| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Rape of Lucrece by William Shakespeare: The worst is but denial and reproving:
My will is strong, past reason's weak removing.
Who fears a sentence or an old man's saw
Shall by a painted cloth be kept in awe.'
Thus, graceless, holds he disputation
'Tween frozen conscience and hot-burning will,
And with good thoughts makes dispensation,
Urging the worser sense for vantage still;
Which in a moment doth confound and kill
All pure effects, and doth so far proceed,
That what is vile shows like a virtuous deed.
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Purse by Honore de Balzac: in front of a sham log of fire-brick, as carefully buried as a
miser's treasure could ever be. An old Aubusson carpet, very much
faded, very much mended, and as worn as a pensioner's coat, did
not cover the whole of the tiled floor, and the cold struck to
his feet. The walls were hung with a reddish paper, imitating
figured silk with a yellow pattern. In the middle of the wall
opposite the windows the painter saw a crack, and the outline
marked on the paper of double-doors, shutting off a recess where
Madame Leseigneur slept no doubt, a fact ill disguised by a sofa
in front of the door. Facing the chimney, above a mahogany chest
of drawers of handsome and tasteful design, was the portrait of
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Maid Marian by Thomas Love Peacock: as shall also all sheriffs, especially the sheriff of Nottingham.
[5] "These byshoppes and these archbyshoppes Ye shall them bete and bynde,"
says Robin Hood, in an old ballad. Perhaps, however, thus is to be
taken not in a literal, but in a figurative sense from the binding
and beating of wheat: for as all rich men were Robin's harvest,
the bishops and archbishops must have been the finest and fattest
ears among them, from which Robin merely proposes to thresh
the grain when he directs them to be bound and beaten:
and as Pharaoh's fat kine were typical of fat ears of wheat,
so may fat ears of wheat, mutatis mutandis, be typical of fat kine.
"The articles of Hospitality are two:
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