| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain: "I name none, I challenge all! Here I stand, and
dare the chivalry of England to come against me -- not
by individuals, but in mass!"
"What!" shouted a score of knights.
"You have heard the challenge. Take it, or I pro-
claim you recreant knights and vanquished, every
one!"
It was a "bluff" you know. At such a time it is
sound judgment to put on a bold face and play your
hand for a hundred times what it is worth; forty-nine
times out of fifty nobody dares to "call," and you
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Father Sergius by Leo Tolstoy: them, and they all laugh and make a fool of her. She sees this
and blushes red in patches and becomes more pitiable than before,
so pitiable that he feels ashamed and can never forget that
crooked, kindly, submissive smile. And Sergius remembered having
seen her since then. Long after, just before he became a monk,
she had married a landowner who squandered all her fortune and
was in the habit of beating her. She had had two children, a son
and a daughter, but the son had died while still young. And
Sergius remembered having seen her very wretched. Then again he
had seen her in the monastery when she was a widow. She had been
still the same, not exactly stupid, but insipid, insignificant,
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Polity of Athenians and Lacedaemonians by Xenophon: the legislator who gave them those laws, obedience to which has been
the secret of their prosperity. This legislator, Lycurgus, I must
needs admire, and hold him to have been one of the wisest of mankind.
Certainly he was no servile imitator of other states. It was by a
stroke of invention rather, and on a pattern much in opposition to the
commonly-accepted one, that he brought his fatherland to this pinnacle
of prosperity.
[1] See the opening words of the "Cyrop." and of the "Symp."
[2] Or, "the phenomenal character." See Grote, "H. G." ix. 320 foll.;
Newman, "Pol. Arist." i. 202.
[3] See Herod. vii. 234; Aristot. "Pol." ii. 9, 14 foll.; Muller,
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