Extracts from Literature
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Extracts from Literature’
Forty thousand men, women and children, the last survivors of Japans’s persecuted Christian population, took refuge without earthly hope in a seaside castle.
In 1587, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, Regent of Japan, had vowed to stamp out Christianity after a Spanish sea-captain boasted that, to the Pope and the King of Spain, its spread was a step towards European conquest. The repression grew in savagery until, on December 17th, 1637, forty thousand Christians huddled together in the seaside fortress of Hara Castle, on the southern tip of the Shimabara Peninsula.
As a young man, surveyor Thomas Telford was a red-hot political activist who yearned for revolution, but admittedly he had read just one book on the matter.
In 1791 Norfolk-born Thomas Paine (lately of the USA), a vocal enthusiast of the French revolution, published a withering denunciation of the British constitution entitled The Rights of Man. Surveyor Thomas Telford, who was living in Shrewsbury Castle as a guest of the local MP, Sir William Pulteney, was swept away by it, and began recommending it to his friends back home in Galloway.
A Victorian artist and avid bird-watcher banished cats from his country cottage, but soon wished he hadn’t.
Harrison Weir was a Victorian artist, engraver and illustrator who specialised in drawing animals, especially songbirds. He was also mad about cats (in 1871 he organised the world’s first cat show) and assumed, naturally enough, that his two passions were incompatible. He discovered, however, that he could not have been more wrong.
Edmund Burke tore into the directors of the East India Company, accusing them of doing less for the country than India’s mediaeval conquerors.
In 1783, Edmund Burke urged the House of Commons to strip the East India Company of its administration of India, arguing that the Mughal Emperors and other foreign conquerors had done more for the people than the Company seemed likely to do. His blistering attack on the Company’s record repays reading, as it applies just as well to modern aid programmes, interventions and regime changes.
While on tour in Austria, Irish tenor Michael Kelly was introduced to Mozart, and discovered a man of many talents and much kindness.
In 1783, young Irish tenor Michael Kelly embarked upon a tour of Austria. One of his early engagements was a piano recital and supper-party also attended by none other than Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, now twenty-seven, and the two became friendly. Mozart spoke touchingly of his English friend Thomas Linley, a gifted violist who had drowned in a boating accident some five years earlier, aged just twenty-two.
Sir Bernard Pares warned that after the Great War, Western powers must not assume Germany’s role as supercilious bully.
In 1916, Sir Bernard Pares looked ahead cautiously to the end of the Great War, and to the prospect of an end to Germany’s high-handed economic domination over Russia. Knowing the Russian Emperor Nicholas’s goodwill towards England, Pares urged Prime Minister Herbert Asquith’s government to set an example of restraint, liberty and understanding, and not simply to take the German Empire’s ignoble place.