| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Chronicles of the Canongate by Walter Scott: the room where she herself had been sitting, probably the only
one which had a fire, though the month was October. This
answered my plan; and as she was about to remove her spinning-
wheel, I begged she would have the goodness to remain and make my
tea, adding that I liked the sound of the wheel, and desired not
to disturb her housewife thrift in the least.
"I dinna ken, sir," she replied, in a dry, REVECHE tone, which
carried me back twenty years, "I am nane of thae heartsome
landleddies that can tell country cracks, and make themsel's
agreeable, and I was ganging to put on a fire for you in the Red
Room; but if it is your will to stay here, he that pays the
|
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Firm of Nucingen by Honore de Balzac: ago.) On that 'eyebrows idem' (no offence to the prefect of police)
Parny, that writer of light and playful verse, would have hung half-a-
dozen couplets, comparing them very agreeably to Cupid's bow, at the
same time bidding us to observe that the dart was beneath; the said
dart, however, was neither very potent nor very penetrating, for as
yet it was controlled by the namby-pamby sweetness of a Mlle. de la
Valliere as depicted on fire-screens, at the moment when she
solemnizes her betrothal in the sight of heaven, any solemnization
before the registrar being quite out to the question.
"You know the effect of fair hair and blue eyes in the soft,
voluptuous decorous dance? Such a girl does not knock audaciously at
|
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from A Prince of Bohemia by Honore de Balzac: gallantry after the fashion of the Marechal de Richelieu, high spirits
and frolic carried rather too far; perhaps we may see in it the
/outrances/ of another age, the Eighteenth Century pushed to extremes;
it harks back to the Musketeers; it is an exploit stolen from
Champcenetz; nay, such light-hearted inconstancy takes us back to the
festooned and ornate period of the old court of the Valois. In an age
as moral as the present, we are bound to regard audacity of this kind
sternly; still, at the same time that 'cornet of sugar-plums' may
serve to warn young girls of the perils of lingering where fancies,
more charming than chastened, come thickly from the first; on the rosy
flowery unguarded slopes, where trespasses ripen into errors full of
|
