| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from Weir of Hermiston by Robert Louis Stevenson: "Godsake! ye made a bonny couple," observed his lordship; and there was
something so formidable and ferocious in his scorn that not even the
galleries thought to laugh.
The summing up contained some jewels.
"These two peetiable creatures seem to have made up thegither, it's not
for us to explain why." - "The panel, who (whatever else he may be)
appears to be equally ill set-out in mind and boady." - "Neither the
panel nor yet the old wife appears to have had so much common sense as
even to tell a lie when it was necessary." And in the course of
sentencing, my lord had this OBITER DICTUM: "I have been the means,
under God, of haanging a great number, but never just such a disjaskit
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau by Honore de Balzac: company of deputies, writers, journalists, stock-brokers, merchants of
the upper grades, agents, engineers, and above all satellites, or
henchmen, who passed from group to group, and knocked in a peculiar
manner at the door of the study, which they were, as it seemed,
privileged to enter.
"What am I in the midst of all this?" thought Birotteau, quite
bewildered by the stir of this intellectual kiln, where the daily
bread of the opposition was kneaded and baked, and the scenes of the
grand tragi-comedy played by the Left were rehearsed. On one side he
heard them discussing the question of loans to complete the net-work
of canals proposed by the department on highways; and the discussion
Rise and Fall of Cesar Birotteau |
| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Sanitary and Social Lectures by Charles Kingsley: woman that she was sent into the world to live for others, rather
than for herself; and therefore I should say--Let her smallest
rights be respected, her smallest wrongs redressed: but let her
never be persuaded to forget that she is sent into the world to
teach man--what, I believe, she has been teaching him all along,
even in the savage state--namely, that there is something more
necessary than the claiming of rights, and that is, the performing
of duties; to teach him specially, in these so-called intellectual
days, that there is something more than intellect, and that is--
purity and virtue. Let her never be persuaded to forget that her
calling is not the lower and more earthly one of self-assertion,
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The fourth excerpt represents the element of Earth. It speaks of physical influences and the impact of the unseen on the visible world, and is drawn from Maitre Cornelius by Honore de Balzac: the sun or the moon were shining. Often he would ask his way of those
who passed him, believing that he was still in Ghent, and seeming to
be in search of something lost.
The most perennial and the best materialized of human ideas, the idea
by which man reproduces himself by creating outside of himself the
fictitious being called Property, that mental demon, drove its steel
claws perpetually into his heart. Then, in the midst of this torture,
Fear arose, with all its accompanying sentiments. Two men had his
secret, the secret he did not know himself. Louis XI. or Coyctier
could post men to watch him during his sleep and discover the unknown
gulf into which he had cast his riches,--those riches he had watered
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