Episode 334: "The Adventures of a Shilling" by Joseph Addison – Short Story Summer Remix

Summary

The Literary Life Podcast

Episode 334: "The Adventures of a Shilling" by Joseph Addison – Short Story Summer Remix

Hosts: Angelina Stanford, Thomas Banks, Cindy Rollins
Date: June 23, 2026

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Overview

In this episode of The Literary Life, hosts Angelina, Cindy, and special guest Thomas Banks dive deep into Joseph Addison’s essay, “The Adventures of a Shilling,” as part of their Short Story Summer Remix series. With a signature blend of erudition and warmth, the conversation explores what defines an essay (especially the informal kind), the lively tradition of English essayists, and the blurred boundaries between essays and short stories. They also offer practical discussion on reading essays for personal enrichment and reflect on themes of leisure, literary lineage, and how stories—no matter how whimsical—shape culture.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Commonplacing and Literary Humility

Timestamps: 04:42–15:58

• Commonplace Books:

  • Thomas Banks is heralded as an obsessive commonplacer, inspiring Angelina to maintain her own.
  • Thomas shares a quote from Samuel Johnson:

    “It is not uncommon for those who have grown wise by the labor of others to add a little of their own and overlook their masters.”
    — Samuel Johnson, Lives of the Poets [05:52, 07:10]

    • The group discusses intellectual humility, plagiarism, and giving credit to one’s influences.
    • Cindy: “I do not have an original thought in my head... To pretend like it came from me, that would be appalling. Absolutely appalling.” [08:07]
    • Angelina: Jokes that “Every time I think I have an original thought, I do a little research and find that C. S. Lewis already said it and said it better.” [09:15]

• On Reading Widely:

  • Reading deeply should inspire humility; otherwise, hubris creeps in.

2. Quotes for Inspiration

Timestamps: 11:01–18:22

• Cindy shares Thomas Howard on T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets as one of the “major edifices in the Christian West.” [11:01]

• Angelina’s Addison Quote:

  “Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.” — Joseph Addison [15:10]

  • The group riffs on the modern-sounding pithiness of the quote and how reading, like exercise, is often the subject of New Year’s resolutions.

• Literary Anecdotes:

  • Thomas tells the story of the awkward lunch between T. S. Eliot and C. S. Lewis arranged by Charles Williams:

    "T. S. Eliot starts off by saying to Lewis, ‘It is good to meet you, Dr. Lewis. You are a slightly younger man than I expected you to be.’ ... Lewis did not take this well and thought he was just being a condescending prig." [16:40]

  • The hosts muse about which famous authors they’d actually like (or be scared) to meet.

3. Essays: Genre, History, and Essence

Timestamps: 19:18–38:32

• What is an Essay?

  • Angelina (citing her lit textbook):

    “Classifying the essay has eluded human skill.” [20:39]

  • Thomas’ definition:

    “An essay is a piece of nonfiction, informal prose writing that has something whimsical about it.” [20:45]

    • Traces the essay tradition from Montaigne (French: ‘essai’ = ‘attempt’) to Bacon, Addison, and the rise of coffeehouse culture.
    • The Spectator (Addison and Steele) as a model: short, witty, to the point, with “something whimsical, informal, personal, and more general.” [24:39]

• Essays vs. Short Stories:

  • “The informal essay is nonfiction, thinking out loud, a contemplation, a revelation of the author's personality... It usually doesn’t have a case to prove—more likely to entertain or muse than argue.” [30:15]
  • Cindy: Compares essays to “blog musings.”
  • Essays balance “enlivening morality with wit and wit with morality.” [25:06]

• The Social Role of the Essay:

  • Periodicals like The Spectator arose from coffeehouse culture—public spaces to read and converse, not unlike today’s digital forums.

4. Essayists in the Great Tradition

Timestamps: 36:28–43:29

• Charles Lamb:

  • His “Essays of Elia” are in the Addison/Chesterton tradition but more autobiographical—a hallmark of Romantic essayists.
  • Lamb’s tragic family life is discussed with sympathy.

• Thomas de Quincey:

  • “Confessions of an English Opium-Eater” as the original drug memoir.

• Chesterton and Orwell:

  • Chesterton as a prolific essayist (“defending” everyday objects).
  • Orwell’s essays valued for honesty and common sense (!Thoughts on the Common Toad” highlighted). [41:31]

5. Why Read Essays? Leisure, Education, and Culture

Timestamps: 43:03–56:20

• Thomas on why he reads essays:

  “There are some authors I find are good company. Addison for me is a good company author... It almost seems like to be a good essayist, one kind of has not to be a genius…you get the impression that you’re in the presence of someone deeply and commendably human.” [43:30]

• Leisure as the Basis of Culture:

  • The opening of “The Adventures of a Shilling” leads to a rich discussion of leisure and its role in education and society.
  • Cindy cites Josef Pieper’s Leisure: The Basis of Culture:
    The mother at home represents the last leisure class; leisure is an opportunity for self-education—and essays fit perfectly into those “little moments.”
  • Angelina: Modern society is rich in leisure, but lacks the habits (and vision) to use it well:

    "We've been given this gift of leisure and we don't know what to do with it." [56:13]

  • Leisure is where true culture—music, poetry, ideas—is made, not just where we kill time.

6. Deep Dive: “The Adventures of a Shilling”

Timestamps: 57:10–76:11

• Narrative Device:

  • The story is told from the shilling’s point of view—naive, neutral, dramatic irony abounds.

• Historical Survey via Coin:

  • The coin’s life passes through Elizabethan England, the Civil War, Restoration, and more, giving a whimsical social history.
  • On Civil War: Addison’s Royalist perspective is obvious—he portrays the Parliamentarians as base and the interregnum as tragic. [58:40]
  • Coin Counterfeiting:

    "Shears off my titles, clipped my brims... so spoiled and pillaged me that he did not leave me worth a groat." — Addison, via the Shilling [61:51]

    • Discusses period counterfeiting and government crackdowns; clipping edges was a real economic problem.

• The “Sex Change”:

  • The shilling is melted down and re-stamped with a new monarch’s face (from Queen Elizabeth to Charles II), hence the “change of sex.” [64:12]

• Narrative Episodes:

  • The coin’s comic attempts at romance (bent by a milkmaid as a love token) and imprisonment by a miser.
  • Satirical passage as the coin passes through classes and professions, ending up in the hat of a blind man by mistake.

• Economic Reflections:

  • The essay reflects on money’s changing value and its role in the broader economic and social spheres.
  • Discusses “The Splendid Shilling” (a burlesque poem referencing the coin) and Addison’s links to other essay-traditions.

7. Ancients vs. Moderns and Literary Lineage

Timestamps: 73:23–76:11

• The hosts link Addison’s work and Samuel Johnson’s quote to the “Ancients vs. Moderns” debate (cf. Swift’s “Battle of the Books”).
• Broader question: Do we still need the ancients, or only modern voices?

  “Do the ancients have any wisdom to offer us today, or do we need modern voices for modern ears?” — Cindy Rollins [76:02]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Essayists:

  “It’s hard to say exactly what you learn from reading Montaigne, but I always feel that my sympathies are richer after reading him.” — Thomas Banks [43:16]

• On Literary Humility:

  “To pretend like it came from me, that would be appalling. Absolutely appalling.” — Cindy Rollins [08:16]

• On Modern Reflections:

  “Every time I think I have an original thought, I do a little research and find that C. S. Lewis already said it and said it better.” — Angelina Stanford [09:15]

• On Leisure:

  “If you have leisure, it’s a gift you’ve been given to use for… the betterment of yourself and the culture around you.” — Cindy Rollins [55:02]

• On Essays:

  “An essay is a... contemplation. A revelation of the author’s personality.” — Thomas Banks [30:19]

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Important Timestamps

• 04:42 – Introductions, commonplace books, humility
• 15:10 – Addison’s famous “Reading is to the mind...” quote
• 20:39 – What is an essay? Genre, tradition, whimsy
• 25:06 – Periodical essays, coffeehouse culture
• 36:28 – Charles Lamb and romantic essayists
• 41:31 – Orwell and Chesterton’s essays, delight vs. genius
• 43:30 – Why essays matter for the “good company”
• 47:47 – Leisure, education, and the life of culture
• 57:10 – The structure and satire of "The Adventures of a Shilling"
• 61:51 – Coin counterfeiting and economic history
• 64:12 – The “sex change” of the shilling: coinage and monarchy
• 68:41 – Travel, commerce, and Addison’s optimism
• 73:23 – Ancients vs. Moderns, battle of literary influence

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Tone & Literary Style

Warm, bookish, gently humorous, and deeply rooted in literary tradition. Discussions are conversational but often turn reflective, inviting listeners to adopt both humility and delight in their own reading journeys.

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Conclusion

The episode concludes with encouragement to incorporate essays into daily life, highlighting their brevity and human richness. The hosts prompt listeners to tune in next week for Guy de Maupassant’s “The Necklace.” The show ends, as is traditional, with Thomas Banks reading Milton’s “When I Consider How My Light is Spent.” [79:57]

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For more on classic essays, literary lineage, or to join the conversation, find the hosts at HouseOfHumaneLetters.com and MorningtimeforMoms.com, or join their Patreon and Facebook communities.

Transcript

[Thomas Banks]

Welcome to the Literary Life Podcast. We've grown quite significantly since our debut in 2019, and we've had many requests to highlight older episodes that new listeners may have missed, as well as revisit listener favorites. To honor that request, I present to you this episode of the Best of the Literary Life Podcast.

