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A question finally answered

posted Sunday, 5 March 2006

Over 170 years ago, Sir Walter Scott posed this question, in The Lay of the Last Minstrel:

Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
Whose heart hath ne'er within him burn'd,
As home his footsteps he hath turn'd,
From wandering on a foreign strand!

Now, thanks to modern electronic media, we know that the answer is YES.

If truth be told, there are more than a handful of such people. In no particular order: Ed Asner, Michael Moore, George Clooney, Alec Baldwin, and Barbra ("I can't even spell my own name") Streisand. These are but the first few who came to mind. In the words of W.S. Gilbert's lord high executioner, "the task of filling up the list, I'd rather leave to you."

Let us hope that the next few lines of Scott's poem ring true:

If such there breathe, go, mark him well;
For him no Minstrel raptures swell;
High though his titles, proud his name,
Boundless his wealth as wish can claim;
Despite those titles, power, and pelf,
The wretch, concentred all in self,
Living, shall forfeit fair renown,
And, doubly dying, shall go down
To the vile dust, from whence he sprung,
Unwept, unhonour'd, and unsung.

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