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The seaside town of Madersley was crowded to excess. It was the height of the summer season, and Holt's circus was doing a roaring trade. There were two exhibitions daily, and every available corner in the great tent was crammed to excess. The spectators said that they came principally to see the little dark-eyed girl ride.
"The Quaker of the seventeenth century ... was essentially a coarse, blustering, conceited, disagreeable, impudent fanatic; whose religion gained subjective comfort in exact proportion to the objective comfort of which it was able to deprive others; and which broke out into its choicest exhibitions in acts which were not only at that time in the nature of a public scandal and nuisance, but which even in the brightest light of this nineteenth century ... would subject those who should be guilty of them to the immediate and stringent attention of the police court.
And when we find them callous to our representations of the truth when we find their hearts almost as unmoved as the firm rocks they tread on, notwithstanding our most faithful exhibitions of human depravity, as is evinced by the slander, the detraction and the calumny which every where prevail, and which many must see, as in a glass, to prevail in their own bosoms, while yet their very blood recoils at the tales of imaginary wo from the pen of Bulwer, or some other novelist of kindred fame is it not proper to remind people of what the evangelist says of hatred, that it is murder?
These exhibitions are more curious than pleasing; indeed, they are rather disgusting than otherwise, except to the admirers of such things, with whom we confess we have no fellow-feeling. Strange tricks very strange tricks are also performed by the harlequin who holds for the time being the magic wand which we have just mentioned.
The anniversary was celebrated, on March 28, 1883, both in that town and in Rome, where he lived and worked, and where he died in 1520, with processions, orations, poetical recitations, performances of music, exhibitions of pictures, statues, and busts, visits to the tomb of the great artist in the Pantheon, and with banquets and other festivities.
Each season brings its own attractions. In summer one may relish what is new in Oldport, as the liveries, the incomes, the manners. There is often a delicious freshness about these exhibitions; it is a pleasure to see some opulent citizen in his first kid gloves.
Men and women came, and some looked eagerly in and pressed their faces against the bars; others glanced carelessly at the body and turned away with a disappointed look people, I thought, who live upon strong excitements and who attend the exhibitions of the Morgue regularly, just as other people go to see theatrical spectacles every night.
It is unnecessary either to tell the story of all the foolish fatal lingerings upon the ill-omened way: trifling with treacherous ladies for whom he cared nothing, cartels from Surrey; the abandonment of a strong position, lest it should give him an advantage, in ever greater and greater folly of chivalry: the refusal to attack, or let his artillery attack, till his foes were all safely over the bridge: all exhibitions of high honour gone mad with the intoxication of fate.
But they believe that dramatic exhibitions are of such a nature as men of a christian spirit could never have invented or encouraged, and that, if the world were to begin again, and were to be peopled by pure christians, these exhibitions could never be called into existence there. This inference, the Quakers judge to be deducible from the nature of a christian mind.
Others, more numerous, among them the irrepressible Chalks, made it an object of derision, and would exhaust their ingenuity in efforts to lead him on, and entice him into more and more egregious exhibitions of it; while, if they did not laugh in his face, they took, at least, no slightest pains to conceal their jubilant interchange of winks and nudges.
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