[Angelina Stanford]

Welcome to the Literary Life Podcast, where your hosts, Angelina Stanford and Cindy Rollins, explore a life shaped by books, stories and poetry. Each week we will rescue story from the ivory tower and bring it to your couch, your kitchen and your commute. The Literary Life is for everyone because in the words of Stratford Caldecott, to be enchanted by story is to be granted a deeper insight into reality. Hello and welcome to episode 14 of the Literary Life Podcast. I'm Angelina Stanford and I'm here with Cindy Rollins. And today we have a very special guest, a voice that we hope you will recognize. The Poet's poet, Thomas Banks. Welcome to the Literary Life Podcast.

[Thomas Banks]

It's good to be on the show.

[Angelina Stanford]

He waved to you guys, but this is not a video podcast. That was really.

[Cindy Rollins]

I like that.

[Angelina Stanford]

So he waved. So welcome. Welcome to the show.

[Cindy Rollins]

We are waving back, Thomas.

[Thomas Banks]

Oh, thank you.

[Angelina Stanford]

I saw him wave, so that's what counts. So we are here with Thomas Banks today to talk about Joseph Addison's essay the Adventures of a Shilling. And you will see why we've asked him to join us today. This was a Thomas Banks pick this essay and I can't wait to start talking about all things essays with him.

[Podcast Announcer/Host]

I hope you're enjoying today's best of episode of the Literary Life Podcast. Because this episode was recorded many years ago, I wanted to let you know what we've got going on right now. This podcast is always available for free,

[Angelina Stanford]

but for people who want to go

[Podcast Announcer/Host]

deeper or explore different topics, we've got a great summer lineup for you of webinars and mini classes. The May webinar was Mary Poppins, Venus in a Blue Coat with Silver Buttons, which takes a look at Mary Poppins as goddess. Celtic Fae, who is there to enter us into the world of fairy through these books, was fantastic in June. We've got a mini class coming up. Frankly, I'm thrilled. I'm thrilled about our entire summer lineup.

[Angelina Stanford]

But Ms. Jen Rogers is going to

[Podcast Announcer/Host]

be bringing us a mini class called the Chronicles of a Complete Transmutation. And she's going to be looking at the Chronicles as a whole and showing us what Lewis is trying to accomplish with the whole series and how it works as one story. In July. We've got a mini class called Players on a Cosmic the Grammar of Nature in Shakespeare. If you enjoyed Ms. Ella Hornstra's classes and webinars on the symbolic meaning of nature, you're going to really love this class where she's going to go through the images of nature in Shakespeare and show us that once again, because we are so disconnected from nature and disconnected from symbolic language that we miss major things going on in Shakespeare's work. So even if you haven't taken those other classes, you'll be able to start here. I'm really looking forward to that one. In July, we also have a webinar, what Became of the Weaving Maid, an introduction to Chinese folklore. That's going to be fantastic. And we're going to continue to explore the ways in which the Tree of Tales has roots in the east as well as the West. And in August, I'll be rounding up the summer lineup with the next installment of my Harry Potter Gateway to the Literary Tradition course. And I will be covering the Half Blood Prince. I also encourage you to check out our publishing wing, cassiodoruspress.com to see the latest from Dr. Jason Baxter. He's got a new book out with us called Falling Inward. You can also check out his other book, why Literature Still Matters. He's also got an audiobook read by himself and get on the mailing list there because we've got some exciting projects coming out in the next couple of years. There may also be one or two more surprises this summer, so keep checking back to our website, HouseOfHumaneLetters.com and remember, all of our purchases are available live or later. You can. You also might notice we have a brand new dashboard set up on the website. We're continuing to move all the classes over to that, but I think you're going to really, really like the new setup and how user friendly it is. It's just going to make taking our classes even easier and even better. So thanks so much for listening. Let's continue with the show.

[Angelina Stanford]

All right, so as you know, on this show we love to share our commonplace quotes. And so I'm just going to tell on my husband here. I have never seen anyone in my life so committed to their commonplace books, plural as Thomas Banks. He really inspires me. I am doing much better with my commonplace since being married to him because he faithfully carries around his commonplace book and is always recording his things he runs across in his reading. So I have asked him to share. I do not know what this is going to be, but I have asked him to share something from his commonplace.

[Thomas Banks]

Thank you very much. Yeah. So we're in the 18th century today. We're talking about Joseph Addison, and I thought I'd bring another 18th century author, Samuel Johnson, who wrote, amongst other things, the Lives of the Poets, Best known, of course, for his dictionary, but he wrote quite a lot of other things as well. So this is. I thought this is just a great condemnation of intellectual pretension, which, I mean, one always comes across in the academic world if you touch that at all, one is guilty of. I know I am from time to time. But this is a great stab at that kind of attitude.

[Angelina Stanford]

Cannot wait to hear this.

[Thomas Banks]

It is not uncommon for those who have grown wise by the labor of others to add a little of their own and overlook their masters.

[Podcast Announcer/Host]

Ooh. Ooh.

[Angelina Stanford]

And that is from Samuel Johnson's Lives.

[Thomas Banks]

Samuel Johnson's Lives of the Poets.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, and he said that again.

[Angelina Stanford]

I need to let that sink in.

[Thomas Banks]

Certainly.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. Now, Thomas, she mentioned that you have your commonplace book that you carry with you. Do you have anything in particular, like a particular commonplace book book that you use, a size.

[Thomas Banks]

I just use a journal. I mean, you know, like, I have some old Moleskine notebooks, the A5 size,

[Angelina Stanford]

for our bullet journal listeners out there. He carries around an A5 journal?

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, it was something. Actually, it wasn't something I began doing on my own. It was something I had to do in school in. I went to a private school, so we had to keep, you know, commonplace books for our reading. And it's a habit I kept up with over the years, and I. I don't necessarily have the best memory. Angelina could tell you for all sorts of things. So it's a way to help me remember what I've read.

[Cindy Rollins]

Have you ever had a concussion?

[Thomas Banks]

I've had some head injuries in my life.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay, I want you to read that. Would you please read that quote one more time? That is too good. It's too good. I want to let that sink in. That is so good.

[Thomas Banks]

Sorry, I just put the book down. So the quote from Samuel Johnson. Once again. It is not uncommon for those who have grown wise by the labor of others to add a little of their own and overlook. They're masters, Cindy.

[Angelina Stanford]

I feel like that you and I talk about that all the time.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, we do.

[Angelina Stanford]

You always say you have to acknowledge the chain. Right? The chain of thought. That as we synthesize other people's ideas with our own and we add. We can never forget the chain. Right. All of the.

[Cindy Rollins]

For me, it's become Extremely important to do that, because I do. I'm like the machine that takes in from all these places, then spits it out for other people. And I have to be. Everybody needs to be aware that this. I do not have an original thought in my head. And this is so much more fun than me having an original thought in my head. But to pretend like it came from me, that would be appalling. Absolutely appalling.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, gosh, we could spend the whole show just unpacking that quote. Man, there's so much to think about. I mean, there's. Obviously, there's plagiarism issues, which have become, in some circles, a big deal lately, last few years, with people failing to acknowledge the work of those who've come before. But if we just think about it on a personal level, you can see how if you're not constantly aware of all the shoulders of giants that you stand on. Right. That you're gonna lose humility. That's gonna lead to hubris.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. I think with the Internet, also, we have this massive amount of information, and people forget that there's a chain and that comes from somewhere. And it's easy to forget that with so much coming at you that you. That you ease. It can be easy to fail to give credit where credit is due.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

[Podcast Announcer/Host]

Absolutely.

[Angelina Stanford]

And it's one of the things that I think being widely read. I don't see how being widely read cannot lead to humility. I mean, my. One of my running jokes with my students is every time I think I have an original thought, I do a little research and find that CS Lewis already said it and said it better.

[Cindy Rollins]

I'm like that, too. I'm like, oh, I take that as

[Angelina Stanford]

a great affirmation, though, that I'm thinking the right thoughts. If Jackie, you know, gives me the thumbs up.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, you know, speaking of Samuel Johnson, I have a thing I love. I love hearing about him. I love that time period. And one of my lifelong goals, which I have failed over 25, 30 years that I've tried to do it, is to get entirely through Boswell's Life of Johnson. But unless I die soon, I am going to make it.

[Angelina Stanford]

I think.

[Cindy Rollins]

You've read it.

[Angelina Stanford]

You've read it, right?

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. It's one of those books that I think I've read it. I've read the whole thing, but I've read it. I know it was, like, in different settings and after long interruptions between. But, yeah, it is a fascinating book. Definitely deserves its reputation. Probably the greatest biography ever written.

[Angelina Stanford]

And Kind of set the form for the modern biography.

[Thomas Banks]

Very much so. Yeah. It's. Yeah. And you realize just, you know, what a fascinating eccentric Johnson was. He was one of the great. One of the great personalities of his time.

[Angelina Stanford]

And if you're listening to this, thinking, I would love to read some of this Samuel Johnson hang around, because two episodes from now or three episodes from now, we have a Samuel Johnson essay that we'll be closing off our summer series with. So.

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay, so no more about Johnson. We'll save our material for the kids

[Angelina Stanford]

now that we've gotten everybody excited about Samuel Johnson. All right, Cindy, what do you have for us?

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay, well, I had. I had. I'm gonna. I'm gonna switch back over here. I have a quote from Thomas Howard. He is Elizabeth Elliot's brother, and he is an Eliot Scholar, T.S. eliot Scholar. And he has a book called Dove Descending. And I took this quote. I like quotes like this because as an uneducated person, and not just for the sake of education, but where do I find the things that I should love? Where do I find the ordo amoris of life? And here's what Thomas Howard says. He says the Four Quartets stands as Eliot's valedictory to the modern world. I myself would place it, along with the Chartres Cathedral, the Divine Comedy, Van Eyck's Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, and the Mozart Requiem as a major edifice in the history of the Christian West. And I just thought that was. I just thought that was a nice little thing. It really helps me when people who love things that I don't understand point me in the right direction. And I'm thinking, now I want to go love those things. I need to go check them out.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, I've loved everything on that list except Eliot's Four Quartets, but that's because I haven't read it. So now I feel very compelled to

[Cindy Rollins]

go and read it. Yeah, I was a little hesitant because I wasn't sure if Thomas was a fan of Elliot. Elliot. And I don't know if I'm a fan of Elliot, but we did read the Four Quartets this year.

