| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Z. Marcas by Honore de Balzac: his family--to his sisters, his brothers, his old father. Like
Napoleon in his fall, he asked for no more than thirty sous a day, and
any man of energy can earn thirty sous for a day's work in Paris.
When Marcas had finished the story of his life, intermingled with
reflections, maxims, and observations, revealing him as a great
politician, a few questions and answers on both sides as to the
progress of affairs in France and in Europe were enough to prove to us
that he was a real statesman; for a man may be quickly and easily
judged when he can be brought on to the ground of immediate
difficulties: there is a certain Shibboleth for men of superior
talents, and we were of the tribe of modern Levites without belonging
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin by Robert Louis Stevenson: This life of delights, with the continual visible comings and
goings of the golden aunt, was well qualified to relax the fibre of
the lads. John, the heir, a yeoman and a fox-hunter, 'loud and
notorious with his whip and spurs,' settled down into a kind of
Tony Lumpkin, waiting for the shoes of his father and his aunt.
Thomas Frewen, the youngest, is briefly dismissed as 'a handsome
beau'; but he had the merit or the good fortune to become a doctor
of medicine, so that when the crash came he was not empty-handed
for the war of life. Charles, at the day-school of Northiam, grew
so well acquainted with the rod, that his floggings became matter
of pleasantry and reached the ears of Admiral Buckner. Hereupon
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: like the Trojan war or the legend of Arthur, which we are unable to
penetrate. In the age of Cicero, and still more in that of Diogenes
Laertius and Appuleius, many other legends had gathered around the
personality of Plato,--more voyages, more journeys to visit tyrants and
Pythagorean philosophers. But if, as we agree with Karsten in supposing,
they are the forgery of some rhetorician or sophist, we cannot agree with
him in also supposing that they are of any historical value, the rather as
there is no early independent testimony by which they are supported or with
which they can be compared.
IV. There is another subject to which I must briefly call attention, lest
I should seem to have overlooked it. Dr. Henry Jackson, of Trinity
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