Sir Thomas Browne,
Religio Medici
The following is an extract from a synopsis of Carmen, thoughtfully provided some years ago by the Paris Opera for the benefit of its English and American patrons:
Carmen is a cigar-makeress from a tabago factory who loves with Don José of the mounting guard. Carmen takes a flower from her corsets and lances it to Don José (Duet: ‘Talk me of my mother’). There is a noise inside the tabago factory and the revolting cigar-makeresses bursts into the stage. Carmen is arrested and Don José is ordered to mounting guard her but Carmen subduces him and he lets her escape.
ACT 2. The Tavern. Carmen, Frasquita, Mercedes, Zuniga, Morales. Carmen’s aria (‘the sistrums are tinkling’). Enter Escamillio, a balls fighter. Enter two smuglers (Duet: ‘We have in mind a business’) but Carmen refuses to penetrate because Don José has liberated from prison. He just now arrives (Aria: ‘Slop, here who comes!’) but hear are the bugles singing his retreat. Don José will leave and draws his sword. Called by Carmen shrieks the two smuglers interfere with her but Don José is bound to dessert, he will follow into them (final chorus: ‘Opening sky wandering life’) . . .
AXT 4, a place in Seville. Procession of balls-fighters, the roaring of the balls heard in the arena. Escamillio enters, (Aria and chorus: ‘Toreador, toreador, All hail the balls of a Toreador’.) Enter Don José (Aria: ‘I do not threaten, I besooch you’.) but Carmen repels himwants to join with Escamillio now chaired by the crowd. Don José stabbs her (Aria: ‘Oh rupture, rupture, you may arrest me, I did kill der’) he sings ‘Oh my beautiful Carmen, my subductive Carmen . . .’
Now must I look as sober and demure as a whore at a Christening.
Capt. Plume,
in The Recruiting Officer,
by George Farquhar
I fell also to think, what advantages these innocent animals had of man, who as soon as nature cast them into the world, find their meat dressed, the cloth laid, and the table covered; they find their drink brewed, and the buttery open, their beds made, and their clothes ready; and though man hath the faculty of reason to make him a compensation for the want of those advantages, yet this reason brings with it a thousand perturbations of mind and perplexities of spirit, griping cares and anguishes of thought, which those harmless silly creatures were exempted from.
James Howell
(1594?-1666)
For some years before my mother received her Disabled Driver’s disc from the Council, I used to collect her occasional notes to parking wardens. She had long since given up looking for meters; her normal practice was to leave the car on the nearest double yellow line, stick a note to the warden under the wiper and hope for the best. It nearly always worked, and several of the notes have the single word ‘Forgiven!’ written at the bottom in a different hand. Some of the choicest specimens were these:
Dear Warden – Taken sad child to cinemar – please forgive.
Dear Warden – Only a minute. Horribly old (80) and frightfully lame. Beware of the DOG. [A foot-long chihuahua.]
[Outside St James’s Palace]
Disabled as you see – lunching on guard. – Diana Cooper,
Sir Martin Charteris’s AUNT!
Dearest Warden – Front tooth broken off: look like an 81-year-old Pirate, so at dentist 19a. Very old, very lame – no metres. Have mercy!
And – the last one:
Dear Warden – Please try and be forgiving. I am 81 years old, very lame & in total despair. Never a metre! Back 2:15. Waiting for promised Disabled Driver disk from County Hall.
Later – Got it!
My friend Enid McLeod, who has a cottage on the Île de Ré, has sent me an extract from her local newspaper reproducing a letter addressed to a typewriter shop by a dissatisfied customer:
Monsixur,
Il y a quxlquxs sxmainxs jx mx suis offxrt unx dx vos machinxs à écrirx. Au début j’xn fus assxz contxnt. Mais pas pour longtxmps. Xn xffxt, vous voyxz vous-mêmx lx défaut. Chaqux fois qux jx vxux tapxr un x, c’xst un x qux j’obtixns. Cxla mx rxnd xnragé. Car quand jx vxux un x, c’xst un x qu’il mx faut xt non un x. Cxla rxndrait n’importx qui furixux. Commxnt fairx pour obtxnir un x chaqux fois qux jx désirx un x? Un x xst un x, xt non un x. Saisissxz-vous cx qux jx vxux dirx?
