| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Chronicles of the Canongate by Walter Scott: could be admired in domestic life. He would conclude with
reciting a few words from Shakespeare, in a spirit not of
contradiction to those stern moralists who disliked the theatre,
but of meekness: "Good, my lord, will you see the players well
bestowed? Do you hear, let them be well used, for they are the
abstract and brief chronicles of the time." He then gave "Mrs.
Henry Siddons, and success to the Theatre Royal of Edinburgh."
Mr. MURRAY.--Gentlemen, I rise to return thanks for the honour
you have done Mrs. Siddons, in doing which I am somewhat
difficulted, from the extreme delicacy which attends a brother's
expatiating upon a sister's claims to honours publicly paid--
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Songs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake: So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep.
There's little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head,
That curled like a lamb's back, was shaved; so I said,
'Hush, Tom! never mind it, for, when your head's bare,
You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair.'
And so he was quiet, and that very night,
As Tom was a-sleeping, he had such a sight! -
That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, and Jack,
Were all of them locked up in coffins of black.
And by came an angel, who had a bright key,
And he opened the coffins, and set them all free;
Songs of Innocence and Experience |
The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Alexandria and her Schools by Charles Kingsley: savagery, but into effete and profligate luxury, is possible. Still
more is it a question whether a regeneration can be effected, not by the
rise of a new spiritual idea (as in the case of the Koreish), but simply
by more perfect material appliances, and commercial prudence. History
gives no instance, it seems to me, of either case; and if our attempt to
regenerate Greece by freeing it has been an utter failure, much more, it
seems to me, would any such attempt fail in the case of the Turkish
race. For what can be done with a people which has lost the one great
quality which was the tenure of its existence, its military skill? Let
any one read the accounts of the Turkish armies in the fifteenth,
sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, when they were the tutors and
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