| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from The Deserted Woman by Honore de Balzac: and wears the Cross of the Legion of Honor. In short, he is a country
gentleman who has fully grasped the significance of the Restoration,
and is coining money at the Chamber, but his Royalism is less pure
than that of the rival house; he takes the /Gazette/ and the /Debats/,
the other family only read the /Quotidienne/.
His lordship the Bishop, a sometime Vicar-General, fluctuates between
the two powers, who pay him the respect due to religion, but at times
they bring home to him the moral appended by the worthy Lafontaine to
the fable of the /Ass laden with Relics/. The good man's origin is
distinctly plebeian.
Then come stars of the second magnitude, men of family with ten or
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Art of Writing by Robert Louis Stevenson: almost in a breath, the scale, the style, the spirit, and the
particularity of execution of his whole design.
The engendering idea of some works is stylistic; a technical
preoccupation stands them instead of some robuster principle
of life. And with these the execution is but play; for the
stylistic problem is resolved beforehand, and all large
originality of treatment wilfully foregone. Such are the
verses, intricately designed, which we have learnt to admire,
with a certain smiling admiration, at the hands of Mr. Lang
and Mr. Dobson; such, too, are those canvases where dexterity
or even breadth of plastic style takes the place of pictorial
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from Familiar Studies of Men and Books by Robert Louis Stevenson: grudging a penny income tax, Kusakabe was stepping to death
with a noble sentence on his lips.
CHAPTER VI - FRANCOIS VILLON, STUDENT, POET, AND HOUSEBREAKER
PERHAPS one of the most curious revolutions in literary
history is the sudden bull's-eye light cast by M. Longnon on
the obscure existence of Francois Villon. (1) His book is
not remarkable merely as a chapter of biography exhumed after
four centuries. To readers of the poet it will recall, with
a flavour of satire, that characteristic passage in which he
bequeaths his spectacles - with a humorous reservation of the
case - to the hospital for blind paupers known as the
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