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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Democracy In America, Volume 2 by Alexis de Toqueville: object of authors will be to astonish rather than to please, and
to stir the passions more than to charm the taste. Here and
there, indeed, writers will doubtless occur who will choose a
different track, and who will, if they are gifted with superior
abilities, succeed in finding readers, in spite of their defects
or their better qualities; but these exceptions will be rare, and
even the authors who shall so depart from the received practice
in the main subject of their works, will always relapse into it
in some lesser details.
I have just depicted two extreme conditions: the transition
by which a nation passes from the former to the latter is not
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