| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin by Robert Louis Stevenson: Fleeming throughout life. His thoroughness was not that of the
patient scholar, but of an untrained woman with fits of passionate
study; he had learned too much from dogma, given indeed by
cherished lips; and precocious as he was in the use of the tools of
the mind, he was truly backward in knowledge of life and of
himself. Such as it was at least, his home and school training was
now complete; and you are to conceive the lad as being formed in a
household of meagre revenue, among foreign surroundings, and under
the influence of an imperious drawing-room queen; from whom he
learned a great refinement of morals, a strong sense of duty, much
forwardness of bearing, all manner of studious and artistic
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: 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
College, Cambridge, in a series of articles which he has contributed to the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Kenilworth by Walter Scott: the other hand, he thought it might bear a very different
interpretation, and refer to his own exquisite art in arranging
pageants, morris-dances, May-day festivities, and such-like
holiday delights, for which he assured Tressilian he had
positively the purest and the most inventive brain in England;
insomuch, that his cunning in framing such pleasures had made him
known to many honourable persons, both in country and court, and
especially to the noble Earl of Leicester. "And although he may
now seem to forget me," he said, "in the multitude of state
affairs, yet I am well assured that, had he some pretty pastime
to array for entertainment of the Queen's Grace, horse and man
Kenilworth |
