| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Little Britain by Washington Irving: decipher, and which extol the charms of many a beauty of
Little Britain who has long, long since bloomed, faded, and
passed away. As I am an idle personage, with no apparent
occupation, and pay my bill regularly every week, I am looked
upon as the only independent gentleman of the neighborhood;
and, being curious to learn the internal state of a community so
apparently shut up within itself, I have managed to work my
way into all the concerns and secrets of the place.
Little Britain may truly be called the heart's core of the city;
the stronghold of true John Bullism. It is a fragment of
London as it was in its better days, with its antiquated folks
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The American by Henry James: he was weary. But on the whole he fell into a rather reflective mood.
Without in the least intending it or knowing it, he attempted to read the
moral of his strange misadventure. He asked himself, in his quieter hours,
whether perhaps, after all, he WAS more commercial than was pleasant.
We know that it was in obedience to a strong reaction against
questions exclusively commercial that he had come out to pick up
aesthetic entertainment in Europe; it may therefore be understood
that he was able to conceive that a man might be too commercial.
He was very willing to grant it, but the concession, as to his
own case, was not made with any very oppressive sense of shame.
If he had been too commercial, he was ready to forget it, for in being
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson by Robert Louis Stevenson: read the other day, and thought in places good - PRINCE OTTO. It
is not as good as either of the others; but it has one
recommendation - it has female parts, so it might perhaps please
better in France.
I will ask Chatto to send you, then - PRINCE OTTO, MEMORIES AND
PORTRAITS, UNDERWOODS, and BALLADS, none of which you seem to have
seen. They will be too late for the New Year: let them be an
Easter present.
You must translate me soon; you will soon have better to do than to
transverse the work of others. - Yours very truly,
ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON,
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