| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Professor by Charlotte Bronte: has a straight nose, arched eyebrows, and all that; but these
advantages--if they are advantages--he did not inherit from his
mother, the patrician, but from his father, old Crimsworth, who,
MY father says, was as veritable a ----shire blue-dyer as ever
put indigo in a vat yet withal the handsomest man in the three
Ridings. It is you, William, who are the aristocrat of your
family, and you are not as fine a fellow as your plebeian brother
by long chalk."
There was something in Mr. Hunsden's point-blank mode of speech
which rather pleased me than otherwise because it set me at my
ease. I continued the conversation with a degree of interest.
The Professor |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Essays of Travel by Robert Louis Stevenson: dale, and by beech and pine wood, in the cheerful morning sunshine.
The English get down at all the ascents and walk on ahead for
exercise; the French are mightily entertained at this, and keep coyly
underneath the tilt. As we go we carry with us a pleasant noise of
laughter and light speech, and some one will be always breaking out
into a bar or two of opera bouffe. Before we get to the Route Ronde
here comes Desprez, the colourman from Fontainebleau, trudging across
on his weekly peddle with a case of merchandise; and it is 'Desprez,
leave me some malachite green'; 'Desprez, leave me so much canvas';
'Desprez, leave me this, or leave me that'; M. Desprez standing the
while in the sunlight with grave face and many salutations. The next
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Menexenus by Plato: Thus born into the world and thus educated, the ancestors of the departed
lived and made themselves a government, which I ought briefly to
commemorate. For government is the nurture of man, and the government of
good men is good, and of bad men bad. And I must show that our ancestors
were trained under a good government, and for this reason they were good,
and our contemporaries are also good, among whom our departed friends are
to be reckoned. Then as now, and indeed always, from that time to this,
speaking generally, our government was an aristocracy--a form of government
which receives various names, according to the fancies of men, and is
sometimes called democracy, but is really an aristocracy or government of
the best which has the approval of the many. For kings we have always had,
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