[Thomas Banks]

I feel sometimes I'm not smart enough to like Elliot. I enjoy some of his. I enjoy a number of his writings. I can't say I've ever read him on my own. I know that I should.

[Angelina Stanford]

I think I'm an Elliot cheerleader. Like, I want to stand on the sidelines and be like, yeah, you go fight that modernity. But I'm not going to swoon over anything. He writes.

[Cindy Rollins]

I think he has some great throwaway lines that probably aren't throwaway lines, but to me, they sound like throwaway lines. But anyway, that was my quote.

[Angelina Stanford]

But that is a great quote because that does inspire me. I've actually been thinking a lot about Elliot's murder in the cathedral, which I also have and have not read, but I keep reading about it in books that I read. Have you read that one?

[Thomas Banks]

No, that's the one about the murder of Thomas Beckett. No, I have not.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, I have read that.

[Angelina Stanford]

What do you think of it? I see. I told you, Mr. Banks. Cindy Rollins is so incredibly well read. You've read something Thomas Banks has not read.

[Cindy Rollins]

I know.

[Angelina Stanford]

A medal. I am mailing you a medal. That does not happen.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, it's. That is a short book, so it's not. It's a play and it's not very long, and it's. I enjoyed it. I mean, I didn't. It's not life changing. It wasn't life changing to. For me, but I did think it was. It goes great with. What is it? Which of the Richards it fits right in with? Is it Richard II'm so sorry.

[Angelina Stanford]

Henry, Richard, Henry Richard.

[Cindy Rollins]

I just get so lost.

[Angelina Stanford]

Assassinated.

[Cindy Rollins]

Henry ii. Henry ii. Yes, okay. Yes, it goes great with that.

[Angelina Stanford]

So, all right, so everybody listening has written down Samuel Johnson and T.S.

[Cindy Rollins]

eliot.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay, so here comes mine. So when we. When I knew we were gonna do a Joseph Addison essay, I immediately wanted to share my favorite Joseph quote. This is. I actually had this on a big poster in my classroom. My students would look at this every day. It's one of these quotes where I actually, earlier today, saw it misquoted on the Internet and attributed to the wrong person. And I started storming around saying, no, that's Joseph Addison that says that. Okay, so here's the quote. This is. You can commonplace this. You know, instead of that, you know how articles will say, tweet this. Now we're going to add commonplace this. Here we go. Reading is to the mind. What exercise is to the body. Joseph Addison said that. Here it is again.

[Cindy Rollins]

That's crazy.

[Angelina Stanford]

Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.

[Cindy Rollins]

I'm shocked that he said that because it sounds so modern.

[Angelina Stanford]

It does, doesn't it? It's very pithy. You know, but the neoclassical writers, I think, were very pithy. Yeah.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes.

[Thomas Banks]

Wit and being to the point and.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, it is. It is very pithy. I mean, it's one of those bumper sticker quotes.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, he's nothing if not pithy.

[Angelina Stanford]

I love that, though. And I'm gonna. You know, I was joking with Mr. Banks earlier that I was gonna make all kinds of jokes about why reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body. But one of the things that occurred to me is they are both the kinds of things that we make New Year's resolutions about.

[Cindy Rollins]

That is true. That is so true.

[Angelina Stanford]

Like, we do have a sense of, like, I need to do this thing. I need to read more, and I'm

[Cindy Rollins]

gonna get in shape every year. But, hey, I maintain.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right. Well, this podcast is gonna let one of those things come true.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes. We are not gonna be doing yoga in our reading, but we are going to try to get you to read more or.

[Angelina Stanford]

Or to make our spin off podcast.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, I mean, you know, you can be listening to Mr. Banks's audio files on the Patreon and do yoga to that. That could work.

[Cindy Rollins]

That's true. Maybe you guys should add a little backbeat to the. To the background.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yawny in the background.

[Thomas Banks]

The audience would love that, I'm sure. Actually, I wanted to go back. Can I go back to T.S. eliot for just a minute?

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes.

[Thomas Banks]

Okay. I just thought of something, and I thought that people might be interested. So he and C.S. lewis are, of course, contemporaries and had, I guess you could say, sort of a vexed relationship. CS Lewis had taken, I guess it said some critical things about T.S. eliot in his book A Preface to paradise lost. And T.S. eliot had, you know, taken it. Taken it hard. Their mutual friend Charles Williams, the novelist, decides that he wants to reconcile them. So he arranges this lunch where it's going to be a summit of, you know, the great minds. And T.S. eliot comes to this meeting, and C.S. lewis comes along, and they're both determined to be polite. But, you know, in those moments when you're determined to be polite to someone you don't really like, it's always going to be kind of tense. And T.S. eliot starts off by saying to Louis, it is good to meet you, Dr. Lewis. You are a slightly younger man than I expected you to be. And he was trying to be charming, like T.S. eliot was trying so hard to be charming. But that was not his. That was not his strong suit. And Lewis did not take this well and thought he was just being a condescending prig. And anyway, I think that they worked out their differences later on, but, yeah, that meeting did not achieve its intended result.

[Angelina Stanford]

That is hilarious. Okay, so Mr. Banks and I, we like to talk about, like, awkward literary moments, and just there's so many stories like this. And one of the things we've concluded is that we're not sure that we would want to be friends with most of the people we like to read.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, that's so sad. They are.

[Thomas Banks]

I feel that way, like, especially some of the great ones, like Jane Austen. I would be terrified to meet Jane Austen.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, well, that's true.

[Thomas Banks]

Fascinating. But, like, at the same time, I'd be thinking all the time, if I say something stupid, she's going to, like, take a.

[Cindy Rollins]

She's going to put you in a

[Thomas Banks]

book character, like some. Some stuffy clergyman in one of her novels or something.

[Angelina Stanford]

Now, Jane Austen is one of the people I do want to meet and hang out with, because I feel like she would stand in the back of the room with me and, like, make fun of everybody, and we would just have a uproariously.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, well, I can do that. Angelina.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, that's true. That's true. You are my Jane Austen. Yeah, we're just gonna.

[Cindy Rollins]

I mean, I might not be as witty as Jane, but I could actually stand in the back of the room and make fun of people.

[Angelina Stanford]

We could make comments like, you know, oh, you're. You're walking around the room four times.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes. Oh, are you networking?

[Angelina Stanford]

I think Samuel Johnson would be pretty funny to hang out with, though.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, yeah, well, he was. I mean, that's the definition of Samuel Johnson.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, yeah.

[Cindy Rollins]

Cool to hang out with.

[Angelina Stanford]

Absolutely.

[Podcast Announcer/Host]

Okay.

[Cindy Rollins]

All right.

[Angelina Stanford]

All right. We're gonna get carried away, but speaking of cool people to hang out with. Joseph Addison. I don't know if that's true or not. Someone on. I'll just introduce it this way. Someone on the Facebook group asked, what's the difference between a short story and an essay? And I thought this would be a really great opportunity for us to talk about the form of the essay. One of the reasons why I really wanted Mr. Banks on this episode is because not only is he the most devoted commonplacer I have ever met, he also is the most intense essay reader I have ever met. Now, he reads very widely. He's always got a novel going and a biography going and lots and lots of poetry going, but he every single day reads essays. Essay reading has never really been a big part of my literary life, so it has been utterly fascinating to me. And he'll stop and read parts of the essay to me, and I have begun to make essays more a part of my reading life. But I thought that it would be so great to bring him on today and to talk to us about the essay. So the first question I want us to explore is the question, what is an essay? And before I do that, I want to tell you that I looked this up in my giant English graduate school book of everything literature. And it had four pages on the essay and the first thing it said was this. I kid you not. First sentence classifying the essay has eluded human skill with that. Mr. Banks, tell us, what is an essay?

[Thomas Banks]

Well, I guess if I were to improvise a definition, I guess it would have to be something like. An essay is a piece of nonfiction, informal prose writing that has something whimsical about it. It's. I mean, that's a really bad definition. But an essay can. It is a nonfiction form and it can really be dedicated to anything. I mean, the first essayist is not English, but French. As you know, Michel de Montaigne, who wrote his book of essays in his leisure time he was a judge by profession, but in his leisure time he wrote a book of his own. Reflections on everything from thumbs. He has an essay on thumbs to.

[Angelina Stanford]

Of smells and odors.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, of smells and odors. To. On cannibalism, on penitence. I don't know if those two are related or not, but anyway, so he just wrote about anything that interested him and then had this book published, I think in the last 10 years or so of his life. It caught on in England. There was a big translation of Montaigne's essays by the Renaissance man of letters, John Florio, I think it was, and Shakespeare, I believe, would have known that translation. Shortly thereafter you have Francis Bacon making his contribution to the form and Bacon writes his book. Bacon's Book of Essays. I think the full title is A book of Essays and Councils, Moral Politic and Religious, or something like that. So it's kind of a self help book. Bacon's book is sort of a book of worldly wisdom for the aspiring Renaissance courtier to get ahead in life and, you know, known to know how to judge human motives and human behavior. And so it is interesting that it's the essay and the novel both come into existence around the same time.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, that is interesting because you have

[Thomas Banks]

Cervantes in the same generation as Montaigne and Francis Bacon. And yeah, it flourishes in the 17th and 18th centuries and of course it's still a form we have with us. Addison polished it, domesticated it, and it became a form of society writing in his hands. It's light. Edison's essays are all short. I don't think any of them is Longer than five pages or so to the point and, you know, kind of whimsical, always kind of, kind of humorous, self reflecting. Addison makes fun of himself in a lot of his papers and yeah, that kind of sets the tone for it.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's an extremely good concise history of the essay. I want to go back though, back to your boy Montaigne, because I think that we can start to kind of put together what are the traits of an essay if we can't like totally define all those.

