| The first excerpt represents the past or something you must release, and is drawn from Lucile by Owen Meredith: Torn open this note, with a hand most unsteady,
Lord Alfred was startled.
The month is September;
Time, morning; the scene at Bigorre; (pray remember
These facts, gentle reader, because I intend
To fling all the unities by at the end.)
He walk'd to the window. The morning was chill:
The brown woods were crisp'd in the cold on the hill:
The sole thing abroad in the streets was the wind:
And the straws on the gust, like the thoughts in his mind,
Rose, and eddied around and around, as tho' teasing
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The second excerpt represents the present or the deciding factor of the moment, and is drawn from The Battle of the Books by Jonathan Swift: this: When the works of Scotus first came out, they were carried
to a certain library, and had lodgings appointed them; but this
author was no sooner settled than he went to visit his master
Aristotle, and there both concerted together to seize Plato by main
force, and turn him out from his ancient station among the divines,
where he had peaceably dwelt near eight hundred years. The attempt
succeeded, and the two usurpers have reigned ever since in his
stead; but, to maintain quiet for the future, it was decreed that
all polemics of the larger size should be hold fast with a chain.
By this expedient, the public peace of libraries might certainly
have been preserved if a new species of controversial books had not
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The third excerpt represents the future or something you must embrace, and is drawn from The Divine Comedy (translated by H.F. Cary) by Dante Alighieri: situation, contrived, by means of forged letters, to make
Frederick believe that he held a secret and traitorous
intercourse with the Pope, who was then at enmity with the
Emperor. In consequence of this supposed crime he was cruelly
condemned by his too credulous sovereign to lose his eyes, and,
being driven to despair by his unmerited calamity and disgrace,
he put an end to his life by dashing out his brains against the
walls of a church, in the year 1245. Both Frederick and Pietro
delle Vigne composed verses in the Sicilian dialect which are yet
extant.
v. 67. The harlot.] Envy. Chaucer alludes to this in the
The Divine Comedy (translated by H.F. Cary) |