Jx voudrais savoir si vous êtxs xn mxsurx dx mx livrxr unx machinx à écrirx donnant un x chaqux fois qux j’ai bxsoin d’un x. Parcx qux si vous mx donnxz unx machinx donnant un x lorsqu’on tapx un x, vous pourrxz ravoir cx damné instrumxnt. Un x xst très bixn tant qux x, mais, oh xnfxr!
Sincèrxmxnt à vous, un dx vos clixnts rxndu xnragé.
Xugènx X.....
Ralph Knevet (1600-71) was rector of Lyng, Norfolk, and tutor or chaplain to the Paston family. His chief literary work was the Stratisticon, or a Discourse on Military Discipline, published in 1628 and written, rather surprisingly, in verse. But he wrote other poems as well: notably the following –
The helmet now a hive for bees becomes,
And hilts of swords may serve for spiders’ looms;
Sharp pikes may make
Teeth for a rake;
And the keen blade, th’ arch enemy of life
Shall be degraded to a pruning knife.
The rustic spade
Which first was made
For honest agriculture, shall retake
Its primitive employment, and forsake
The rampires steep
And trenches deep.
Tame conies in our brazen guns shall breed,
Or gentle doves their young ones there shall feed.
In musket barrels
Mice shall raise quarrels
For their quarters. The ventriloquious drum,
Like lawyers in vacations, shall be dumb.
Now all recruits,
But those of fruits,
Shall be forgot; and th’ unarmed soldier
Shall only boast of what he did whilere,
In chimneys’ ends
Among his friends.
Pliny in his natural history reporteth of Hedg-hogs, that having been abroad to provide their store, and returning home laden with nuts and fruit, if the least Filbert fall but off, they will in a pettish humour, fling down all the rest, and beat the ground for very anger with their bristles.
William Barlow
Spencer’s Things New and Old, 1658
From an old Times Law Report:
The plaintiff, giving evidence, said that when he was on the crossing in Chertsey Street, Guildford, he heard a shout. He turned and saw the cow coming pell-mell round a corner. It trampled over him and continued on its way. He did not think it deliberately went for him.
Mr PATRICK O’CONNOR, for King Bros., submitted that the person in control of a tame animal mansuetae naturae – and a cow was undoubtedly tame – was not liable for damage done by it which was ‘foreign to its species’. He would seek to prove the cow attacked the plaintiff; if that were so, there was no liability.
HIS LORDSHIP – Is one to abandon every vestige of common sense in approaching this matter?
COUNSEL – Yes, my Lord.
The hearing was adjourned.
A tablet in the church of Ashover, Derbyshire, reads:
To the memory
of
David Wall
whose superior performance
on the bassoon
endeared him
to an extensive musical
acquaintance.
His social life closed on
the 4. of December
1796
in his 57. year.
We all know Rosalind’s words in As You Like It:
Time travels in divers paces, with divers persons. I’ll tell you who Time ambles withal, who Time trots withal, who Time gallops withal, and who he stands still withal.
I was reminded of them when my friend John Guest sent me this verse, inscribed on the pendulum of the clock in St Lawrence’s church, Bidborough, Kent:
When as a ch
ild I laughed and wept,
Time crept
When as a youth I dreamed and talked,
Time walked
When I became a full-grown man,
Time ran
And later as I older grew,
Time flew.
Soon shall I find when travelling on
Time gone.
Will Christ have saved my soul by then?
Amen.
I love all waste
And solitary places, where we taste
The pleasure of believing what we see
Is boundless, as we wish our souls to be:
And such was this wide ocean, and this shore
More barren than its billows.
