| The third excerpt represents the element of Water. It speaks of pure spiritual influences and feelings of love, and is drawn from Z. Marcas by Honore de Balzac: degradation of the country was enough to aggravate his complaint.
I myself was witness to the proposals made to him by one of the
leaders of the antagonistic party which he had fought against. His
hatred of the men he had tried to serve was so virulent, that he would
gladly have joined the coalition that was about to be formed among
certain ambitious spirits who, at least, had one idea in common--that
of shaking off the yoke of the Court. But Marcas could only reply to
the envoy in the words of the Hotel de Ville:
"It is too late!"
Marcas did not leave money enough to pay for his funeral. Juste and I
had great difficulty in saving him from the ignominy of a pauper's
|
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 Enemies of Books by William Blades: opposed to it they are immoral," seems, indeed, _mutatis mutandis_,
to have been the general rule for all such devastators.
The Invention of Printing made the entire destruction of any author's
works much more difficult, so quickly and so extensively did books
spread through all lands. On the other hand, as books multiplied,
so did destruction go hand in hand with production, and soon
were printed books doomed to suffer in the same penal fires,
that up to then had been fed on MSS. only.
At Cremona, in 1569, 12,000 books printed in Hebrew were publicly
burnt as heretical, simply on account of their language;
and Cardinal Ximenes, at the capture of Granada, treated 5,000
|