[Podcast Announcer/Host]

I think you get a really good definition.

[Angelina Stanford]

So what did the word essay mean? Why did he choose that word?

[Thomas Banks]

So essay in French, same spelling, except with an I instead of a Y on the end. It simply means an attempt. So an attempt describes something, a trial. So sort of a trial balloon. It's the trial balloon of literary forms.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right, so. And I love that you're having an aha moment over there. So the difference between an essay and like a dissertation or a treatise. Right. Is that it's an attempt. It's like I'm thinking out loud, this is not meant to be my complete case. And so sometimes you'll see a difference in category between the formal and the informal essay. So the formal essay is much more like, you know, I'm presenting a science paper to a group of scientists. It's expert to expert and it's, it's very specific and it's going to make its case and it's going to have that formal feel to it. The informal essay though is to a general audience and it's. Well, it's almost like blogging. Right? Everybody.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, that's just hanging there, waiting to be said.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, right, like how everybody named their blog Musings. Right. Montaigne is attempt. Same kind of things. Like this is not meant to be my thought out dissertation. This is just some thoughts. And I love that you keep saying the word whimsical that came up in all of my reading, that there's something whimsical, informal, personal and more general, less like specialized topics. So general audience and less and more general topic.

[Cindy Rollins]

On that point, the Spectator was said to enliven morality with wit and to temper wit with morality.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes.

[Cindy Rollins]

That goes along with what you're saying. It was trying to say something, but it wasn't trying to say it very. In a real heavy handed sort of way.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. So what happens with the, in the, in the 18th century is you have the rise of the coffee houses, which I just, I love. Anytime, anytime. There's like a parallel to our own life. We did not invent coffee house culture. Right? We did not invent coffee house culture. So where we would go to the coffee house with our laughter and look at our news feed, and we know whatever our news aggregate source is, and we're reading the headlines of the day, that is what the 18th century man do. He'd go to the coffee house and order coffee and read the newspaper and discuss with people what was going on. And so this gave rise to these sort of periodicals that came out that were less, quote, unquote, newsy and more kind of fun. So Joseph Addison's longtime friend Richard still starts off with putting together a periodical called the Tattler, from which this essay is. And he wrote under a pen name, and he brought in writers like Joseph Addison and Jonathan Swift, and they all wrote under the same pen name, which was Sir Isaac Bickerstaff, Esquire, who basically is every man.

[Cindy Rollins]

Is that sort of what he said?

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, yeah, yeah. It kind of reminded me a little bit of Poor Richard's Almanac, Right? Like that same kind of kind of vibe. The idea why it was called a Tattler, which is. This is hilarious. It was a gossip rag. It was misunderstood. Meant to be coffeehouse gossip. Some real. Some made up and humorous, whimsical, like,

[Cindy Rollins]

I wish we could do that nowadays, but everybody's so serious, it gets their feelings hurt.

[Angelina Stanford]

No, it's true, though, that, you know, they poked a lot of fun at each other and that that lasted for two years. And then they did a spin off together, Addison and Steele, with the Spectator, which was, of course, a hugely popular periodical. Very, very influential. Huge influence on Charles Dickens, Pickwick Papers, a big influence on Jane Austen. I mean, pretty much anybody in the 18th century was influenced by the Spectator. So they kind of set the form. They set the form for the literary periodical, and they set the form for the length.

[Cindy Rollins]

And so we found from them then that the essay has five paragraphs. Just a joke.

[Angelina Stanford]

Very good, very good. But it occurred to me that we still. We still read. I mean, if you look at what people are reposting on Facebook, for example, it's articles, it's essays. The Atlantic, the New Yorker, that kind of stuff is very much, very much what gets circulated. And one of the things that I thought was so interesting and I want us to kind of try to unpack, because I don't know that I can fully unpack it. So this is going to be a good conversation, I think, is one of the. One of the essays on essays that I read said that. So we're talking primarily today about the informal essay. Not. Not like the formal essay. The informal essay falls into the realm of literature. And this is why we say essay is part of the literary life. So I started thinking about, like, how. Because there are a lot of fictional elements to this. Addison.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes. Yes, Itself is very fictional. And also they use fictional writers. This is. They don't think of themselves as themselves, as their writers.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. So they're writing as a. With a Persona. It's humorous. In fact, the whole. The whole essay is a dream sequence. Right. So that. That is actually coming out of the dream literature, vision literature of the Middle Ages. It's a long history, and until progress, either I lay down, I had a dream. Dante had a dream.

[Thomas Banks]

That's one of the. It's been a long time. Addison wrote in that form on a few occasions. There's another famous one of his called the Vision of Mira, which is. It's an Oriental tale. It's a Persian tale, sort of adapted to English uses. But it's him describing a dream of a faraway, distant country. And it sounds like he's describing Iran or perhaps Arabia or something like that. But, yeah, that would sort of fit in with that as well.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay, so my question then is, how do we distinguish the essay from the short story?

[Thomas Banks (reading poem)]

Hmm.

[Thomas Banks]

I mean, I. As with any sort of. Basically, I think where you began, the essay is nonfiction, a short story is fiction. I mean, that covers most of it right there. I mean, it seems that these are perhaps exceptions proving the rule. I guess that's kind of a lazy

[Angelina Stanford]

answer, but, no, I don't think so.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, I guess that's how I would approach it, the essay one distinction, if I could take this, distinguishing the essay from something more formal, like a thesis or a. Or a dissertation. Addison usually he doesn't set out. And Montaigne, to take it to its root, almost never sets out trying to prove something. So it's not necessarily. The informal essay usually doesn't have a case that needs to be proved. And if it is, then it's a good one. If it's not, then it's. Then it's an utter failure.

[Angelina Stanford]

So is it more a contemplation? Like, here's something to think about.

[Thomas Banks]

A contemplation. Yeah, I think that's absolutely a good way to look at it. Also a kind of a revelation of the author's personality, which would not be

[Angelina Stanford]

in a formal essay.

[Thomas Banks]

No.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, that's. No, that's very good. That's very good.

[Thomas Banks]

So Addison, also in Addison's Writing there's always. He always seems to be journeying after. He's a man in search of good sense. He's one word that he always uses in a pejorative sense. One word he always uses in a bad sense is enthusiasm, which is kind of strange. And this is something again in the 18th century. Voltaire, Samuel Johnson. Enthusiasm. If you say someone is enthusiastic, you're insulting them. This is a person who's, you know, sort of addle pated, crack brained.

[Angelina Stanford]

Too much fancy.

[Thomas Banks]

Exactly so. Exactly so. Too much fancy.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's along the lines of the best

[Cindy Rollins]

lack all conviction and the worst are full of passionate intensity. Is that the kind of enthusiasm like from Yeats?

[Thomas Banks]

That's an interesting comparison. I hadn't thought of that. But actually he would agree with the second half of that in the 18th century. So this, of course would be a generation after the English Civil War, after The Revolution of 1688, after all sorts of political passions had been running wild in England and the country was actually torn apart. I mean, there's actually the illusion, a couple of allusions to the English Civil War in the Adventures of the Schilling. So Addison and a lot of writers at the time, Alexander Pope, Oliver Goldsmith, are sort of presenting a new way of civilized intellectual living instead of pursuing political zealotry, enthusiasm, if you will. So let's moderate all of our passions. Let's be men of good sense. Alexander Pope's famous Know then thyself presume not God to scan the proper study of mankind is man. So it's. Yeah, it's a very secular age in a way. Which isn't to say that all of these men were, you know, God hating, irreligious anti clericals or something like that. But it's an age that's suspicious of the stronger passions.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay, this is extremely interesting. So something else I read said that the purpose of the informal essay is primarily to entertain. Would you agree with that?

[Thomas Banks]

I would say yes. I mean, in the 18th century there's always. You have to balance entertainment and instruction. Addison's essays seem to be much more. Yeah. Much more given to entertainment and charming than preaching, certainly. Interestingly, he was the son of a preacher. He was the son of. He was the son of a preacher who evidently was best known for plagiarizing a book. So I mean, once again we're bringing plagiarism into this. But yeah, Addison, I mean, he's not, I don't know what you would say. A severe, grave serious moralist. There are moral counsels attached to his Essay, but they always seem like afterthoughts. He's much more concerned to delight than to instruct.

[Angelina Stanford]

So I've got a quote here from Addison. Well, it's part quote, part paraphrase about what they were trying to do with the Spectator. He said that there are two types of Spectator papers. You have the serious essays on which they would talk about things like death, marriage, education, friendship, and then the occasional papers which dealt with, quote, folly, extravagance and caprice of the present age.

[Thomas Banks]

Could you read that again?

[Angelina Stanford]

Folly, caprice, folly, extravagance and caprice of the present age.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes, yes, certainly. There's a lot of satirical writing contained in the Spectator. I think he. He has one where he talks about. I think he found. He talks about dress and fashion, both men's and women's pretty, pretty often in these papers. And there's ones where he talks about how it can be distracting at a play when women are fanning themselves. When all the women are fanning themselves, you know, very, very ostentatiously. And he talks about how he starts speculating on whether women are drilled in fanning and the way that soldiers are drilled in the men.

