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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Familiar Studies of Men and Books by Robert Louis Stevenson: Reformer. He returns to it again and again; it is the Alpha
and Omega of his rhetoric; it is to him what a ship is to the
stage sailor; and one would almost fancy he had begun the
world as a trumpeter's apprentice. The partiality is surely
characteristic. All his life long he was blowing summonses
before various Jerichos, some of which fell duly, but not
all. Wherever he appears in history his speech is loud,
angry, and hostile; there is no peace in his life, and little
tenderness; he is always sounding hopefully to the front for
some rough enterprise.
And as his voice had something of the trumpet's hardness, it
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