December 3rd, 2010

Memo to Mark:

How can we limit our readers to a civilised 5,000? Perhaps I should just post more often.

Note:

Title quip is attributed to Jonathan Swift, but that doesn´t feel right.

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One Response to “We can´t have heaven crammed”

  1. Andrew Sabl says:

    According to James M. Lindgren, “A Constant Incentive to Patriotic Citizenship”: Historic Preservation in Progressive-Era Massachusetts,” The New England Quarterly, 64, No. 4 (Dec., 1991): 594-608, p. 604n21, the sentiment was penned by Charles Knowles Bolton in 1940 as a satire regarding people who wanted to own more than one property. That article quotes the poem as “‘We are the best selected few / And all the rest are damned; / There’s room in heaven for me and you / But we can’t have heaven crammed’”—and gives the original citation as Charles Knowles Bolton, “Tribute to William Sumner Appleton,” Old-Time New England 30 [April 1940]: 108. UCLA holds that journal and I may check it when I’m procrastinating in a few months. It does make sense, though, that a satire on the doctrine of the Elect would come from a New Englander, not from Swift.

    By the way, this is not among my own useless bits of knowledge: thank Google Scholar.