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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Maid Marian by Thomas Love Peacock: of England, the arch-crusader and anti-jacobin by excellence,--
the very type, flower, cream, pink, symbol, and mirror
of all the Holy Alliances that have ever existed on earth,
excepting that he seasoned his superstition and love
of conquest with a certain condiment of romantic generosity
and chivalrous self-devotion, with which his imitators
in all other points have found it convenient to dispense.
To give freely to one man what he had taken forcibly from another,
was generosity of which he was very capable; but to restore
what he had taken to the man from whom he had taken it,
was something that wore too much of the cool physiognomy
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