London Snow

As a Canadian I can appreciate the message that snow brings out the best in people. London is enjoying the kind of winter it hasn't seen since 1991, perhaps even 1891, and all of a sudden a big cold heartless city is magically rendered a warm and gentle playing ground for people of all ages. There are reports that people are actually talking to one another in the streets, whispering such pleasantries as "hello" and "good morning" to complete strangers. It seems that civilisation has returned for a brief wintery moment.

London Snow
by Robert Bridges


When men were all asleep the snow came flying,
In large white flakes falling on the city brown,
Stealthily and perpetually settling and loosely lying,
Hushing the latest traffic of the drowsy town;
Deadening, muffling, stifling its murmurs failing;
Lazily and incessantly floating down and down:
Silently sifting and veiling road, roof and railing;
Hiding difference, making unevenness even,
Into angles and crevices softly drifting and sailing.
All night it fell, and when full inches seven
It lay in the depth of its uncompacted lightness,
The clouds blew off from a high and frosty heaven;
And all woke earlier for the unaccustomed brightness
Of the winter dawning, the strange unheavenly glare:
The eye marvelled - marvelled at the dazzling whiteness;
The ear hearkened to the stillness of the solemn air;
No sound of wheel rumbling nor of foot falling,
And the busy morning cries came thin and spare.
Then boys I heard, as they went to school, calling,
They gathered up the crystal manna to freeze
Their tongues with tasting, their hands with snowballing;
Or rioted in a drift, plunging up to the knees;
Or peering up from under the white-mossed wonder!'
'O look at the trees!' they cried, 'O look at the trees!'
With lessened load a few carts creak and blunder,
Following along the white deserted way,
A country company long dispersed asunder:
When now already the sun, in pale display
Standing by Paul's high dome, spread forth below
His sparkling beams, and awoke the stir of the day.
For now doors open, and war is waged with the snow;
And trains of sombre men, past tale of number,
Tread long brown paths, as toward their toil they go:
But even for them awhile no cares encumber
Their minds diverted; the daily word is unspoken,
The daily thoughts of labour and sorrow slumber
At the sight of the beauty that greets them, for the charm they have broken.

For more inspiration read Peter Hitchens: What's so bad about cold weather?

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400 years of John Milton (1608-1674)

...he was a true Poet, and of the Devil's party without knowing it.
- William Blake on Milton's Paradise Lost.

John Milton was born 400 years ago today, on December 9, 1608. If Oliver Cromwell is English history's most famous republican, John Milton must be regarded as England's most famous republican poet. Samuel Johnson called him that "acrimonious and surly republican" for his dangerous commitment to the English Revolution and his continuing unpopular attacks against Royalists right up to the time of the Restoration. Milton was very much a political, social and religious radical for his time, who fought for oligarchical government over absolute monarchy, who supported legal measures for divorce and polygamy, who rejected the Holy Trinity of the Bible and believed in mortalism over the divinity of Christ. He forthrightly hated the High Church, he hated the Lords and he hated the natural power of Kings. He was the very opposite of a Cavalier Poet.

Two weeks after the execution of Charles I in 1649, Milton committed himself to the Republican side by publishing The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates in support of the regicide. His argument (which runs in direct opposition to Hobbes' Leviathan published in 1651), was that a monarch's power is not absolute, but derived from the people he rules and held in accordance with a social contract. If a monarch breaks this contract by abusing his position, the people have the right to remove him from power. Not exactly radical stuff by the standards of today.

Milton joins hands with John Locke as an early apostle of liberalism who fought against the absolutist monarchist writings of Robert Filmer and Thomas Hobbes. His last major pamplet published in 1660 was an anti-monarchical protest in the face of the coming Restoration, which expresses a feeling of despair at seeing his countrymen so eager to run back to servitude. Milton seemed to think that it was better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven, but there is also a real sense of the man as a lone but stalwart adherent to a greater truth rebelling against a false authority. "The work is an impassioned, bitter, and futile jeremiad damning the English people for backsliding from the cause of liberty and advocating the establishment of an authoritarian rule by an elitist, unelected parliament." Perhaps fearing the tyranny of the many in addition to the tyranny of the one, he favoured not a democratic solution but a perpetual Rump Parliament, a kind of governing council with a permanent ruling membership. Unfortunately the modern word Politburo comes to mind, but to Milton this was The Ready and Easy Way to Establish a Free Commonwealth.

