Your Daily Shakespeare

Words being arbitrary, they owe their power to association, and have the influence which custom has given them – for language is the dress of thought. Therefore on hearing the words “Democracy in America,” some will think of Alexis de Tocqueville’s book by the same title. Others, not having read the book (an enterprise of no mean feat), will think that it took a Frenchman to appreciate American democracy, as it existed nowhere else.

Still others may think that the concept of democracy and America are indissolubly and maybe exclusively linked, just as America is the obamanesque exceptional nation. But as there is a history in all men’s lives (1), so there is one in all men’s words. In the instance, it may interest some to know the curious and fortuitous circumstances that caused the book to be written. Continue reading →

An Eastern monarch, of whom we know the existence but not the name, kept an officer in his house whose employment it was to remind him of his mortality, by calling out every morning at a stated hour, “Remember prince that thou shalt die.

Indeed, the contemplation of the frailness of our present state appeared of so much importance to the famous legislator Solon of Athens, that he left this precept to future ages, ”Keep thine eyes fixed upon the end of life.” Continue reading →