I have just been re-reading 'A Book of Words' with a good deal of pleasure,
and happened on this passage, which you may know. It is from an address at a
Royal Academy Dinner in 1906. RK has been talking about how writers,
'masterless men with words' hope that the 'magic of literature' will
miraculously happen through their work.
"...If a tinker in Bedford gaol; if a pamphleteering shopkeeper, pilloried
in London; if a muzzy Scot; if a despised German Jew; or a condemned French
thief, or an English Admiralty official with a taste for letters can be
miraculously afflicted with the magic of the necessary word, why not any man
at any time ? ..."
The tinker is presumably Bunyan and the Admiralty official Pepys, but who -
do you think - are the others ?
Best regards John R
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