| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Essays & Lectures by Oscar Wilde: incommunicable, the virtue by which a particular picture or poem
affects us with a unique and special joy; but rather to point out
to you the general ideas which characterise the great English
Renaissance of Art in this century, to discover their source, as
far as that is possible, and to estimate their future as far as
that is possible.
I call it our English Renaissance because it is indeed a sort of
new birth of the spirit of man, like the great Italian Renaissance
of the fifteenth century, in its desire for a more gracious and
comely way of life, its passion for physical beauty, its exclusive
attention to form, its seeking for new subjects for poetry, new
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Lock and Key Library by Julian Hawthorne, Ed.: he beheld three more men in the room; one was fastening the outer
door; one was drawing some arms from a cupboard, and two others
were whispering together. He himself was disturbed and perplexed,
and felt that all was not right. Such was his confusion, that
either all the men's faces must have been muffled up, or at least
he remembered nothing distinctly but one fierce pair of eyes
glaring upon him. Then, before he could look round, came a man
from behind and threw a sack over his head, which was drawn tight
about his waist, so as to confine his arms, as well as to impede
his hearing in part, and his voice altogether. He was then pushed
into a room; but previously he had heard a rush upstairs, and words
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Lock and Key Library by Julian Hawthorne, Ed.: may be as old as Methuselah. He has no beard. He wears a large
curly glossy brown wig, and his eyebrows are painted a deep olive-
green. It was odd to hear this man, this walking mummy, talking
sentiment, in these queer old chambers in Shepherd's Inn.
Pinto passed a yellow bandanna handkerchief over his awful white
teeth, and kept his glass eye steadily fixed on me. "Sir Joshua's
friend?" said he (you perceive, eluding my direct question). "Is
not everyone that knows his pictures Reynolds's friend? Suppose I
tell you that I have been in his painting room scores of times, and
that his sister The has made me tea, and his sister Toffy has made
coffee for me? You will only say I am an old ombog." (Mr. Pinto,
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