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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Essays of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: that last and most worrying form of interference, that chooses to
introduce tradition and authority into the choice of a man's own
pleasures. I can excuse a person combating my religious or
philosophical heresies, because them I have deliberately accepted,
and am ready to justify by present argument. But I do not seek to
justify my pleasures. If I prefer tame scenery to grand, a little
hot sunshine over lowland parks and woodlands to the war of the
elements round the summit of Mont Blanc; or if I prefer a pipe of
mild tobacco, and the company of one or two chosen companions, to a
ball where I feel myself very hot, awkward, and weary, I merely state
these preferences as facts, and do not seek to establish them as
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