Thomas Osbert Mordaunt
Thomas Osbert Mordaunt (1730–1809), a British officer and poet, is best remembered for his oft-quoted poem "The Call", written during the Seven Years' War of 1756–1763:
- "Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife!
- Throughout the sensual world proclaim,
- One crowded hour of glorious life
- Is worth an age without a name."
For many years, the poem was incorrectly attributed to Mordaunt's contemporary, Sir Walter Scott. Scott had merely quoted a stanza of the poem at the beginning of Chapter 34 of his novel Old Mortality.[1]
One Crowded Hour, Tim Bowden's biography about the Australian combat cameraman Neil Davis, takes its title from a phrase used in "The Call".
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