| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Mrs. Warren's Profession by George Bernard Shaw: late Queen Victoria's Reader of Plays, the other by the present
Reader to the King. Both plots conform to the strictest rules of
the period when La Dame aux Camellias was still a forbidden play,
and when The Second Mrs Tanqueray would have been tolerated only
on condition that she carefully explained to the audience that
when she met Captain Ardale she sinned "but in intention."
Play number one. A prince is compelled by his parents to marry
the daughter of a neighboring king, but loves another maiden.
The scene represents a hall in the king's palace at night. The
wedding has taken place that day; and the closed door of the
nuptial chamber is in view of the audience. Inside, the princess
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Historical Lecturers and Essays by Charles Kingsley: account at old manuscripts, and bawling all the while at his
wretched boys, who cheat him, and pay each other to answer to
truants' names. The class is all wrong. "One is barefoot,
another's shoe is burst, another cries, another writes home. Then
comes the rod, the sound of blows, and howls; and the day passes in
tears." "Then mass, then another lesson, then more blows; there is
hardly time to eat." I have no space to finish the picture of the
stupid misery which, Buchanan says, was ruining his intellect, while
it starved his body. However, happier days came. Gilbert Kennedy,
Earl of Cassilis, who seems to have been a noble young gentleman,
took him as his tutor for the next five years; and with him he went
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Elixir of Life by Honore de Balzac: hate cordially, without offending against the social conventions
that require two brothers to wear a mask if the older will
succeed to the entail, and the other to the fortune of a younger
son. The whole civilization of Europe turns upon the principle of
hereditary succession as upon a pivot; it would be madness to
subvert the principle; but could we not, in an age that prides
itself upon its mechanical inventions, perfect this essential
portion of the social machinery?
If the author has preserved the old-fashioned style of address To
the Reader before a work wherein he endeavors to represent all
literary forms, it is for the purpose of making a remark that
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