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.
Author: James Wimberley
James Wimberley (b. 1946, an Englishman raised in the Channel Islands. three adult children) is a former career international bureaucrat with the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. His main achievements there were the Lisbon Convention on recognition of qualifications and the Kosovo law on school education. He retired in 2006 to a little white house in Andalucia, His first wife Patricia Morris died in 2009 after a long illness. He remarried in 2011. to the former Brazilian TV actress Lu Mendonça. The cat overlords are now three. I suppose I've been invited to join real scholars on the list because my skills, acquired in a decade of technical assistance work in eastern Europe, include being able to ask faux-naïf questions like the exotic Persians and Chinese of eighteenth-century philosophical fiction. So I'm quite comfortable in the role of country-cousin blogger with a European perspective. The other specialised skill I learnt was making toasts with a moral in the course of drunken Caucasian banquets. I'm open to expenses-paid offers to retell Noah the great Armenian and Columbus, the orange, and university reform in Georgia. James Wimberley's occasional publications on the web View all posts by James Wimberley
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.