Extracts from Literature
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Extracts from Literature’
In ‘Familiarity Dangerous,’ poet William Cowper tells a little tale warning that if you join in the game you play by the rules.
William Cowper was very much a cat person, so naturally these lines from the Latin of Vincent Bourne (1695-1747), who had been on the staff at Westminster School when Cowper was a pupil there, appealed to him. A kitten reminds us that if you want to be one of the gang it has got to be on their terms.
Sir William Hunter looks back over a Government committee’s plan to introduce tea cultivation to India in 1834.
The British drink almost 36 billion cups of tea each year, a trend set by King Charles II’s Portuguese wife, Queen Catherine. The tea itself came exclusively from China, which by the early Nineteenth Century had become a cause for concern. What if China were to close her ports to Europe, as neighbouring Japan had done? So the Government set up a Tea Committee.
A London barrister indulges in courtroom theatrics to win a case, but it turns out that not everything is as it seems.
In 1858, a witness testified in a US court to seeing a man murdered in bright moonlight; but in a dramatic twist, defence attorney Abraham Lincoln swept out an almanac showing this was not possible, and the case fell through. Over twenty years earlier, Robert Southey had recorded a bizarre parallel involving a barrister at the Old Bailey, only there was an even more dramatic twist to that tale.
Robert Browning, aboard ship in sight of Gibraltar, reflects on the momentous events in British history that have happened nearby.
In this poem from his travels in 1838, Robert Browning is aboard a ship just off Tangiers. Cape St Vincent in Portugal has faded from view, but he can see Cadiz and Cape Trafalgar clearly, and just make out Gibraltar. He thinks of the stirring events in British history that took place hereabouts, and wonders what an ordinary Englishmen can still do for his country.
On the day that Manfred, Prince of Otranto, expected his son Conrad to marry the Marquis of Vicenza’s daughter, grotesque tragedy struck.
Horace Walpole’s ‘Castle of Otranto’ (1765) was suggested by a dream, and the tumbled nightmare of a tale, masquerading as an historical document, left many a Georgian reader cowering under the bedclothes. It opens with Manfred, Prince of Otranto, waiting impatiently for the marriage of his son Conrad to Isabella, daughter of the Marquis of Vicenza.
After Oliver Goldsmith’s landlady lost patience with her cash-strapped tenant, Dr Johnson took charge and a literary classic entered the world.
Irish novelist and playwright Oliver Goldsmith (1730-1774) was perpetually hard up, living hand-to-mouth on his writing. There came a day however when his landlady lost patience, and would not let her tenant out of her sight until he paid up. Goldsmith turned in desperation to his friend Samuel Johnson, the famous critic and lexicographer.