Seriously old chap, you need to slay that damn dragon, you know, lance through her head, and then head back to England. You even missed your grandmum’s birthday FFS! You’ll be forgiven, but only if you return alone.
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man
As modest stillness and humility:
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger;
Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favour’d rage;
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
Let pry through the portage of the head
Like the brass cannon; let the brow o’erwhelm it
As fearfully as doth a galled rock
O’erhang and jutty his confounded base,
Swill’d with the wild and wasteful ocean.
Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide,
Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit
To his full height. On, on, you noblest English.
Whose blood is fet from fathers of war-proof!
Fathers that, like so many Alexanders,
Have in these parts from morn till even fought
And sheathed their swords for lack of argument:
Dishonour not your mothers; now attest
That those whom you call’d fathers did beget you.
Be copy now to men of grosser blood,
And teach them how to war. And you, good yeoman,
Whose limbs were made in England, show us here
The mettle of your pasture; let us swear
That you are worth your breeding; which I doubt not;
For there is none of you so mean and base,
That hath not noble lustre in your eyes.
I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,
Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot:
Follow your spirit, and upon this charge
Cry ‘God for Harry, England, and Saint George!’
Topical 😆
But I preferred your tweet
For those that can read Latin, https://societyofstbede.files.wordpress.com/2016/04/salvefestageorgi.pdf
His Mam?
The Queen isn’t his mother.
It is likely that a point will be reached that the Hollywood Hag will pull just a little too hard on the Pussywhip lead and even the Foolish Prince will have had enough.
There is literally no bucket large enough to contain all of the f**ks I don’t give about the fate of this man, or his marriage.
Full marks to him for having the stones to go and fight with his regiment when they went to fight, and not just wearing the pretty uniform. Absolutely nothing but 100% respect for him for that.
But now – Who Cares? And Why? If he wants to live in Hollywood, married to a fading actress – in the immortal words of John Lee Hooker, it don’t confront me none. And it don’t confront anybody else, either. He will never sit on the throne, he was quite literally The Spare, and now he’s not even that.
We have slightly-more important things to worry about today.
llater,
llamas
although I generally find anything related to the Royal family tedious beyond words I cant help but think that Harry made the right right call moving to America, away from the British tabloids and the cretins who read them.
Perry, aren’t you opposed to the idea of the UK having a royal family?
And has Harry not done very much to harm the Royal Family of the UK?
Once this particular dragonette feels secure in her social status, and has gotten some long term gigs with a guaranteed audience, the Harry formerly known as Prince will be made redundant. In spirit, if not in fact. Whether he acquiesces to being an accessory to HER fame is entirely up to him.
Regardless of the merits of this particular case (though, for the record, i am inclined to believe that Harry went very much against his own interests):
I believe that there should be a protocol in place for royals who want to disengage from the Royals Family. After all, you don’t want it to grow too large, do you?
I was gonna write more but illamas said exactly everything I wanted to say – and better than I could. So, I’ll leave it with, “Happy St George’s Day!” and hope the next one finds us in a happier place.
No, I am ok with the Royals. They fulfill some function & as long as they reign but don’t rule, that’s fine by me.
In support of Perry:
At the risk of sounding like an intellectual snob, I submit that, if you read Plato’s Laws (book 3), Aristotle’s Politics, Polybius’ Histories (book 6), Cicero’s De Re Publica, or Machiavelli’s Discorsi (book 1, chapter 2), you’ll find that, to be a true republican, you have to support a limited monarchy — though not necessarily hereditary.
Actually there are also later works that support this view. In particular, John Adams’ Defence of the Constitutions of the United States. (Note the plural: ConstitutionS.)
Back in the mid-1930s, the American Wallis Simpson unwittingly did great good to Britain by causing a royal heir who might not have been ideal in WWII to be replaced by his brother, who was much more what the country needed, and his brother’s wife, who was also great, and thus ensuring the succession of his brother’s daughter (quick pause to drink loyal toast – in cask-strength whisky strong enough to kill any invading Chinese virus).
Sadly, I see no such obvious good from evil – or at least from great PC silliness – in the current marry-American rerun. On the one hand, Harry was already well removed from any likelihood of succession anyway, and on the other, I rather liked the Invictus games and suchlike he was doing before. My guess, FWIW, is that Meghan was never so skilled an actress as when she convinced her groom that she loved him more than her own part-selfish, part-Hollywood-mindless-PC ideas. George Atkisson’s guess (April 23, 2020 at 2:36 pm) is one possible endgame.
Of course, Sir Winston Churchill was the product of a marriage between English aristocrat and American plutocrat (a marriage that quickly ceased to look successful in itself), so I suppose one never knows how it will all turn out in the end. For now, however, if I knew an aristocrat who was planning to marry from across the pond, I’d tell him that heiress has a better record than actress.
Sadly I can not think of a poem or a symbol less in accord with the modern English than this poem and the symbol o Saint George slaying the dragon.
What would get modern people to fight back? Would a government order to EAT their own children (alive) get people to fight back?
Or would most people just brush away a tear and say “we hate doing this – but the rules are the rules” and start to eat their (struggling and screaming) children – because the government told them to do so.
Whilst clapping and under little drawings of rainbows – of course.