| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Maitre Cornelius by Honore de Balzac: "Sire," replied Saint-Vallier, haughtily, "I would prefer an axe at my
throat to the ornament of marriage on my head."
"You may have both," said Louis XI. "None of you are safe from such
infirmities, messieurs. Go into the farther hall. Conyngham,"
continued the king, addressing the captain of the guard, "you are
asleep! Where is Monsieur de Bridore? Why do you let me be approached
in this way? Pasques-Dieu! the lowest burgher in Tours is better
served than I am."
After scolding thus, Louis re-entered his room; but he took care to
draw the tapestried curtain, which made a second door, intended more
to stifle the words of the king than the whistling of the harsh north
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: penetrate. In the age of Cicero, and still more in that of Diogenes
Laertius and Appuleius, many other legends had gathered around the
personality of Plato,--more voyages, more journeys to visit tyrants and
Pythagorean philosophers. But if, as we agree with Karsten in supposing,
they are the forgery of some rhetorician or sophist, we cannot agree with
him in also supposing that they are of any historical value, the rather as
there is no early independent testimony by which they are supported or with
which they can be compared.
IV. There is another subject to which I must briefly call attention, lest
I should seem to have overlooked it. Dr. Henry Jackson, of Trinity
College, Cambridge, in a series of articles which he has contributed to the
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Montezuma's Daughter by H. Rider Haggard: wondered at, for now he was a man of sixty or more. His peaked
chestnut-coloured beard was streaked with grey, his cheeks were
hollow, and at that distance his lips seemed like two thin red
lines, but the eyes were as they had always been, bright and
piercing, and the same cold smile played about his mouth. Without
a doubt it was de Garcia, who now, as at every crisis of my life,
appeared to shape my fortunes to some evil end, and I felt as I
looked upon him that the last and greatest struggle between us was
at hand, and that before many days were sped, the ancient and
accumulated hate of one or of both of us would be buried for ever
in the silence of death. How ill had fate dealt with me, now as
Montezuma's Daughter |
