| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Wrong Box by Stevenson & Osbourne: thought it better that even you should be ignorant of my address;
those rascals, the Finsburys, would have wormed it out of you.
And just to put them off the scent I hoisted these abominable
colours. But that is not all, Gid; you promised me to work, and
here I find you playing the fool at Padwick.'
'Please, Mr Bloomfield, you must not be hard on Mr Forsyth,' said
Julia. 'Poor boy, he is in dreadful straits.'
'What's this, Gid?' enquired the uncle. 'Have you been fighting?
or is it a bill?'
These, in the opinion of the Squirradical, were the two
misfortunes incident to gentlemen; and indeed both were culled
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Emma by Jane Austen: "Prejudiced! I am not prejudiced."
"But I am very much, and without being at all ashamed of it.
My love for Mr. and Mrs. Weston gives me a decided prejudice in
his favour."
"He is a person I never think of from one month's end to another,"
said Mr. Knightley, with a degree of vexation, which made Emma
immediately talk of something else, though she could not comprehend
why he should be angry.
To take a dislike to a young man, only because he appeared to be
of a different disposition from himself, was unworthy the real
liberality of mind which she was always used to acknowledge in him;
Emma |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Familiar Studies of Men and Books by Robert Louis Stevenson: and Scottish James I., who whiled away the hours of their
captivity with rhyming. Indeed, there can be no better
pastime for a lonely man than the mechanical exercise of
verse. Such intricate forms as Charles had been used to from
childhood, the ballade with its scanty rhymes; the rondel,
with the recurrence first of the whole, then of half the
burthen, in thirteen verses, seem to have been invented for
the prison and the sick bed. The common Scotch saying, on
the sight of anything operose and finical, "he must have had
little to do that made that!" might be put as epigraph on all
the song books of old France. Making such sorts of verse
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