[Cindy Rollins]

Has he ever been through menopause?

[Thomas Banks]

Again, it's a man's reflection on these things. He probably missed a lot, but

[Angelina Stanford]

I love that. Well, you know, and I know a lot of our listeners are big Chesterton fans, so Chesterton would definitely be the inheritor of this tradition of kind of writing. Right?

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, Chesterton was. Probably the bulk of his writing is his. His essay writing. He wrote for the Illustrated London News for, I'm gonna say, 30 years. His secretary remarked after his death that he could keep his mind running on several tracks at once and could write by hand one article himself while dictating a second to her. So, yeah, Chesterton, yeah. Hugely, hugely prolific essayist. And he, again, I mean, uses it for ed. Every purpose under the sun. I mean, he has his. One of his first essay collections is entitled the Defendant, which is a series of defenses of everyday objects. So a defense. Well, you had your defense of penny dreadfuls. That's from there. There's also a defense of skeletons and a defense of gargoyles in the same book. So just his rambling thoughts on all of these subjects designed to, again, instruct, but mostly to delight.

[Angelina Stanford]

And I think we saw that in that Chesterton essay. Very much a general audience, an informal topic, so more of a cultural conversation than something to prove. And he kind of pokes at where he thinks there's some elitism and some bad thinking. But it's not like he's trying to make a case that everyone should go out and read a penny dreadful.

[Thomas Banks]

No, no. And it's, it's one of the middle forms of writing the essay, whether it's Chesterton or Addison, because Addison had in mind a cultivated, intelligent, but not necessarily university educated audience. Again, so you could see why the essay has its origins in England anyway, in the form of journalism.

[Cindy Rollins]

What about Charles Lamb? Now he would be between Addison and Chesterton, I'm imagining.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah.

[Thomas Banks]

He's in the same tradition. Of course, he's writing in the Romantic era, so the form has loosened up. And of course he can take a lot of subject matter that a neoclassical writer probably would think beneath him. But Charles Lamb, yeah, he's best known for his. The collection is the Essays of Elia, I believe.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, that's another of my books that I have it and I definitely want to read it, at least some of it. I have read some of it, to be honest, but I haven't read all of it.

[Thomas Banks]

He's an endearing man. I like Charles Lamb a lot. I think he was a very. Whether or not he was a great writer, he was a very decent human being. And I read a book about him last year and he had absolutely tragic family life and always had a very attitude about it. I don't know if you know the story about his.

[Cindy Rollins]

With his sister Mary.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. Who suffered various mental breakdowns and I believe during one of them stabbed their mother.

[Angelina Stanford]

These are the tales from Shakespeare people.

[Thomas Banks]

These are the tales. Yeah. His sister. Yeah, she was mentally unbalanced. She had periods of lucidity in which she could write and do her own work. But yeah, she killed their mother in a fit of insanity. And after that he wanted to make sure that she wasn't put in a common in Bedlam, which would have been a horrible experience at that time. So he, you know, have her moved in with him and dedicated his life to taking care of her. And I think there's, you know, he was an honorable person. He's, you know, maybe as a writer, not everyone's cup of tea, but I enjoy him very much now and again.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, that is fascinating and gosh, this is a terrible segue, but this is what I planned to say before he told this story. So I'm just gonna keep. I'm just gonna roll with it because it's what's next on my list here. But when you get to the more romantic essayist, that period, and this is fitting the romantic period they say they start to be even more autobiographical in their writing than the neoclassical writers.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, Thomas de Quincey and that generation. I mean, Thomas de Quincey is an essayist, Is, again, very prolific. Thomas de Quincey, for anyone who doesn't know the name, is probably best known for his book, the Confessions of an English Opium Eater.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, right.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. Which is kind of. I mean, I guess it has kind of a maybe dubious. Dubious reputation. It is actually a fascinating book, but it's the original drug memoir. So the William Burroughs, that type of writing that begins with Thomas de Quincey, it's not easygoing. It's one of those books best read in small doses. But it is an interesting portrayal of his own mind.

[Cindy Rollins]

Now, wasn't de Quincey. Didn't he have something to do with the Lake District?

[Thomas Banks]

He was acquainted with Coleridge and Wordsworth.

[Cindy Rollins]

I think he must have visited Wordsworth there.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, he wrote about Wordsworth. I think he wrote, actually. Yes. My First Visit to the Lake Poets. I think that is a title of his.

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay. For some reason, from going there last time his name came up.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. It's kind of interesting that he could write that book. I mean, he didn't write it. It to offend people. He didn't write his book, the book about his opium addiction, to offend public opinion. But it's strange that a lot of people thought that at that age, you know, opium was not something that's necessarily that harmful and is a respectable intoxicant, almost.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, there were opium dims. That was all public.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, it was. Yeah. He casually talks about seeing William Wilberforce and, you know, getting opium. Wilberforce had, you know, like, awful. Awful health issues that caused his doctors to prescribe it to him. But, I mean. Yeah, that was just. It's. It was oddly taken for granted as a part of. As a part of the medical life of the day.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, that really brings up how we have to be careful when we're reading not to put our values on the past because we have information they didn't have. Dorothy Sayers in Murder Must advertise. She's talking about some of these cigarette ads that go out, and many of them were, like, the doctors recommend, if you have. You have lung problems, try smoking.

[Thomas Banks]

Sure. Yep.

[Cindy Rollins]

Like, okay. That was just the worst possible.

[Angelina Stanford]

You know, I have seen an old cigarette ad, and it's a pregnant woman in the ad, and it said, smoking will have a lower birth weight for your baby. And it was presented positively, like, it'll be so much Easier to pop these babies out. They'll be so tiny. Keep smoking.

[Cindy Rollins]

Wow, that is so interesting.

[Angelina Stanford]

So, yeah. Well, it also is a reminder to be careful with the expert culture because the experts are often wrong.

[Cindy Rollins]

So we've named a few famous essayists. What are some other essayists from that romantic period or Moving On?

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, moving on, we've got George Orwell. And so we'll be reading one of his why I Write. Talk about confessional.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, I mean, Lewis wrote a lot of essays.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Orwell again. I mean, as with Chesterton, we know him a lot for other things. We know him primarily as the author of 1984 and Animal Farm. He wrote the two great political allegories of the last century. But then, yeah, most of his bread and butter writing was in the form of casual journalism, essay writing. He has one. There's so many good ones with Orwell, I couldn't pick a favorite with him, but one that is a delight to read. It's three pages long. It's Thoughts on the Common Toad. And he says in is a wonderful thing how even in the times of war, prison camps, totalitarianism. This is, of course, written During World War II, nature can go on existing unofficially. And he sat down to write this essay, evidently because he'd been getting all sorts of mail complaining whenever he wrote something for pleasure as opposed to something with a definite political purpose. And he said, no, you need to sit down every once in a while and contemplate a common toad or some rose bushes or something like that to, you know, to stay sane.

[Angelina Stanford]

I feel like Shirley Mason would have something to say about that. Cindy.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, she would. Well, she. Education is the science of relations. I mean, you start talking about the common toad, and the next thing you know, you've discovered some principle of life that you didn't even realize existed.

[Angelina Stanford]

No, that. That's absolutely true. So you, Thomas, you do read a lot of essays. That's a big part of your life. Why do you like essays? And related to that is, what do you think makes a good essay? What draws you to an essay?

[Thomas Banks]

When I'm drawn to an essay, it's. Man, it could be any number of things. I mean, there are some authors I find are good company. There are authors you read because they're geniuses. Then there's authors you read because they're good company.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, I love that.

[Thomas Banks]

Addison for me, is a. Joseph Addison, for me is a good company author. I think I first read him in ninth grade. I think he was part of our curriculum in Ninth grade. And yeah, Montaigne also is a good company author. It's hard to say exactly what you learn from reading Montaigne, but I always feel that my sympathies are richer after reading him. And what makes a. It almost seems like to be a good essayist, one has kind of not to be a genius, because, I mean, Addison is not, you know, John Locke or Thomas Hobbes. He's not a great philosopher, but you get the impression reading him that you're in the presence of someone deeply and commendably human. And I think that holds true for the form itself.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, that's wonderful.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. Orwell also, actually, Christopher Hitchens, in his book about Orwell, said that with Orwell, it's common sense and absolute honesty that one responds to, because he says, once again, this is a man who is emphatically not a genius. He's not James Joyce. He's not recreating the language. He writes very plainly, very directly. But at the same time, Orwell can expose the great evils of some of the bad ideas of the 20th century, perhaps more memorably than almost anyone else in, you know, in 1984, in Animal Farm. So, yeah, for me, the essay, it's. I'd like to be in. I'd like to be in good company in my. In my private reading life.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, that's one that's wonderful. I love that. I feel all goofy now. Just. Pardon me.

[Cindy Rollins]

I think that essays would be a good addition to something like a regular daily morning time or something. Just, you know, when you have time, you know, I'm going to read an essay or I'm going to read a scene from Shakespeare each day.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, fortunately, essays are short by definition. Right. So that helps. And this one was short. So let us go ahead and turn our attention to Joseph Addison's the Adventure of a Shilling. Why did you pick this one, Thomas? Why this one?

[Thomas Banks]

This one, it happened to be one that I have taught to my two 10th grade students on a number of occasions. And one of the earlier examples of a tale narrated by an inanimate object. And I found that approach caught my memory the first time I read it. I read it for the first time, I think, in college, and it's always, always stuck with me.

[Angelina Stanford]

I love that, though, the fact that it is narrated by an inanimate object. There's a sort of naive neutrality. What I mean is the reader understands the significance of what's happening and the narrator does not.