Shelley
How beautiful, I have often thought, would be the names of many of our vilest diseases, were it not for their disagreeable associations. My old friend Jenny Fraser sends me this admirable illlustration of the fact by J. C. Squire:
So forth there rode Sir Erysipelas
From good Lord Goitre’s castle, with the steed
Loose on the rein: and, as he rode, he mused
On Knights and Ladies dead: Sir Scrofula,
Sciatica of Glanders and his friend,
Stout Sir Colitis out of Aquitaine,
And Impetigo, proudest of them all,
Who lived and died for blind Queen Cholera’s sake:
Anthrax, who dwelt in the enchanted wood
With those princesses three, tall, pale and dumb,
And beautiful, whose names were music’s self,
Anaemia, Influenza, Eczema.
And then, once more, the incredible dream came back
How long ago, upon the fabulous shores
Of far Lumbago, all on a summer’s day,
He and the maid Neuralgia, they twain,
Lay in a flower-crowned mead, and garlands wove
Of gout, and yellow hydrocephaly,
Dim palsies, and pyrrhoea, and the sweet
Myopia, bluer than the summer sky:
Agues, both white and red, pied common cold,
Cirrhosis, and that wan, faint flower of love
The shepherds call dyspepsia. – Gone! all gone!
There came a Knight: he cried ‘Neuralgia!’
And never a voice to answer. Only rang
O’er cliff and battlement and desolate mere
‘Neuralgia!’ in the echo’s mockery.
Families, when a child is born,
Want it to be intelligent.
I, through intelligence,
Having wrecked my whole life,
Only hope the baby will prove
Ignorant and stupid.
Then he will crown a tranquil life
By becoming a Cabinet Minister.
Su Dong-Po (11th century)
Edward Gibbon on the demise of the Emperor Jovian:
The cause of this sudden death was variously understood. By some it was ascribed to the consequences of an indigestion, occasioned either by the quantity of the wine or the quality of the mushrooms which he had swallowed in the evening. According to others, he was suffocated in his sleep by the vapour of charcoal, which extracted from the walls of the apartment the unwholesome moisture of the fresh plaster.
The second of these two possibilities is not so far-fetched as it sounds. A serious indisposition suffered by Mrs Clare Boothe Luce, United States Ambassador to Rome during the 1950s, was after thorough investigation confidently attributed to arsenic fumes emerging from the paintwork on the ceiling of her bedroom.
Regarding the Emperor Gordian, on the other hand, Gibbon has some more cheerful information:
His manners were less pure, but his character was equally amiable with that of his father. Twenty-two acknowledged concubines, and a library of sixty-two thousand volumes, attested the variety of his inclinations, and from the productions which he left behind him, it appears that the former as well as the latter were designed for use rather than ostentation.
The following letter was written by Anthony Henley, Member of Parliament for Southampton from 1727 to 1734, to his constituents who had protested to him about the Excise Bill:
Gentlemen,
I received yours and am surprised by your insolence in troubling me about the Excise. You know, what I very well know, that I bought you. And I know, what perhaps you think I don’t know, you are now selling yourselves to Somebody Else; and I know, what you do not know, that I am buying another borough. May God’s curse light upon you all: may your houses be as open and common to all Excise Officers as your wifes and daughters were to me, when I stood for your scoundrell corporation.
Yours, etc.,
Anthony Henley
The text of this letter has been slightly corrected since it appeared in the 1973 Cracker, thanks to the late Lord Henley who gave me the authentic version. He confirmed that the letter was written in 1734, in which year his ancestor, as the letter implies, ceased to represent Southampton. In the previous year, on 31 March, the Weekly Register had noted:
Lady Betty Berkeley, daughter of the Earl of that name, being almost fifteen has thought it time to be married, and ran away last week with Mr Henley, a man noted for his impudence and immorality but a good estate and a beau.
My mother taught me to read with the aid of a splendid little volume called Reading Without Tears, or a Pleasant Mode of Learning to Read, by the author of ‘Peep of Day’, &c. It was published in 1861 and deserves reprinting. Where I was concerned, it did its job swiftly and, as promised, painlessly; but the other day I looked through it again, and wondered. Here are two extracts:
What is the mat-ter with that lit-tle boy?
