Collected Letters Volume One: Family Letters 1905–1931. Walter Hooper
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who wrote love poems, elegies and satirical epigrams with equal success.
102 Jack London, The Jacket (1915).
103 This is from the essay by Francis Bacon referred to in the letter of 13 May 1915. Bacon was the Baron of Verulam.
104 See The Times (21 October 1915), p. 4 and (22 October 1915), p. 5.
105 ‘Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceedingly small.’ Friedrich von Logau, Sinnegedichte (1654), ‘Desz Dritten Tausend, Andres Hundert’ no. 24 (translated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow).
106 William H.F. ‘Bill’ Patterson, the son of William Hugh Patterson (1835-1918) who wrote A Glossary of Words in Use in the Counties of Antrim and Down (1880), was addicted to puns and was a recognized Strandtown wit. He published a volume of verse under the initials W.H.F., Songs of a Port (Belfast, 1920).
107 Included in The Times of 3 November 1915 was The Times Recruiting Supplement, on page 16 of which was a poem Rudyard Kipling composed for the occasion. The first verse of the poem, ‘For All We Have and Are’, is as follows:
For all we have and are,
For all our children’s fate, Stand up and meet the war, The Hun is at the gate! Our world has passed away In wantonness o’erthrown. There is nothing left today But steel and fire and stone.
108 Rudyard Kipling, Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses (1892).
109 ‘The Brushwood Boy’ is one of the stories in Kipling’s The Day’s Work (1908).
110 The ‘dedication piece’ which refers to ‘my brother’s spirit’ and ‘gentlemen unafraid’ is the dedication poem to Wolcott Balestier in Barrack-Room Ballads; ‘The Last Rhyme of True Thomas’, ‘The First Chantey’ and ‘The Last Chantey’ are found in The Seven Seas.
111 Sir Henry John Newbolt (1862-1938) was educated at Clifton College and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He is remembered particularly for his nautical ballads published in Admirals All and Other Verses (1897).
112 Thomas Love Peacock, Headlong Hall (1816).
113 William Shakespeare, Sonnet 17 (1609).
114 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Idea (1883-6).
115 Algernon Charles Swinburne, Erechtheus (1876); Atalanta in Calydon (1865).
116 The Battle of Mons, on the Western Front, began on 23 August 1914. For the whole of that day the British held the line against the Germans with greatly inferior numbers. A legend began within two weeks of the battle that an angel had appeared ‘on the traditional white horse and clad all in white with flaming sword’. Facing the advancing Germans the angel ‘forbade their further progress’. Martin Gilbert, First World War (1994), p. 58.
117 ‘Killed in Action’ by R.C.L. is found in Punch, Vol. CXLIX (13 November 1915), p. 310.
118 Horace, Epistles, 2. 2. 17-19.
119 This is Théo Ysaÿe (1865-1918), a pianist and composer, brother of Eugène.
120 ‘Auf den Bergen’ is a piano solo from Edvard Grieg’s Folkelivsbilleder (1872).
121 George Gordon, Lord Byron, The Destruction of Sennacherib (1815), l. 1: ‘The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold’.
122 ‘It was the schooner Hesperus’ is l. 1 of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Wreck of the Hesperus (1839); ‘Under the spreading chestnut tree’ is l.1 of Longfellow’s The Village Blacksmith (1839).
123 Barkis is the character in Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield (1849-50) who sent a message by David to Clara Peggotty that ‘Barkis is willin’.’
124 Albert had been appointed a church warden at St Mark’s for the third time.
125 W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, The Pirates of Penzance (1879), Act II.
126 Albert replied on 26 November 1915: ‘I was glad to get your kind and sympathetic letter. I have done as you would wish. I have just written to Warnie to say that inasmuch as he says he will not get leave again until the end of the war, I have altered my decision and have written to you to hold yourself in readiness to leave when he calls. I shall write to K. and send your travelling money later. You may tell K. what is impending if you like’ (LP V: 34).
127 Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, bk. V, l. 585: ‘Men mighte a book make of it, lik a storie!’
128 Virgil, Aeneid, IV, 298: ‘Incline to fear where all was safe…’
129 Andrew Lang, History of English Literature (1912).
130 John William Mackail, Springs of Helicon: A Study in the Progress of English Poetry from Chaucer to Milton (1909); The Life of William Morris, 2 vols. (1899).
131 i.e. Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women and Troilus and Criseyde are better than his most popular work, The Canterbury Tales (composed 1387-1400).
132 Gilbert Murray, A History of Ancient Greek Literature (1897). Murray (1866-1957) was Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford 1908-36, and a distinguished translator of Greek plays.
133 People who frequent the agora (market place),