‘Remember what the fellow said — it’s not a bally bit of use every prospect pleasing if man is vile,’ Bertie Wooster remarked. (In this case, the man was Aunt Agatha’s second husband.) Now Bertram was quite widely, if not exactly, versed in the gems of English literature, and older readers will, like Wodehouse’s, recognise the most quotable line from Bishop Heber’s celebrated hymn, ‘From Greenland’s icy mountains’.
Language is not only vocabulary and syntax, but also shared references. Wodehouse’s joke works only if we share Bertie’s acquaintance with Heber’s lines. Heber had written them barely a century earlier, in a few minutes one night in 1819, as a hymn for his parson father to use the next morning. He was a clever man and agreeable, leaving an account of the once-a-century Mallard ritual enacted on the rooftops of All Souls College, Oxford, in 1800, but dying upon taking a bath as Bishop of Calcutta, aged 42.
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