Word: cornish
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Mercury's current hit, The Way to the Tomb by Cornish Farmer Ronald Duncan, has St. Anthony as its topic, modern materialism for its target. The first half of the play, an austere masque, tells of Anthony's attempts to find God. The three monks who feed him, sing to him and argue with him represent his three temptations (the belly, the senses and intellectual pride); but even when he conquers fleshly pleasures through a death-fast, he has still to cast out the sin of pride...
...people of Cornwall, Q was not only a favorite regional novelist, but also local magistrate, school councilor, alder man, freeman of three Cornish towns onetime mayor of Fowey (rhymes with joy), his birthplace and home. When Q said of Samuel Johnson: "He never saw literature but as a part of life," he was stating his own, classically inspired ideal of the author as citizen...
...look at the world from his Cornish window." Q put what he saw into stately poems, rolling ballads, romances, respect ful essays on Shakespeare and the ancients. Occasionally he published lectures which he felt were colored by a "colloquial style" - though one critic complained that the nearest thing in them to a colloquialism was "the repeated intrusion of the word 'Gentlemen.'" As dean of British belles-lettres, Q was not popular with the younger poets, whom he carefully omitted from the revised Oxford Book of 1940 and attacked as dispirited pessimists ("What are they for he cried...
Latin & Cock Feathers. Son of a Cornish doctor, grandson of famed Cornish Ichthyologist Jonathan Couch (History of the Fishes of the British Islands), Q received his first Latin at the age of seven ("I went home as one baptized into a cult"), in the Misses Harriet and Jemina Lutman's seminary, or "dame school." These "excellent ladies" also taught him Euclid and "globes," introduced him to Reading without Tears and Little Arthur's History of England. He learned by heart the questions & answers in the 48th edition of The Child's Guide to Knowledge, by a Lady...
...inveighing bitterly against politicians, against women "because they spend their lives making men think that unessential things, like furniture, napkins, sheets and silver plate, are essential," or "the blasted superficiality and bogus pretence of education." There were also the medico from a High land regiment with his Cornish remedy for colds ("Hang a boot over foot of bed, go to bed, drink whiskey till you see two boots, go to sleep"), and the genial host, Jack Barrett, full of his customers' reminiscences : one, asked if he never broke his marriage vows, answered, "I ain't never exactly broke...