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Excerpt: MME. VAUQUER (nee de Conflans) is an elderly person, who for the past forty years has kept a lodging-house in the Rue Nueve-Sainte-Genevieve, in the district that lies between the Latin Quarter and the Faubourg Saint-Marcel. Her house (known in the neighborhood as the Maison Vauquer) receives men and women, old and young, and no word has ever been breathed against her respectable establishment; but, at the same time, it must be said that as a matter of fact no young woman has been under her roof for thirty years, and that if a young man stays there for any length of time it is a sure sign that his allowance must be of the slenderest....

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Excerpt: Nearly all young men have a compass with which they delight in measuring the future. When their will is equal to the breadth of the angle at which they open it the world is theirs. But this phenomenon of the inner life takes place only at a certain age. That age, which for all men lies between twenty-two and twenty-eight, is the period of great thoughts, of fresh conceptions, because it is the age of immense desires. After that age, short as the seed-time, comes that of execution. There are, as it were, two youths,--the youth of belief, the youth of action; these are often commingled in men whom Nature has favored and who, like Caesar, like Newton, like Bonaparte, are the greatest among great men....

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Excerpt: The Pension Beaurepas by Henry James.

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Excerpt: The Pit: A Story of Chicago by Frank Norris.

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Excerpt: Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen.

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Excerpt: Pandora by Henry James.

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Excerpt: The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult, I vowed revenge. You, who so well know the nature of my soul, will not suppose, however, that I gave utterance to a threat. At length I would be avenged; this was a point definitely settled--but the very definitiveness with which it was resolved, precluded the idea of risk. I must not only punish, but punish with impunity. A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser. It is equally unredressed when the avenger fails to make himself felt as such to him who has done the wrong....

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Excerpt: I had done a few things and earned a few pence--I had perhaps even had time to begin to think I was finer than was perceived by the patronising; but when I take the little measure of my course (a fidgety habit, for it?s none of the longest yet) I count my real start from the evening George Corvick, breathless and worried, came in to ask me a service. He had done more things than I, and earned more pence, though there were chances for cleverness I thought he sometimes missed....

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Excerpt: Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis is a publication of the Pennsylvania State University. This Portable Document File is provided with out charge for any and all interested parties. The Pennsylvania State University and Jim Manis, editor, assume no responsibilities for its use, either in content or as an electronic transmission or device. Persons using this document/file do so at their own risk. The Pennsylvania State University and Jim Manis, editor, wish you the best and hope you enjoy this document....

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Excerpt: Introduction to Crito. The ?Crito? seems intended to exhibit the character of Socrates in one light only, not as the philosopher, fulfilling a divine mission and trusting in the will of Heaven, but simply as the good citizen, who having been unjustly condemned is willing to give up his life in obedience to the laws of the State....

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One of Shakespeare’s most popular plays, As You Like It is a pastoral comedy of mistaken identity, wit, and love. Daughter of a banished duke and forced to flee the court, Rosalind hides in the Forest of Arden disguised as a man. When her true love Orlando also shows up in the forest, she courts him without revealing her identity. Meanwhile, Phebe mistakenly falls in love with her disguise, Silvius pines for Phebe, Jacques philosophizes, and Touchstone makes fun of it all, and love and happiness triumph (for the most part) as Rosalind orchestrates a happy ending amid the confusion. (Summary by Rosalind Wills)...

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Comedy, Play

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A collection of reprinted articles on a wide-range of subject, all in the unique style of G. K. Chesterton. Using wit, paradox, and good humor he “defends” a series of seeming harmless things that need no defense, and in so doing he exposes many of the broken assumptions and dogmatic notions of secular humanism and other trends of his age and of ours. (Summary by Ray Clare)...

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Essay/Short nonfiction, Humor

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Excerpt: On a winter?s night, about two in the morning, the Comtesse Jeanne d?Herouville felt such violent pains that in spite of her inexperience, she was conscious of an approaching confinement; and the instinct which makes us hope for ease in a change of posture induced her to sit up in her bed, either to study the nature of these new sufferings, or to reflect on her situation. She was a prey to cruel fears,--caused less by the dread of a first lying-in, which terrifies most women, than by certain dangers which awaited her child. In order not to awaken her husband who was sleeping beside her, the poor woman moved with precautions which her intense terror made as minute as those of a prisoner endeavor...

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Excerpt: Vittoria by George Meredith.

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Excerpt: As I sit down to write here amidst the shadows of vine leaves under the blue sky of southern Italy, it comes to me with a certain quality of astonishment that my participation in these amazing adventures of Mr. Cavor was, after all, the outcome of the purest accident. It might have been any one. I fell into these things at a time when I thought myself removed from the slightest possibility of disturbing experiences. I had gone to Lympne because I had imagined it the most uneventful place in the world. ?Here, at any rate,? said I, ?I shall find peace and a chance to work!?...

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Excerpt: Sons of the Soil by Honore de Balzac, translated by Katharine Prescott Wormeley.

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Excerpt: The Soul of a Bishop by H. G. Wells.

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Excerpt: Virgin Soil by Ivan S. Turgenev, translated by R. S. Townsend.

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Excerpt: Vanity Fair: Volume Two (Chapters Twenty-six through Fifty) by William Makepeace Thackeray.

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Excerpt: The Courtship of Susan Bell by Anthony Trollope.