| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy: "Michael--pity me, and be generous!"
"You don't deserve pity! You did; but you don't now."
"I'll help you to pay off your debt."
"A pensioner of Farfrae's wife--not I! Don't stay with me
longer--I shall say something worse. Go home!"
She disappeared under the trees of the south walk as the
band came round the corner, awaking the echoes of every
stock and stone in celebration of her happiness. Lucetta
took no heed, but ran up the back street and reached her own
home unperceived.
30.
The Mayor of Casterbridge |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: themselves elsewhere. I hasten past them with this remark--that to
have gone through the toils, dangers, and disgusts which Vesalius
faced, argued in a superstitious and cruel age like his, no common
physical and moral courage, and a deep conscience that he was doing
right, and must do it at all risks in the face of a generation
which, peculiarly reckless of human life and human agony, allowed
that frame which it called the image of God to be tortured, maimed,
desecrated in every way while alive; and yet--straining at the gnat
after having swallowed the camel--forbade it to be examined when
dead, though for the purpose of alleviating the miseries of mankind.
The breaking out of war between Francis I. and Charles V. drove
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Hiero by Xenophon: you are the head and chief? And for my part, I hold it ill becomes a
tyrant to enter the lists with private citizens. For take the case he
wins, he will not be admired, but be envied rather, when is is thought
how many private fortunes go to swell the stream of his expenditure;
while if he loses, he will become a laughing-stock to all mankind.[9]
[9] Or, "you will be mocked and jeered at past all precedence," as
historically was the fate of Dionysus, 388 or 384 B.C. (?); and
for the possible connection between that incident and this
treatise see Lys. "Olymp."; and Prof. Jebb's remarks on the
fragment, "Att. Or." i. p. 203 foll. Grote, "H. G." xi. 40 foll.;
"Plato, iii. 577.
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