| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin by Robert Louis Stevenson: 'a terribly busy state, finishing up engines for innumerable gun-
boats and steam frigates for the ensuing campaign.' From half-past
eight in the morning till nine or ten at night, he worked in a
crowded office among uncongenial comrades, 'saluted by chaff,
generally low personal and not witty,' pelted with oranges and
apples, regaled with dirty stories, and seeking to suit himself
with his surroundings or (as he writes it) trying to be as little
like himself as possible. His lodgings were hard by, 'across a
dirty green and through some half-built streets of two-storied
houses'; he had Carlyle and the poets, engineering and mathematics,
to study by himself in such spare time as remained to him; and
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Wheels of Chance by H. G. Wells: the pavement and regarding him with a very curious expression of
face.
There came into Mr. Hoopdriver's head the curious problem whether
he was to be regarded as a nuisance haunting these people, or
whether they were to be regarded as a nuisance haunting him. He
abandoned the solution at last in despair, quite unable to decide
upon the course he should take at the next encounter, whether he
should scowl savagely at the couple or assume an attitude
eloquent of apology and propitiation.
THE IMAGININGS OF MR. HOOPDRIVER'S HEART
X
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Charmides by Plato: recurring in them; they are too like him and also too unlike him, to be
genuine (see especially Karsten, Commentio Critica de Platonis quae
feruntur Epistolis). They are full of egotism, self-assertion,
affectation, faults which of all writers Plato was most careful to avoid,
and into which he was least likely to fall. They abound in obscurities,
irrelevancies, solecisms, pleonasms, inconsistencies, awkwardnesses of
construction, wrong uses of words. They also contain historical blunders,
such as the statement respecting Hipparinus and Nysaeus, the nephews of
Dion, who are said to 'have been well inclined to philosophy, and well able
to dispose the mind of their brother Dionysius in the same course,' at a
time when they could not have been more than six or seven years of age--
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