[Thomas Banks]

Yes. Yeah, there is that kind of. That kind of dramatic Irony in it.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, the first thing I wanted to do was to ask Mr. Banks if he would read to us the Latin epigram here and then translate it for us.

[Thomas Banks]

So, yeah, at the heading of the essay, there's a quotation from Virgil's Aeneid, book 1. Per varios casus, pertot discrimina rerum tendimus. It's through various chances and changes of things we make our way. That'd be the rough translation. John Dryden translates through various hazards and events which we move.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, I like your accent. What pronunciation do you use?

[Thomas Banks]

I learned to. I've had so many different Latin teachers in my life that mine is. When I read Latin, I read it in the way that strikes my ear best, which is to say not very systematically and probably with some inaccuracies. But yeah, basically, I know ecclesiastical Latin as my.

[Cindy Rollins]

It's sort. You make it sound Italian, which makes sense.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes, I know. This is how he won me over on our first day. You know, he just quoted all that Latin from memory, and I was like, I've actually. Should I say this? I've actually convinced him to do a recording of Book 1 of the Aeneid in Latin.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, my. I will listen to it, even though I'm not understanding.

[Angelina Stanford]

That quote is from book one. That is when Aeneas is telling his story to Dido. The story of, I've been wandering around and here's my story, so that you could see why that's appropriate for the essay. All right, so here we are. Cindy, I know you have something to say about that first paragraph.

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, I found the first paragraph before we get into the actual essay, where. I mean, the actual adventures of the Schilling, we have this little discourse on the life of business, and it just really reminded me of this idea of leisure as being the basis of culture. It talks about how, whether, let's see, that it required much greater talents to fill up and become a retired life than a life of business. So if your whole life is on you, like many moms are, we semi live a retired life. It's up to us to fill it. That's a much harder job, filling your own life than it is for, say, someone to tell you what you have to do next and you go out and do it. And. And that's why I think many people prefer, many women would rather go out and work in the workforce, where there's clear boundaries and everything somebody else's fault, than to be responsible for their own life and their own decisions in their own homes. That's a big responsibility.

[Angelina Stanford]

It is. I'm so glad you brought that up. I mean, we read articles all the time about how people retire from business and then die.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, yes. They don't know how to fill their time.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's right. And that is a skill, and it's hard work. I completely agree with that. You have to cultivate those habits.

[Cindy Rollins]

And I think today this podcast is giving people another idea of something they can fill their time with.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, amen to that.

[Cindy Rollins]

You skipped the essay. Maybe the essay hasn't seemed like an important part of your life, but if you're. If you're looking for a few spare minutes, we have an idea of what you can fill it with.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, yeah, and they're short and they're complete.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes. But anyway, I just thought that was. It reminded me so much of the concept of leisure being the basis of culture. And I don't know that he was trying to make any great point about it, but I think he was making a very good point. It's a rough responsibility to be responsible for your time.

[Thomas Banks]

Cindy, you refer to Leisure, the Basis of Culture, the book by Joseph the Journalist Keeper.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, yes.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, I read that one a couple years ago in faculty meetings, and that was. That was. I thought that that was a very humane and a very wise book.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. And what my. The conclusions that I drew from that after I read it was that the. And most of our listeners have probably heard me say this, but that the mother at home is the last bastion of the leisure classes in our culture, and she does have the ability to be educated and to fill her time with education, you have to have leisure. And our culture is lacking in leisure in so many ways. Not to mention that we're distracted. But the mom who is at home with time, not time, that's completely her own, but with time that she controls in some way has the ability to choose in those little moments, the right, you know, to educate herself.

[Thomas Banks]

A hundred years ago, more than 100 years ago, probably more like 125 years ago, Henry James made, I mean, I think something of the same point that you're making. He said that if you look at the literary societies and book clubs in Boston, London, New York, it's 90%, 90% consistency women. He said, that's my living as a writer right there. I mean, I. So, yeah, I guess, sort of plus a change. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, I think I read that this week. Looking up about the essay were that most of these essay writers knew that their Audience was women. And maybe it's because of this little paragraph right here that the businessmen were off doing business, but it took the leisured person to have time to read the essay.

[Thomas Banks]

Jane Austen also seems to intimate in a couple of places in her books that novel reading. I'm sorry if I'm taking this off on a beaten track here, but novel reading is also was in her time considered a feminine preoccupation.

[Podcast Announcer/Host]

Oh, yeah, Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

I was just reading some articles recently of some preachers speaking out against the evils of novel reading because it was something that women were doing in their spare time and they thought perhaps it was not edifying.

[Cindy Rollins]

So many places we could go with that. Oh, my goodness. I know Hudson Taylor was very anti novel reading, which when I read his biography, which I thoroughly enjoyed, I still felt a little badly because I thought, I don't agree with you, Hudson.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, you know, I think when you take this idea of the life of leisure versus the business life, I think that calls us back to remember what our aims are with education, Whether it's self education or the education of someone else, it's got to be a big. Whatever the vision is, it's got to be bigger than just so I can get a job. Right. Because you have a whole life to cultivate. And I think part of what we've seen as a culture as education has become more and more oriented toward a job. Okay. Is that even people in the business world have no idea what to do in their leisure time.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes. Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

I've been thinking a whole lot about how. Because we don't know how to deliberately cultivate leisure time, like, what are we supposed to be doing with our time off? We end up just killing time all the time. Right. We're playing, you know, we're playing solitaire and free sell in mind. You know, all of these games that we're just sort of halfway giving our attention to. We're scrolling through social media kind of halfway giving our. We're just killing the time between the job because we don't know what we're supposed to be doing.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right. And I think part of the problem is that we think of everything. Like, if we're gonna read a novel, we think, oh, that's 10 hours. We don't think, oh, I'm gonna read a chapter, that's 10 minutes. You know, we think of the big picture instead of the small picture. Like, if I just plod away here for five minutes, or I'm walking around the house doing my steps, if I'm only gonna walk for two minutes. But I turn on the audiobook while I walk. That's still two minutes that I've had thinking about something. Or I could just think also, which is also a good idea.

[Angelina Stanford]

I'm just spitballing here, but how much do you think the tension around the question of should women have quote unquote careers? Really kind of centers around the idea that as a culture we don't value leisure life because we don't know what it does. Does that make sense? I feel like I'm kind of.

[Cindy Rollins]

Absolutely. I think that's the heart of it. I think that we don't value leisure because we think of it as a negative and we don't understand the purpose of leisure and the historical significance of leisure. But I mean.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right, but it's in the leisure time that culture is created.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right. Because the liberal arts were the arts of the free man, the man who had leisure, whereas the servile arts were the arts of the slave, the slave, the person who had to serve. And I don't mean serve in a good way, like we serve our families, but not that. Not that those people were bad people and these were good people. But if you have leisure, it's a gift you've been given to use for. Like David Hicks says, the leisured person has a responsibility to use his time wisely for the betterment of himself and the culture around him.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, that's so good. And one of the things that strikes me is that our modern culture, we actually have more leisure time in theory than any other culture because we have nothing but time saving devices. Take all day to wash clothes. You didn't have to go kill a cow for dinner. We have so much. We have more free time than anyone historically has ever had, and we don't know what to do with it.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, that. That is so true.

[Angelina Stanford]

And so we're frenzied and we're restless

[Cindy Rollins]

and we're distracted and then we do

[Angelina Stanford]

not know how to cultivate the incredible gift that we've been given. We've been given this gift of leisure and we don't know what to do with it.

[Thomas Banks]

Learn how to use it as. Yeah, one of those, one of those species of wisdom that you. I mean, I never thought about that when I was young, of course. And it's, it's one of those gifts that you wish you could have given yourself early on. It's a. It's like the quote that I have in mind is from, from Blaise Pascal in his Penses where he says most of the evil I'm paraphrasing badly. Most of the evil that man does stems from the fact that he cannot sit still in a room.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, wow.

[Thomas Banks]

So. And that's in the 17th century. So, I mean, I guess that's, you know, probably now.

[Cindy Rollins]

Now we've drugged it. We've drugged ourselves with. So we don't do any evil. We just sit.

[Angelina Stanford]

But even our entertainment is kind of that way. Right? Numbing.

[Cindy Rollins]

Numbing, yes, very much so. Well, let's start. Let's get off to the penny. The penny.

[Angelina Stanford]

Let's do it.

[Cindy Rollins]

So I immediately. It took me. My brain did not work quickly. When he said he was born on the side of a mountain, I'm like, what do you mean, in Peru? But then I figured it out because he said ingot. Thank the Lord.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right, so what we have here is a literary device here. It's a little fantasy story of the history of England being told from the perspective of what was at first, I guess, a precious metal that was mined. And then it becomes a coin.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, yes. And we see that throughout. It took me another while to figure out why he kept saying, and they hammered him, and they hammered him and his picture changed. But because our money is so different than this, because this is a gold standard money. This is not. Throw away your penny and there's just another penny somewhere else to take its place. This penny had to be stamped accordingly to the time. So the gold itself stayed the same, but the pictures changed.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. And you get a sense here. So you get. You get the sense of England's the Exploration Age, and then how quickly the British Empire kind of explodes during that golden age. He's being passed all around.

[Cindy Rollins]

Right. So he had the face of Queen Elizabeth on him right away. And.

[Angelina Stanford]

And then he gets to the part about the English Civil War. And here's where you get to see. To see Addison making some comments on what he thought of that through the. Through the shilling.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. So he doesn't seem to have a very high view of. What does he say? He regrets that. Oh, let me find the passage right here. Yeah. So I was used to. In veil country fellows enlist them in the service of the Parliament. So he feels like he's betrayed, you know, betrayed England because he was, you know, used to bribe soldiers.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. And you get Addison.

