Word: scylla
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Dates: during 1920-1929
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...Britannia between Scylla and Charybdis", one of those now in the cases, was created in 1793, when the ominous influence of the French Revolution was beginning to penetrate into England. In the engraving Pitt is steering Britannia in the snugly-built ship "Constitution," between Charybdis, the ministers of the Crown, and Scylla, a towering threatening rock capped by the colors of France. True to her attitude at that time, the fair maiden England is heedless of Charybdis, but is gazing fearfully at the rock and the sea dogs swarming around its base, representing, in ugly caricatures, the famous trio...
However, one fact opens a narrow path to Royalty between Scylla and Charybdis, namely that slightly more than half the population of the United Kingdom do not belong to the Church of England. It is this majority which (although its individual leaders are less potent than those in the State Church), is probably strong enough to maintain the Sovereign in suspended straddle, until the abyss beneath him closes through conciliation, or is replaced by some such new order of things as disestablishment of the State Church by Parliament...
...event seems to have been peculiarly unfortunate for the Russian government which seems to be placed between the Scylla of popular criticism at home and the Gharibdis of general disfavor abroad. To let the matter drop would probably not be satisfactory to those in Russia who feel that communism is being threatened. To press it would probably be to incur the hostility of the other nations who would inevitably regard the action as totally unwarranted. It is possible that the severity already threatened is no more than a beau geste for the benefit of Russian opinion, and that further action...
There follow in rapid succession the Vale of Tempe, the summit of Parnassus, scaling the Acropolis at midnight, wooing the Maidens of the Porch by Attic moonlight, swimming the Hellespont, climbing Stromboli and Vesuvius, trying to swim from whirling Charybdis to rocky Scylla, singing "Funiculi, Funicula" in the Blue Grotto to an English girl with an Alice-blue Rolls-Royce, climbing Aetna, playing Ulysses ("handsome, heaven-sent Greek") to a 65-year-old bobbed grandmother's Calypso, and reading "The Return of Ulysses" at Ithaca, having completed what was begun, a trip in the wandering wake of Ulysses doing...
...this country at Coshocton, Ohio. In the year and five months of his stewardship he has shown where his talents lie-as a conciliator and composer of differences within the ranks of labor and as a leader devoted to the policy of "the middle course" between a possibly imaginary Scylla of Capitalism and a certainly dreaded Charybdis of Communism...