| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Battle of the Books by Jonathan Swift: forced by art, and are so ready to lapse into barbarity. This,
among the Romans, was the raillery of slaves, of which we have many
instances in Plautus. It seemeth to have been introduced among us
by Cromwell, who, by preferring the scum of the people, made it a
court-entertainment, of which I have heard many particulars; and,
considering all things were turned upside down, it was reasonable
and judicious; although it was a piece of policy found out to
ridicule a point of honour in the other extreme, when the smallest
word misplaced among gentlemen ended in a duel.
There are some men excellent at telling a story, and provided with
a plentiful stock of them, which they can draw out upon occasion in
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The New Machiavelli by H. G. Wells: luminous final theories about Love and Death and Immortality, odd
matters they seemed for him to think about! and all his woven
thoughts lay across my perception of the realities of things, as
flimsy and irrelevant and clever and beautiful, oh!--as a dew-wet
spider's web slung in the morning sunshine across the black mouth of
a gun. . . .
4
All through those years of development I perceive now there must
have been growing in me, slowly, irregularly, assimilating to itself
all the phrases and forms of patriotism, diverting my religious
impulses, utilising my esthetic tendencies, my dominating idea, the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Sesame and Lilies by John Ruskin: how can anything that we do be right--how can anything we think be
wise? what honour can there be in the arts that amuse us, or what
profit in the possessions that please?
Is not this a mystery of life?
But farther, you may, perhaps, think it a beneficent ordinance for
the generality of men that they do not, with earnestness or anxiety,
dwell on such questions of the future because the business of the
day could not be done if this kind of thought were taken by all of
us for the morrow. Be it so: but at least we might anticipate that
the greatest and wisest of us, who were evidently the appointed
teachers of the rest, would set themselves apart to seek out
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