| The first excerpt represents the element of Air. It speaks of mental influences and the process of thought, and is drawn from New Arabian Nights by Robert Louis Stevenson: Tabary giggled.
"Or parsley on a golden dish," scribbled the poet.
The wind was freshening without; it drove the snow before it, and
sometimes raised its voice in a victorious whoop, and made
sepulchral grumblings in the chimney. The cold was growing sharper
an the night went on. Villon, protruding his lips, imitated the
gust with something between a whistle and a groan. It was an
eerie, uncomfortable talent of the poet's, much detested by the
Picardy monk.
"Can't you hear it rattle in the gibbet?" said Villon. "They are
all dancing the devil's jig on nothing, up there. You may dance,
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The second excerpt represents the element of Fire. It speaks of emotional influences and base passions, and is drawn from A Book of Remarkable Criminals by H. B. Irving: are waging a perpetual struggle for our very existence. Why
dissipate our strength by fighting among ourselves? By enlarging
our conception of crime we move towards that end. What is anti-
social, whether it be written in the pages of the historian or
those of the Newgate Calendar, must in the future be regarded
with equal abhorrence and subjected to equally sure punishment.
Every professor of history should now and then climb down from
the giddy heights of Thucydides and Gibbon and restore his moral
balance by comparing the acts of some of his puppets with those
of their less fortunate brethren who have dangled at the end of a
rope. If this war is to mean anything to posterity, the crime
A Book of Remarkable Criminals |
