| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Glaucus/The Wonders of the Shore by Charles Kingsley: will breed, and will also die; and you need for them some such
scavenger as our poor friend Squinado, to whom you were introduced
a few pages back. Turn, then, a few stones which lie piled on each
other at extreme low-water mark, and five minutes' search will give
you the very animal you want, - a little crab, of a dingy russet
above, and on the under side like smooth porcelain. His back is
quite flat, and so are his large angular fringed claws, which, when
he folds them up, lie in the same plane with his shell, and fit
neatly into its edges. Compact little rogue that he is, made
especially for sidling in and out of cracks and crannies, he
carries with him such an apparatus of combs and brushes as Isidor
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Dark Lady of the Sonnets by George Bernard Shaw: to an extent that threatened to make his reasonable admirers
ridiculous.
Shakespear's Pessimism
I submit to Mr Harris that by ruling out this idolatry, and its
possible effect in making Shakespear think that his public would stand
anything from him, he has ruled out a far more plausible explanation
of the faults of such a play as Timon of Athens than his theory that
Shakespear's passion for the Dark Lady "cankered and took on proud
flesh in him, and tortured him to nervous breakdown and madness." In
Timon the intellectual bankruptcy is obvious enough: Shakespear tried
once too often to make a play out of the cheap pessimism which is
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe: for it,' and whether that father was a husband or no husband,
was no business of hers; her business was to assist me in my
present circumstances, whether I had a husband or no. 'For,
madam,' says she, 'to have a husband that cannot appear, is
to have no husband in the sense of the case; and, therefore,
whether you are a wife or a mistress is all one to me.'
I found presently, that whether I was a whore or a wife, I was
to pass for a whore here, so I let that go. I told her it was
true, as she said, but that, however, if I must tell her my case,
I must tell it her as it was; so I related it to her as short as I
could, and I concluded it to her thus. 'I trouble you with all
Moll Flanders |
