| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Sanitary and Social Lectures by Charles Kingsley: sailors who returned from our voyages of discovery, and from our
raids against the Spaniards, too often crippled by scurvy, or by
Tropic fevers, with perhaps a little prize money, which was as
hastily spent as it had been hastily gained. The later years of
Elizabeth, and the whole of James the First's reign, disclose to
us an ugly state of society in the low streets of all our sea-port
towns; and Bristol, as one of the great starting-points of West
Indian adventure, was probably, during the seventeenth century, as
bad as any city in England. According to Ben Jonson, and the
playwriters of his time, the beggars become a regular fourth-
estate, with their own laws, and even their own language--of which
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Edingburgh Picturesque Notes by Robert Louis Stevenson: Perhaps it is now one in the afternoon; and at the same
instant of time, a ball rises to the summit of Nelson's
flagstaff close at hand, and, far away, a puff of smoke
followed by a report bursts from the half-moon battery at
the Castle. This is the time-gun by which people set
their watches, as far as the sea coast or in hill farms
upon the Pentlands. - To complete the view, the eye
enfilades Princes Street, black with traffic, and has a
broad look over the valley between the Old Town and the
New: here, full of railway trains and stepped over by the
high North Bridge upon its many columns, and there, green
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from On Revenues by Xenophon: in requital of kindly treatment. And to-day, owing to the chaos[15]
which reigns in Hellas, if I mistake not, an opportunity has fallen to
this city of winning back our fellow-Hellenes without pain or peril or
expense of any sort. It is given to us to try and harmonise states
which are at war with one another: it is given to us to reconcile the
differences of rival factions within those states themselves, wherever
existing.
[9] Lit. "her hegemony for the city," B.C. 476.
[10] "And first of all."
[11] See Thuc. i. 96.
[12] B.C. 378. Second confederacy of Delos. See Grote, "H. G." x. 152.
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