England beautiful.
The Romans did bring some blessings to Britain, but none so great as the one they did not mean to bring.
In his Child’s History of England Dickens was consistently severe on the abuse of power. The Romans, who ruled here from the first century to the start of the fifth, did not escape his censure. He admitted they had exercised a degree of civilising influence, but in his judgment the most civilising influence in their time had been Christianity, for it exposed the frauds of Britain’s indigenous pagan elite, the Druids.
When William Cobbett told his son James to be conscientious about his grammar lessons, he was drawing on hard-won experience.
In one of his letters on English grammar written to his son James, William Cobbett recalled his own quest to learn French many years before. It is not enough, he said, when learning a language to flick casually through a textbook. It is necessary to take each lesson and learn it by heart with absolute precision. The labour would be well rewarded.
Ralph Waldo Emerson wondered why New Yorkers elected to Congress the kind of man they would turn out of their own homes.
American essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson was unimpressed with the quality of the Representatives that the people of New York sent to Congress. They were the kind of men most people would banish from their homes, but New Yorkers were quite happy to send them to the House if it meant their Party secured a majority and dipped into the pork barrel.
The study of history can distract us from pressing modern problems, but failing to study it is much worse.
John Buchan — novelist, wartime spymaster, and Governor-general of Canada — was also a historian in his own right, and the editor-in-chief of the multi-volume Nations of Today just after the Great War. In his introduction, Buchan picked up on George Santayana’s famous warning that ‘those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it’.
The English language is the most valuable part of our national heritage, and the patriotic citizen is careful to treat it with respect.
Hilaire Belloc ran in the same head-spinning literary company as GK Chesterton and George Bernard Shaw. In this essay, he urges us to think of the English language as our most prized possession, neither to be put under glass in a museum, nor to be mangled in the media, but used thoughtfully and responsibly, because one day it will be the only record of what kind of people the English were.