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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Memories and Portraits by Robert Louis Stevenson: not there, nor yet in the next column, so that I began to think it
had been dropped at press; and when at last I found it, mounted on
the shoulders of so many successors, and looking in that posture
like the name of a man of ninety, I was conscious of some of the
dignity of years. This kind of dignity of temporal precession is
likely, with prolonged life, to become more familiar, possibly less
welcome; but I felt it strongly then, it is strongly on me now, and
I am the more emboldened to speak with my successors in the tone of
a parent and a praiser of things past.
For, indeed, that which they attend is but a fallen University; it
has doubtless some remains of good, for human institutions decline
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