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Ethel Smyth encouraged writers to try to find their own words before deciding to borrow someone else’s.
In her book of essays ‘Streaks of Life’, composer Dame Ethel Smyth (rhymes with Forsyth) was unusually severe on the Quotation Freak, the writer who borrows phrases from more famous authors simply to save himself the trouble of turning his own.
Some years before the Elgin marbles were put on display in the British Museum, rising artist Benjamin Haydon got a sneak preview.
In 1808, young Benjamin Haydon was an up-and-coming painter with a passion for lifelike figures. He had spent long hours sprawled on the floor painstakingly copying anatomical drawings instead of courting well-to-do patrons, and his father had declared him mad. Haydon called himself only exasperated: his attempts to paint Roman hero Dentatus were going badly.
... I heard John Wesley sing. A visitor on the quayside on Sunday May 30th, 1742, would have stumbled into a crowd agape and a determined clergyman singing psalms.
In 1742, John Wesley extended his northern preaching tour to Newcastle-upon-Tyne, a large, cramped city by the North Sea, founded on coal mining and the coal-trade of England’s east coast. Many areas were grindingly poor, and over time ignorance and want had so tightened their grip that violence and addiction kept areas such as Sandgate, down on the Quayside, utterly wretched. Naturally, it was to Sandgate that Wesley at once demanded to go.
A gentleman travelling home from London by train reached his destination carrying more than he set out with.
In 1830, the world’s first intercity passenger line began running steam-hauled trains between Liverpool and Manchester. Half a century later, Richard Pike compiled a collection of vignettes about life on the ever-growing railway network, some about engineers and locomotives, others about the surprising things that could happen in a railway carriage.
Byron felt compelled to set the record straight after it was alleged that he had swum the Hellespont the easy way.
Every night, so the Greek myths tell us, Leander left Abydos in Asia Minor and swam across the narrow Hellespont to his lover Hero, priestess of Aphrodite at Sestos in Thrace, the European side, until he was drowned in bad weather. On May 3rd, 1810, George Gordon Byron and his friend Lt William Ekenhead swam the same stretch of water in the other direction, from Europe to Asia.
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.
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.