The Copybook
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
Short passages for reading, drawn from history, legend, poetry and fiction.
An excited English gentleman hires a ship for a treasure-hunt, but doesn’t check his crew’s credentials.
When a treasure-map falls into his excited hands, Squire Trelawny can’t wait to go treasure-hunting on distant seas. So he hires a crew of experienced sailors, without asking what kind of ship they gained their experience on...
Lord Byron could not have hoped for a better omen in his support for the oppressed people of Greece.
George Gordon Byron, one of the greatest of all English romantic poets, died in 1824, aged just 36, in Missolonghi, Greece. Yet he played a key part in liberating Greece from almost four hundred years of oppression by the Ottoman Empire.
The cruelty of the Ottoman Turks so shocked Europe that the tide of opinion turned against them.
In 1823, early in the Greeks’ desperate fight for independence from the Ottoman Empire, English poet Lord Byron brought welcome public attention to the town of Missolonghi near Corinth just after it had endured two draining sieges. Two years later, however, the Turks came a third time.