[Thomas Banks]

Sure. His idea seems to be that Addison seems to be for the King and against the Parliament and thinks that this is just a national tragedy and it

[Cindy Rollins]

was good that he was flung aside and remained hidden for the rest of that time.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. That was really funny when he says he realized that's what saved him from having to wear a monstrous pair of britches. Because we looked that up. Tom, you want to say what you.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. So the money that was much of the coinage that was minted during the interregnum when Cromwell ruled England had a figure with the big baggy men's breeches of the time on the reverse of the coins. So the coin is thankful that he wasn't restamped with such a bad fashion choice forced upon him.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, that's funny.

[Angelina Stanford]

The coin is obviously a royal.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah, it looks like his is a royalist coin.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, he refers to it as the usurpation of Oliver Cromwell. There you go. That's pretty clear.

[Cindy Rollins]

And people still have quite strong. Just like American Civil. America's Civil War. We have very strong opinions about the English Civil War.

[Thomas Banks]

So fast forwarding a couple hundred years to the latter 19th century, end of the Victorian era, the House of Commons, I believe was voted to set up a monument in honor of, of Oliver Cromwell, which at that time was a very controversial thing still to do. And Queen Victoria said, you know, she refused to attend any ceremony in which this statue was unveiled because this is, you know, this is a man who, you know, overthrew the monarchy and you know, one of their, one of their, you know, principal institutions. So.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, yes, I could see that she would not like that at all.

[Thomas Banks]

No, not at all.

[Angelina Stanford]

So that part of the essay is dealing with something I guess, a little more heavy, but he's also got some really humorous light hearted stuff. I thought the stuff about trying to seduce a milkmaid was pretty funny. Yes, the wench bent me and gave me to her sweetheart.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, I was trying to figure that out. How did she bend it?

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, is that the way they bite the coin?

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. Since it's a pure coin, it's presumably a pure silver coin that's a fairly malleable or what the word be. Ductile anyway, a fairly bendable, which is why a lot of old coins you look at aren't perfectly round because they've been handled so much and you know, treated to all sorts of rough usage such that they lose their shape.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. Yes. And he says a soft silver sound in the beginning. So it is a soft.

[Thomas Banks]

Exactly.

[Cindy Rollins]

So, okay, so that makes sense because I was trying to figure that out. I thought, well, but I guess people used to bite coins too when they were trying to find out if they were like true or filled with something else or.

[Thomas Banks]

And another interesting thing at the end, there's the Great. This very pathetic section where he's disfigured. So a counterfeiter gets a hold of him and shears off my titles, clipped my brims, retrenched my shape, rubbed me to my inmost ring, and in short, so spoiled and pillaged me that he did not leave me worth a groat. Evidently this was a really common practice because they didn't have coins in those days with milled edges, with the rough edges.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, right.

[Thomas Banks]

Since coins aren't very often are not perfectly round to begin with, it's hard to tell if one has had a bit of metal trimmed off the edge. Counterfeiters would do this. They would shear a bit of metal off the edge of a coin, a silver or gold coin. Do that a number of times with a lot of different coins, and you might have enough to melt down, make into a bar, which you can then take to your local goldsmith and make a fortune off of. So evidently this was something that the government in those days really cracked down hard. And the diarist, John Evelyn, I think it is, records seeing a woman being taken to Smithfield to be executed for doing this, because she had evidently bribed a lot of servants, ladies in waiting in her neighborhood, you know, people who had handling of rich people's money to, you know, bring them by her, and she would trim a bit of metal off and, you know, make her living that way. So it was. It was a common, common form of petty crime.

[Cindy Rollins]

And it really could bring. Bring things to a halt, if it can. If it was just so easy to do and everybody was doing it, then it would.

[Angelina Stanford]

And it caused inflation. It caused inflation. The coin was worthless. They were debasing the currency by doing that.

[Cindy Rollins]

So to find out how much it was worth, you had to weigh it, is that correct?

[Thomas Banks]

I think that would be the case, yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

I think we might want to address the sex change at the end, explain what that was.

[Thomas Banks]

That definitely raises your eyebrow. The 21st century, the passage. So in the midst of this general calamity, when everybody thought our misfortune irretrievable, him and his fellow coins and our case desperate, we were thrown into the furnace together. And as it often happens with cities rising out of a fire, appeared with greater beauty and luster than we could ever boast of before. What has happened to me since this change of sex, which you now see, I shall take some opportunity to relate to. So he's. Presumably, it's a new monarch again, but

[Angelina Stanford]

it's now it's a man.

[Thomas Banks]

But now it's a man.

[Angelina Stanford]

He had been a woman. He had been Queen Elizabeth.

[Thomas Banks]

Right. So it's in the Restoration now. So it would be Charles ii.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right.

[Thomas Banks]

So he was Queen Elizabeth's coin. Now he's Charles II's coin, which means

[Angelina Stanford]

he had Queen Elizabeth's face imprinted on it. And then now a man. So that's his sex change.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, okay, okay. Yes. Okay. I was thinking he just changed from a shilling to something else. But he didn't. He still to schelling. He just had to have his. His face changed. Right.

[Angelina Stanford]

He was re stamped with the new monarch. And I love that he ended up. He's so beautiful. He's now inspired a poem.

[Cindy Rollins]

Okay, so. Yes. So he. And this is true then apparently there was a famous burlesque poem called the Splendid Shilling, which.

[Angelina Stanford]

Very good. I looked that up too.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. And it was a takeoff of Milton. It was a. Like a parody of Milton and Milton

[Angelina Stanford]

who wrote formal essays. So are pagitica is Milton's defense of freedom of the press. Free speech.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, that's right.

[Angelina Stanford]

That's very formal. That's not whimsical and humorous and just musings. That is.

[Cindy Rollins]

Could anybody ever accuse Milton of being whimsical or. I was thinking the same thing.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah.

[Thomas Banks]

Does Milton never tell a joke?

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes, when I consider how my joke is spent.

[Thomas Banks]

Right.

[Cindy Rollins]

There we go. Angelina. We'll have to everybody put in their Milton parodies, please.

[Angelina Stanford]

Oh, there is. There is no right or wrong that laughing does not make it so.

[Cindy Rollins]

There you go. All right.

[Angelina Stanford]

There you go.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, so. Well, I like. The last line is very funny because. I mean the last little part because he says I was given away in charity to a blind man. But indeed this was by a man mistake which the person who gave me heedlessly threw me into the hat among a pennyworth of farthings, which are the least of all the coinage. So basically the person was trying to give a farthing and he accidentally gave. Didn't we have a story recently where this idea of charity came up?

[Angelina Stanford]

Araby.

[Cindy Rollins]

Araby, that's right. And he accidentally doing something for charity. Or. Or doing it to be thought of as doing something for charity, but not really being charitable at all.

[Thomas Banks]

I have to say most of what I know about pre decimalization English money I've learned from essays from English literature generally. But from this essay in particular, I

[Angelina Stanford]

really thought the funny where he. The section where he falls in with the Scrooge guy who locks him away in a chest with the other. He described it as his imprisonment and he Would never be free.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, yeah, that was a very fascinating episode because it was. We all relate to that. That's something that happens to money.

[Angelina Stanford]

But then when the old man's heir broke it through, I mean, there's a. There's a lot to be said about that that you're. You can't. Well, we can be cliche here. You can't take it with you. Right. So the miser's heirs got all this money he was saving.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah.

[Angelina Stanford]

I love that he separated us that very day.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. Yes. And yes. He immediately went out and spent it on what, sack or something. It was.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yep, yep. And then. And then we see how it gets passed from person to person. So now it's back in circulation in the economy.

[Thomas Banks]

Yeah. So I was sent to the. To the apothecary shop for a pint of sack. The apothecary gave me to an herb woman, the herb woman to a butcher, the butcher to a brewer, and the brewer to his wife, who made a present of me to a non conformist preacher.

[Cindy Rollins]

Oh, yes.

[Thomas Banks]

I can't tell if that's like. If that's like an Anglican joke against the non. Anglican. Anglican clergy. It's almost like there's a. He sees. Addison sees sort of social dissent here. The apothecary above the herb woman, the herb woman above the butcher, and then finally the non conformist preacher at the bottom of this list of the lower professions. But no, I thought that was. That was a funny piece of. A funny piece.

[Cindy Rollins]

That was hilarious. And Dickens does that, I think, a lot, too, where he has the women that. The women who are for a cause that. The suffragette, but really the Christian woman who is falling for some preacher.

[Angelina Stanford]

Mm. Well, Dickens was very influenced by Addison and Steele, so that was good that you're picking up on the Dickens feel. Very much so. I thought the next sentence was great. After this manner, I made my way merrily through the world for, as I told you before, we shillings love nothing so much as traveling. And I kind of felt like this is. This is Addison's economic appeal here, that you got to keep spending money. You got to spread the economy on.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes. You know, there was a time in my life when I really didn't understand this, as most young people don't. I had one of my sons one time said. I said, don't turn the air conditioner down. That costs money. And he was like, oh, my goodness, you're not going to tell me it costs us money to change the temperature of the house? I'm like, yeah, I am going to tell you that. And he was way too old to say that, but he knows now because he pays his own bills. Yeah, but that whole. That whole concept of money, you know, like somehow if I don't spend money, then that's better for everybody. But there is a sense that if we spend money, it's also better for everybody.