He has ta-ken poi-son. He saw a cup of poi-son on the shelf. He said ‘This seems sweet stuff.’ So he drank it.
Why did he take it with-out leave?
Can the doc-tor cure him? Will the poi-son des-troy him? He must die. The poi-son has des-troyed him.
Wil-li-am climb-ed up-stairs to the top of the house, and went to the gun-pow-der clos-et. He fil-led the can-is-ter. Why did he not go down-stairs quickly? It came into his fool-ish mind, ‘I will go in-to the nur-se-ry and fright-en my lit-tle bro-thers and sis-ters.’
It was his de-light to fright-en the chil-dren. How un-kind! He found them a-lone with-out a nurse. So he was a-ble to play tricks. He throws a lit-tle gun-pow-der in-to the fire. And what hap-pens? The flames dart out and catch the pow-der in the can-is-ter. It is blown up with a loud noise. The chil-dren are thrown down, they are in flames. The win-dows are bro-ken. The house is sha-ken.
Mis-ter Mor-ley rush-es up-stairs. What a sight! All his chil-dren ly-ing on the floor burn-ing. The ser-vants help to quench the flames. They go for a cab to take the chil-dren to the hos-pit-al. The doc-tor says, ‘The chil-dren are blind, they will soon die.’
More dictionary definitions:
An extract from Liddell and Scott’s Greek–English Lexicon. I’m sure it must once have been familiar to every schoolboy, and now that the classics are less popular than they used to be I should hate it to be forgotten:
To thrust a radish up the fundament; a punishment for adulterers in Athens.
Another rich seam is J. G. Hava’s Arabic–English Dictionary, published in Beirut as recently as 1964. Almost every entry gives additional proof – if such were needed – of the utter impossibility of the Arabic language.
(jawn) Black. White. Light red. Day. Intensely black (horse).
(khàl) Huge mountain. Big camel. Banner of a prince. Shroud. Fancy. Black stallion. Owner of a th. Self-magnified. Caliphate. Lonely place. Opinion. Suspicion. Bachelor. Good manager. Horse’s bit. Liberal man. Weak-bodied, weak-hearted man. Free from suspicion. Imaginative man.
The first of these items elicited another nugget of information, from Professor Hugh Trevor-Roper, who called my attention to the fact that this improbable tradition was carried on by the Romans, who used not only radishes but also mullets. This is confirmed by Juvenal (Satire x, 317) and also by C
atullus, who ends his poem to Ausonius with the untranslatable lines:
Ah! tum te miserum, malique fati,
Quem attractis pedibus, patente porta,
Percurrent raphanique, mugilesque.
A book review from the American magazine Field and Stream, November 1959:
Although written many years ago, Lady Chatterley’s Lover has just been re-issued by Grove Press, and this fictional account of the day-to-day life of an English game-keeper is still of considerable interest to outdoor-minded readers, as it contains many passages on pheasant-raising, the apprehending of poachers, ways to control vermin, and other chores and duties of the professional game-keeper.
Unfortunately, one is obliged to wade through many pages of extraneous material in order to discover and savour these sidelights on the management of a Midland shooting estate, and in this reviewer’s opinion the book cannot take the place of J. R. Miller’s Practical Gamekeeper.
Two thoughts about pictures. First, by Kuo Hsi, a painter of the Sung period, born about A.D. 1020.
To learn to draw a flower it is best to place a blossoming plant in a deep hollow in the ground and to look upon it. Then all its qualities may be grasped. To learn to draw a bamboo, take a branch and cast its shadow upon a white wall on a moonlight night; then its true outline can be obtained. To learn to paint a landscape, too, the method is the same. An artist should identify himself with the landscape and watch it until its significance is revealed to him.
Second, by Sir Thomas Browne in Religio Medici:
The Illustrated Christmas Cracker Page 2
