| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: English clear and consecutive.
It is difficult to harmonize all these conflicting elements. In a
translation of Plato what may be termed the interests of the Greek and
English are often at war with one another. In framing the English sentence
we are insensibly diverted from the exact meaning of the Greek; when we
return to the Greek we are apt to cramp and overlay the English. We
substitute, we compromise, we give and take, we add a little here and leave
out a little there. The translator may sometimes be allowed to sacrifice
minute accuracy for the sake of clearness and sense. But he is not
therefore at liberty to omit words and turns of expression which the
English language is quite capable of supplying. He must be patient and
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: they consider that he has, and are the better men for his guidance.
Whether this ought to have been the history of primaeval
civilisation, is a question not to be determined here. That it is
the history thereof, is surely patent to anyone who will imagine to
himself what must have been. In the first place, the strongest and
cunningest savage must have had the chance of producing children
more strong and cunning than the average; he would have--the
strongest savage has still--the power of obtaining a wife, or wives,
superior in beauty and in household skill, which involves
superiority of intellect; and therefore his children would--some of
them at least--be superior to the average, both from the father's
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Plain Tales from the Hills by Rudyard Kipling: of the announcement that Lispeth had 'verted to her mother's gods,
the girl had gone; and she never came back.
She took to her own unclean people savagely, as if to make up the
arrears of the life she had stepped out of; and, in a little time,
she married a wood-cutter who beat her, after the manner of
paharis, and her beauty faded soon.
"There is no law whereby you can account for the vagaries of the
heathen," said the Chaplain's wife, "and I believe that Lispeth was
always at heart an infidel." Seeing she had been taken into the
Church of England at the mature age of five weeks, this statement
does not do credit to the Chaplain's wife.
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