| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia by Samuel Johnson: thy native king. Tell me if thou waterest through all thy course a
single habitation from which thou dost not hear the murmurs of
complaint."
"You are then," said Rasselas, "not more successful in private
houses than I have been in Courts." "I have, since the last
partition of our provinces," said the Princess, "enabled myself to
enter familiarly into many families, where there was the fairest
show of prosperity and peace, and know not one house that is not
haunted by some fury that destroys their quiet.
"I did not seek ease among the poor, because I concluded that there
it could not be found. But I saw many poor whom I had supposed to
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Plain Tales from the Hills by Rudyard Kipling: dozen men who knew and liked him held by him. Biel was furious and
surprised. He denied the whole thing, and vowed that he would
thrash Bronckhorst within an inch of his life. No jury, we knew,
could convict a man on the criminal count on native evidence in a
land where you can buy a murder-charge, including the corpse, all
complete for fifty-four rupees; but Biel did not care to scrape
through by the benefit of a doubt. He wanted the whole thing
cleared: but as he said one night:--"He can prove anything with
servants' evidence, and I've only my bare word." This was about a
month before the case came on; and beyond agreeing with Biel, we
could do little. All that we could be sure of was that the native
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Lesser Hippias by Plato: him. And several of the citations of Aristotle omit the name of Plato, and
some of them omit the name of the dialogue from which they are taken.
Prior, however, to the enquiry about the writings of a particular author,
general considerations which equally affect all evidence to the genuineness
of ancient writings are the following: Shorter works are more likely to
have been forged, or to have received an erroneous designation, than longer
ones; and some kinds of composition, such as epistles or panegyrical
orations, are more liable to suspicion than others; those, again, which
have a taste of sophistry in them, or the ring of a later age, or the
slighter character of a rhetorical exercise, or in which a motive or some
affinity to spurious writings can be detected, or which seem to have
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