| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Contrast by Royall Tyler: Why, really, Miss Manly, you could not have asked
me a question more mal-apropos. For my part, I must
confess that, to a man who has travelled, there is noth-
ping that is worthy the name of amusement to be found
in this city.
CHARLOTTE
Except visiting the ladies.
DIMPLE
Pardon me, Madam; that is the avocation of a man
of taste. But for amusement, I positively know of
nothing that can be called so, unless you dignify with
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: ruled. We must believe too, that they were better, in every sense
of the word, than those tribes on their eastern frontier, whom they
conquered in after centuries, unless we discredit (which we have no
reason to do) the accounts which the Roman and Greek writers give of
the horrible savagery of those tribes.
So it was in later centuries. One cannot read fairly the history of
the Middle Ages without seeing that the robber knight of Germany or
of France, who figures so much in modern novels, must have been the
exception, and not the rule: that an aristocracy which lived by the
saddle would have as little chance of perpetuating itself, as a
priesthood composed of hypocrites and profligates; that the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe: Fields only, there died in the parish of Aldgate but four, in the parish
of Whitechappel three, in the parish of Stepney but one.
Likewise in the next week, from the 11th of July to the 18th, when
the week's bill was 1761, yet there died no more of the plague, on the
whole Southwark side of the water, than sixteen.
But this face of things soon changed, and it began to thicken in
Cripplegate parish especially, and in Clarkenwell; so that by the
second week in August, Cripplegate parish alone buried 886, and
Clarkenwell 155. Of the first, 850 might well be reckoned to die of
the plague; and of the last, the bill itself said 145 were of the plague.
During the month of July, and while, as I have observed, our part of
A Journal of the Plague Year |
