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The performers went through their contests, so to speak, with bated breath and a self-consciousness which, try as we might, poisoned our applause and made it insufferably patronising. Their backers would pluck up heart and encourage them loudly with Whitechapel catch-words, and anon would hush their voices in uneasy shame.

The question was not a criticism, for she might have been satisfied that the girl was a mass of fluent catch-words and yet scarcely have liked her the less. It was just as she was that she liked her; she was so strange, so different from the girls one usually met, seemed to belong to some queer gipsy-land or transcendental Bohemia.

But here in a moment of withdrawal, I at least cannot fail to recognize behind the issues that divide us the tie of a common destiny. We shall pass and a new generation will succeed us; a generation to whom our ideals will be irrelevant, our catch-words empty, our controversies unintelligible. Hi motus animorum atque haec certamina tanta Pulveris exigui jactu compressa quiescunt.

Introduce an extra sex-motive to excite you for a bit and make you feel how thrillingly immoral things really are. And then it all goes flat again. Father complex, mother complex, incest dreams: pah, when we've had the little excitement out of them we shall forget them as we have forgotten so many other catch-words.

Or would you find the nearest equivalent to this emotion in the breast of the educated tramp of France, or Germany, or England? The speech of Whitman is English, and his metaphors and catch-words are apparently American, but the emotional content is cosmic. He put off patriotism when he took to the road. The attraction exercised by his writings is due to their flashes of reality.

But for an occasional drop and bump of the sailing gasbag upon catch-words of enthusiasm, which are the rhetoric of the merely windy, and a collapse on a poetic line, which too often signalizes the rhetorician's emptiness of his wind, the article was eminent for flight, sweep, and dash, and sailed along far more grandly than ordinary provincial organs for the promoting or seconding of public opinion, that are as little to be compared with the mighty metropolitan as are the fife and bugle boys practising on their instruments round melancholy outskirts of garrison towns with the regimental marching full band under the presidency of its drum-major.

Seeing that the Megarians and Cynics were making knowledge impossible, he takes their 'catch-words' and analyzes them from every conceivable point of view.

Liberty and independence are fine words, my friend. I love them. But they may be catch-words as well, and we have to beware. Who assures us that the revolted Colonies are sincere? After all, they are only Englishmen rebelling against their country. Even if they are justified in rebelling, does that fact justify us in joining them?

Nothing drew him from his intrenchments behind the forms of politeness; he laid in a provision of formulas, and made lavish use of his stock of the catch-words coined at need in Paris to give fools the small change for the ore of great ideas and events.

Temple, "that the whole of this communication was entirely of a political nature, but that in the last page which Lord Oldborough put into my hand, the catch-words at the bottom were Countess Christina." Alfred observed, "that, without the aid of Rosamond's imagination to supply something more, nothing could be made of this.