Milton's view of monarchy and the decadence of monarchy is a theme later emphasized in Paradise Lost. Within this epic, Milton's magnus opus, Satan is directly linked to monarchical rule. The tone of the piece is to ensure that the citizenry would not backslide into their old monarchical ways. In particularly, Milton relied on predictions of the future combined with biblical analogies to ensure that people knew the dangers inherent in such a governmental system. In particular, Milton argued that it would be a sin against God to bring back the monarchy and warned against the lack of freedom and virtue that would correspond with a king.

How stunned Milton would be 400 years after his birth to learn that freedom and virtue wear a Crown.

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A basket of literary truffles

Besides The Monarchist and a judiciously filled (very, very filled) hipflask, the next thing the troubled man of today needs is a good read. Put aside the swelling packages from the pharmacy; avoid the other more casual pharmacy in his hooded top and jeans on the corner of your road; not for us the druggism of the 21st century. Books can do the job perfectly well. Is it any mere coincidence that the decline of literacy is exactly inverse to the rise of junkiedom?

There are, of course, numerous kinds for numerous purposes. If one aims for some sort of paper-based sleeping pill, pretty much anything from the shelves of modern fiction will do it.

As for a little appetite suppressant, may we heartily endorse anything from the Current Affairs section?

But to be electrified? To have the hairs quivering on end, the mind breezy and elevated, the eyes well popped? Let us turn a page back to that happy historical summertime of Edwardian Britain.



Which is precisely what Penguin have done. In charming two-tone covers with excellent retro design and cover illustrations, they have relaunched into the world everything from Childers’ gloriously vivid thriller ‘The Riddle of the Sands’ to Chesterton’s ticklingly clever and hearty ‘The Man Who Was Thursday’. The only thing missing from this series is a railway station bookstall to buy them from, accompanied by the vigorous whistle of an incoming steam engine as you pass over your sixpence piece.

They are, however, £7.99 in the Great Britain of today. This horrific fact alone will probably do enough to keep you up at night, regardless of the thrilling contents within. Happily for Canucks, though, they are less damaging at $10.

Well worth filling a shelf with.

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The Century's Finest Poet

'Death-warnings'

I saw the ramparts of my native land
One time so strong, now dropping in decay,
Their strength destroyed by this new age's way
That has worn out and rotted what was grand.
I went into the fields; there I could see
The sun drink up the waters newly thawed;
And on the hills the moaning cattle pawed,
Their miseries robbed the light of day for me.

I went into my house; I saw how spotted,
Decaying things made that old home their prize;
My withered walking-staff had come to bend.
I felt the age had won; my sword was rotted;
And there was nothing on which to set my eyes
That was not a reminder of the end.


This year marks 40 since the passing of one of the century's finest writers - one of the few our era can bestow to posterity without shame or embarrassment. Unlike so many authors since the blunder of Modernism, he didn't spend his career in a kind of arrested adolescence, tinkering and playing in public, producing effects through sophistic trivialities, or in the kind of critic-friendly work that holds an appeal only when considered conceptually. He plunged into the heart of literature: he didn't try and rationalise from the outside what might be good (an activity, like its brother socialism, that has never worked, and is responsible not merely for Stalin, but for nearly all bad poetry too). No, he wrote with reference to his heart, to his instinctive taste, and to the truth of God and the beauty of God's creation; and wrote, and wrote, and was victorious. He is responsible for two charming books for the young, two general novels, and a kind of poetry that overturns one's stomach with its excellence.

His name was John Masefield. He was Poet Laureate. Few remember him. A pretty decent Selected Poems is now available. Do read it. (See Gutenberg for some of his work online, too).

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Ah, Sunday afternoon!

“There is no flavour comparable, I will contend, to that of the crisp, tawny, well-watched, not over-roasted, crackling, as it is well called – the very teeth are invited to their share of the pleasure at this banquet in overcoming the coy, brittle resistance – with the adhesive oleaginous – O call it not fat – but an indefinable sweetness growing up to it – the tender blossoming of fat – fat cropped in the bud – taken in the shoot – in the first innocence – the cream and quintessence of the child-pig’s yet pure food – the lean, no lean, but a kind of animal manna – or, rather, fat and lean, (if it must be so) so blended and running into each other, that both together make but one ambrosian result, or common substance."

(From 'A Dissertation Upon Roast Pig', by Charles Lamb).

The Monarchist hopes everybody has enjoyed such a delicious Sunday roast this afternoon.

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