| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from A Woman of No Importance by Oscar Wilde: must be the next world. This world and I are on excellent terms.
[Sits down beside MRS. ALLONBY.]
LADY STUTFIELD. Every one I know says you are very, very wicked.
LORD ILLINGWORTH. It is perfectly monstrous the way people go
about, nowadays, saying things against one behind one's back that
are absolutely and entirely true.
LADY HUNSTANTON. Dear Lord Illingworth is quite hopeless, Lady
Stutfield. I have given up trying to reform him. It would take a
Public Company with a Board of Directors and a paid Secretary to do
that. But you have the secretary already, Lord Illingworth,
haven't you? Gerald Arbuthnot has told us of his good fortune; it
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: creation that there are no more worlds left to conquer.
Alas! the Muses are shy and wild; and though they will haunt, like
skylarks, on the bleakest northern moor as cheerfully as on the sunny
hills of Greece, and rise thence singing into the heaven of heavens, yet
they are hard to tempt into a gilded cage, however amusingly made and
plentifully stored with comforts. Royal societies, associations of
savants, and the like, are good for many things, but not for the
breeding of art and genius: for they are things which cannot be bred.
Such institutions are excellent for physical science, when, as among us
now, physical science is going on the right method: but where, as in
Alexandria, it was going on an utterly wrong method, they stereotype the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Lady Susan by Jane Austen: and less of your daughter. She is not of a disposition to do you credit in
the world, and seems precisely in her proper place at Churchhill, with the
Vernons. But you are fitted for society, and it is shameful to have you
exiled from it. Leave Frederica, therefore, to punish herself for the
plague she has given you, by indulging that romantic tender-heartedness
which will always ensure her misery enough, and come to London as soon as
you can. I have another reason for urging this: Mainwaring came to town
last week, and has contrived, in spite of Mr. Johnson, to make
opportunities of seeing me. He is absolutely miserable about you, and
jealous to such a degree of De Courcy that it would be highly unadvisable
for them to meet at present. And yet, if you do not allow him to see you
Lady Susan |
