| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Polity of Athenians and Lacedaemonians by Xenophon: either.
[4] = "boyherd."
[5] Cf. Plut. "Lycurg." 17 (Clough, i. 107); Aristot. "Pol." iv. 15,
13; vii. 17, 5.
[6] Or, "assemble the boys in flocks."
[7] {mastigophoroi} = "flagellants."
Instead of softening their feet with shoe or sandal, his rule was to
make them hardy through going barefoot.[8] This habit, if practised,
would, as he believed, enable them to scale heights more easily and
clamber down precipices with less danger. In fact, with his feet so
trained the young Spartan would leap and spring and run faster unshod
|
The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from The Vicar of Tours by Honore de Balzac: vengeance, and they take it. Thus it happened that Birotteau, weak
brother that he was, was made to undergo the decrees of that great
distributive Justice which goes about compelling the world to execute
its judgments,--called by ninnies "the misfortunes of life."
There was this difference between the late Chapeloud and the vicar,--
one was a shrewd and clever egoist, the other a simple-minded and
clumsy one. When the canon went to board with Mademoiselle Gamard he
knew exactly how to judge of his landlady's character. The
confessional had taught him to understand the bitterness that the
sense of being kept outside the social pale puts into the heart of an
old maid; he therefore calculated his own treatment of Mademoiselle
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