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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Lay Morals by Robert Louis Stevenson: expect the fable, in company with other and more important
literary forms, to be more and more loosely, or at least
largely, comprehended as time went on, and so to degenerate
in conception from this original type. That depended for
much of its piquancy on the very fact that it was fantastic:
the point of the thing lay in a sort of humorous
inappropriateness; and it is natural enough that pleasantry
of this description should become less common, as men learn
to suspect some serious analogy underneath. Thus a comical
story of an ape touches us quite differently after the
proposition of Mr. Darwin's theory. Moreover, there lay,
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