| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Hunting of the Snark by Lewis Carroll: That the phrase was not legally sound.
But their wild exultation was suddenly checked
When the jailer informed them, with tears,
Such a sentence would have not the slightest effect,
As the pig had been dead for some years.
The Judge left the Court, looking deeply disgusted:
But the Snark, though a little aghast,
As the lawyer to whom the defense was entrusted,
Went bellowing on to the last.
Thus the Barrister dreamed, while the bellowing seemed
To grow every moment more clear:
The Hunting of the Snark |
The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia by Samuel Johnson: CHAPTER XXXIII - THE PRINCESS MEETS WITH AN UNEXPECTED MISFORTUNE.
THEY rose up, and returned through the cavity at which they had
entered; and the Princess prepared for her favourite a long
narrative of dark labyrinths and costly rooms, and of the different
impressions which the varieties of the way had made upon her. But
when they came to their train, they found every one silent and
dejected: the men discovered shame and fear in their countenances,
and the women were weeping in their tents.
What had happened they did not try to conjecture, but immediately
inquired. "You had scarcely entered into the Pyramid," said one of
the attendants, "when a troop of Arabs rushed upon us: we were too
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Menexenus by Plato: difficulty in improvising any number of such orations. To praise the
Athenians among the Athenians was easy,--to praise them among the
Lacedaemonians would have been a much more difficult task. Socrates
himself has turned rhetorician, having learned of a woman, Aspasia, the
mistress of Pericles; and any one whose teachers had been far inferior to
his own--say, one who had learned from Antiphon the Rhamnusian--would be
quite equal to the task of praising men to themselves. When we remember
that Antiphon is described by Thucydides as the best pleader of his day,
the satire on him and on the whole tribe of rhetoricians is transparent.
The ironical assumption of Socrates, that he must be a good orator because
he had learnt of Aspasia, is not coarse, as Schleiermacher supposes, but is
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