Extracts from Literature
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Extracts from Literature’
Magnus, Earl of Orkney, disappointed King Magnus of Norway by refusing to get involved in somebody else’s war.
In 1098, Magnus III ‘Barelegs’, King of Norway, swept across the Scottish islands, reminding their governors that these territories belonged to the crown of Norway. Three brothers of Orkney, the earls Erlend, Magnus and Hakon, were obliged to accompany him as his fleet sailed west and then south down to Wales, where King Magnus barged into a fight between peoples who owed him no loyalty at all.
A herd of goats is threatened by a pride of lions, and it falls to one brave billy to face the danger alone.
PV Ramaswami Raju published a collection of Indian Fables in 1887, shortly after he was called to the Bar and while he was teaching Indian languages at Oxford University and later at London. His fables are a creative blend of tradition and imagination: this one tells how one wily old goat saved the whole herd with an audacious bluff.
In this fable from India, a sly little insect teaches a jackdaw that all that glisters is not necessarily edible.
William Cowper’s ‘The Nightingale and the Glow-Worm’ told how a glow-worm persuaded a hungry bird to spare his life because light and song complement each other so beautifully. In the following Indian fable by Ramaswami Raju (playwright, London barrister and Oxford professor of Telugu), the hard-pressed glow-worm does not have such dainty material to work with.
Pliny was only about nine when his uncle left to go and help rescue the terrified townspeople of Pompeii and Herculaneum.
On August 24th, 70, Mount Vesuvius on the Bay of Naples began to erupt. Pliny, a nine-year-old boy doing his homework in nearby Miseno, watched his uncle Pliny, the admiral, sail off to the disaster zone; later he learnt that Uncle Pliny had parted from the other boats to go and rescue Senator Pomponianus in Stabiae.
John Wesley urged the medical profession (and his fellow clergy) to remember that drugs are not the answer to every sickness.
On Saturday May 12th, 1759, John Wesley was in Whitehaven, on the coast of Cumbria. That evening, he left himself a reminder in his daily Journal never to try to get there via the coast road: the inland trip by Kendal and Keswick was longer but quicker. He then fell to musing on a lady he had spoken to recently, who suffered from a persistent stomach ailment.
William Cowper told Lady Hesketh about a walk beside the river at Olney, and the affecting behaviour of his spaniel Beau.
In June 1788, William Cowper wrote to his friend Lady Hesketh about a remarkable act of devotion from his spaniel Beau. It all happened when Cowper, who now lived a rather retired life owing to his shattered nerves, was taking a break from his books with a walk by the River Great Ouse near Olney in Buckinghamshire. The following month he cast the tale into verse.