The sentence from Herman Melville's short story "The Lightning-Rod Man" which is an example of allusion is the one we find in letter B. Who has empowered you, you Tetzel, to peddle round your indulgences from divine ordinations?
One of the characters is mocked by being called Tetzel, who was a German Dominican preacher who sold "indulgences" (paid forgiveness for one's sins) in the 1500's. In the aforementioned sentence, there is an allusion to Martin Luther, who was openly against Tetzel and his "indulgences". An allusion is an indirect reference to something or someone, and Martin Luther is indirectly mentioned in the sense that it's like he is talking to his adversary. Except it's not Martin Luther himself speaking; it's one of the characters who try to impersonate him.
In the sentence: <span>Long ago, builders erected the Great Wall of China to keep out invaders, in which the underlined word is the "Great Wall of China", it specifies the direct object.
</span>Direct objects<span> can be nouns, pronouns, phrases, or clauses. If you can identify the subject and verb in a sentence, then finding the </span>direct object<span>—if one exists—is easy.</span>
The skepticism is characterized by an atittude of doubting, questioning and/or not believing something or someone.
As we can see in “Of Cannibals”, Montaigned used skepticism to justify his arguments on his opinion about clever people. For instance:
1) “They never show you things as they are” – The author also said that clever people “cannot help altering history a little”, and then he says that they never show things as they really are; meaning that since he believes that clever people tend to change facts and information, the consequence of it is that their speech isn’t 100% honest. Therefore, he is skeptical when it comes to the true nature of those facts.
2) (...) And to give credence to their judgement and attract you to it, they are prone to add something to the matter, to strecht it out or amplify it” – Now the author claims that clever people try to convince others by adding details or facts to what actually happened. He believes that once the fact is amplified, it gets more attention and credit. In this case, he is being skeptical in regards to judgements and opinions, suggesting that clever people aren’t really honest in their judgements as they want others to “buy their ideas” and because of it they will tell things in a way that will persuade people to do what they want and believe what they say.