[Thomas Banks]

Addison, he. Commerce fascinated him. And one of his other essays is. It's kind of funny now to read it. It's a visit to the Royal Exchange. So the Royal Exchange would be the English version of the stock market. And he goes to this Royal Exchange and he looks around him and he sees investments being made in joint stock companies which have far off headquarters in Brazil or in the West Indies, and negotiations being made with Dutch and Scottish businessmen. And he reflects that this is sort of the way that men are civilized. This is one of the ways in which peace is made between nations. If we all just spend enough money, we'll all be friends because all of our interests will be tied together, which is. We get a naive idea. But it's kind of interesting to look back and probably that does not actually solve all the problems in the world, but it's kind of. It reveals him to be, I guess, a very ingenuous personality, that he could see it that way in any case.

[Angelina Stanford]

No, but a lot of modern thinkers see it that way, too. That's why you have trade embargoes and things saying the best thing to do is to have trade with these countries and that'll smooth everything over.

[Cindy Rollins]

And also it opens the door, though, also for charlatans to come in and say, I have a diamond mind. And, you know, Brazil, and everybody invests in it, and then they all lose their. I mean, didn't that happen a few times during that time?

[Angelina Stanford]

Yeah, there's some novels that deal with that.

[Thomas Banks]

There was the South Sea Bubble. So that was the first. One of the first examples in England of a stock market crash. Because there was this. The South Sea Company. I don't know what they traded in exactly, but everyone was investing in this company. And then the stocks are skyrocketing and then they just fall through the floor. And that was a national crisis. That was one of those fears that everyone kind of has at the back of their mind now the idea of the stock market crashing that began at that time, the wild speculation, knowing that you can lose all of your money overnight in that kind of investment.

[Angelina Stanford]

I also really liked the paragraph about the reading of the will and how he threw the shilling out of disgust when he realized he was disinherited.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes, yes, yes. I thought that was good, too.

[Angelina Stanford]

And he fell under a wall and was there, undiscovered and useless.

[Podcast Announcer/Host]

That was great.

[Cindy Rollins]

That was great. Yeah. I think it was a delightful essay.

[Thomas Banks]

I had one further thought. Okay, this is interesting. Addison. We remember him for his essays. He was very well known in his own day as a playwright. He wrote a tragedy called Cato, which was hugely popular. And it's a study of the Roman statesman Cato the Younger, during the last day of his life, contemplating whether he should resist Julius Caesar and stand up for the Republic or just submit and surrender. This was an internationally popular play. And during the American Revolution, George Washington had a theater company come to Valley Forge to. I don't know why he thought this would cheer his men up. Maybe it did, I don't know. But to present Cato, a tragedy which is in praise of Stoicism and the sterner Republican virtues. And it's one of the most widely quoted plays of its era. Even another Revolutionary War anecdote. Nathan Hale. I regret that I have but one life to give for my country. That's Joseph Addison. Actually, that's a quotation from no way. No Way.

[Angelina Stanford]

You heard it here first, folks. One of our great American history quotes. One of our bumper sticker quotes is from a play. Yep.

[Thomas Banks]

British.

[Angelina Stanford]

A British play about the Romans.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yep.

[Angelina Stanford]

That is fascinating. I almost want to just end on that note. That is so good. The other thing that I was thinking about. So I won't end on that note because I'm just horrible. I'm gonna keep talking. So Joseph Addison was good friends and co wrote a lot of things with Jonathan Swift. And this feels very Gulliver's Travels to me because Jonathan Swift does the same sort of thing where you're going, where he's creating these little adventures where you can see England through new eyes by being in these fantasy islands.

[Thomas Banks]

You know, if I were to think. Thinking of, you know, the comparison that you've drawn, Angelina, between Addison and Swift. Have either of you ever read the Battle of the Books?

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes.

[Thomas Banks]

So Jonathan Swift. So the Battle of the Books, it's again, one of his fantasy writings. He imagines this, the contents of this giant library at night going to war with each other with the ancients fighting against the moderns. Which, again, is a very important intellectual controversy, whether modern authors can supersede the ancients, Homer and Virgil and whatnot, or whether those will always be the masters. And it's a delightful piece of writing. And, yeah, I kind of fancy.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, that makes us go full circle to your Samuel Johnson quote about forgetting your masters. Because the ancients versus the moderns was exactly about that. That the moderns wanted to forget the shoulders they had stood on. And Jonathan Swift was of the position. You can't despise your master.

[Thomas Banks]

No, absolutely not. Actually, he takes some really mean shots in that piece, too. So Jonathan. No, not Jonathan. John Dryden, who's contemporary, another one of their contemporaries, great poet of the same age, had translated the Aeneid into English. And Swift, if I remember correctly, describes Dryden as. Dryden is a mouse who tries to put on this giant suit of armor, which is Virgil, but he can't. He can't shift it. He's a mouse in armor. So his allegiances were with the ancients.

[Cindy Rollins]

So he thought. He didn't want them translated either. He just wanted them to be.

[Thomas Banks]

I don't even. Maybe he just didn't want Dryden to translate.

[Angelina Stanford]

We should do that one, though. We should do. We should do this essay, Cindy. We should do the battle of the battle.

[Cindy Rollins]

I think we should. Is it. How long is it?

[Thomas Banks]

It's. I'm gonna say it's 20 pages.

[Cindy Rollins]

I've heard about it, but I'm not. I may have read it, but if I did, it would have been.

[Angelina Stanford]

Well, if you remember from my talk I gave in that last conference.

[Cindy Rollins]

We did. That's right.

[Angelina Stanford]

Charles Perrault, the French fairy tale writer, was involved in that Ancients versus Moderns controversy.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah. I mean, I'm sure we're still at that point of ancients versus. I mean, so many. So many arguments in the Charlotte Mason world come down to that.

[Angelina Stanford]

Right. Do the ancients have any wisdom to offer us today, or do we need modern voices for modern ears?

[Cindy Rollins]

Well, we won't probably solve that today, but I'm sure we all.

[Angelina Stanford]

But it certainly. It gives us a good segue into why we read, why do we read broadly and why do we read old. Because we want to hear voices from the past.

[Cindy Rollins]

So do you. Do you read, Thomas? Do you have a plan of reading? That is, before we wrap things up here. Do you. Do you read modern novels at all, or do you stick with it, with the ancients? We'll have to have you back on to find out.

[Thomas Banks]

I don't read very much contemporary literature, but I do have. There are some. I mean, there are living writers, there are living poets and novelists whom I enjoy and respect very much. Living poets, I guess, just sticking to poets. I think that Sarah Rudin and you like AE Stallings. Yeah. Alicia Stallings, I think, are very, very gifted lyric poets who will deserve their place in the canon. J.M. wilson, Dana Gioia. I could go on. But, yeah, poetry is not dead. I mean, it's still being written. Formal verse is still being written, and it's not finished.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yes. Yes.

[Thomas Banks]

Thank God.

[Angelina Stanford]

Yes, thank God. Thank God. Well, I think. I think we did it. We've been talking for quite a while here, and I really like this episode. I was excited to talk about this. I was excited to talk about what makes an essay and why that should be part of our reading lives. I am trying to make it a more deliberate part of my reading life. I have a. I started with a volume of C.S. lewis essays, and they're so short. They're like two pages.

[Cindy Rollins]

And, yeah, they are very short.

[Angelina Stanford]

I'm reading one one a day, and I'm quite enjoying them. And I feel like each little essay kind of gives me another little, you know, picture of what he's trying to do with his fiction. He's giving me a fuller picture of him, I think. Yeah, they're very much snippets. They're just snippets. They're musings.

[Cindy Rollins]

I always say with Lewis, it really doesn't matter what he says. He just says it so well. It's fun to listen to him, even if you. You don't get it. Sometimes I'm like, I read the Problem of Pain, and half the time I was like, I don't know what he just said, but he just said it so well.

[Angelina Stanford]

Okay. Well, thanks so much, guys, for joining me in this conversation. I really enjoyed it. I hope our listeners have enjoyed it. I would just want to remind everybody, we'll be back next week with the short story, the French short story, the Necklace by Guy de Maupassant. And if you are a Patreon fellow, we have an audio recording done by Mr. Banks here waiting for you in the Patreon page. So we want to give a special thanks to our fellows and friends on the Patreon who continue to support this podcast. And you can head over to patreon.com theliterarylife if you want to find out about how you can be a sponsor of this show or get any of the bonus materials that we've got headed out over there. So that'll be next week. Guy de Maupassant. And as always, please, if you liked what you heard today, subscribe, rate and review. That is the way the podcast world rolls, right?

[Podcast Announcer/Host]

Yes.

[Angelina Stanford]

All right. So until next time, we will leave you with a poem read by this guy right here, Thomas Banks.

[Cindy Rollins]

Yeah, thank you Thomas. It was fun having you.

[Thomas Banks]

Thank you both for having me. It's been a delight.

[Angelina Stanford]

Thank you for listening to the Literary Life Podcast brought to you by our loyal patreon sponsors. Visit HouseOfHumaneLetters.com to find Angelina and Thomas and to sign up for our newsletter with podcast schedules and more. And keep up with [e-mail] Join the Conversation at our member Only Patreon Forum or our Facebook discussion group. Visit patreon.com theliterarylife to find out how you can sponsor this podcast and get great bonus content. Don't forget to subscribe, rate and review and check out our sister podcasts, the New Mason Jar and the well Read Poem. And now for a poem read by poet Thomas Banks.

[Thomas Banks (reading poem)]

When I Consider How My Light Is Spent by John Milton When I consider how my light is spent Ere half my days in this dark world and wide, and that one talent which is death to hide, Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent, to serve therewith my Maker and present my true account, Lest he returning Chide doth God exact day labour light denied? I fondly ask, but patience to prevent that murmur soon replies, God doth not need either man's work or his own gifts. Who best bear his mild yoke, they serve him best his state is kingly, Thousands at his bidding speed and post O' er land and ocean without rest they also serve, who only stand and wait.