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Ever since Shakespear, playwrights have been struggling with the same lack of religion; and many of them were forced to become mere panders and sensation-mongers because, though they had higher ambitions, they could find no better subject-matter. Goldsmith's was the only saved soul in that pandemonium.

Nothing very daring in their aspect to-day a little weary and preoccupied they looked, as they stood up there in twos and threes, talking to one another in that exposed position of theirs, while from time to time about their ears like spent bullets flew the spasmodic laughter and rude comment of the crowd strangely unconscious, those 'blatant sensation-mongers, of the thousand eyes and the sea of upturned faces!

Throughout the last years of Elizabeth's reign there had been, as we have seen, a morbid interest in demoniacal possession, an interest to which sensation-mongers were quickly minded to respond.

Whether he had really allowed himself to be dragged into the horrors of even a slight connection with the slave-trade she could not tell; but she knew the world well enough to recognise the fact that Durnovo had only to make the accusation for it to be believed by the million sensation-mongers who are always on the alert for some new horror.

A servant, obeying his master's gesture, pulled back the curtains after the departing crowd. The four men were alone. "Mr. von Tassen," Peter said easily, "you are a man who loves adventures. To-night you experience a new sort of one. Over in your great country such methods as these are laughed at as the cheap device of sensation-mongers. Nevertheless, they exist.

He would be thrust into the pitiless mouth of sensation-mongers, called to appear before tribunals, subjected to an inquisition of his fellow-men, made to endure a notoriety infinitely odious even in anticipation. Indeed, Sir Walter's simple intellect wallowed in anticipation, and so suffered much that, given exercise of restraint, he might have escaped altogether.

The low altitude of the planet, however, practically neutralised this advantage for northern observers, and public expectation, which had been raised to the highest pitch by the announcements of sensation-mongers, was somewhat disappointed at the "meagreness" of the news authentically received from Mars.

The natural result will be, as in the Venezuelan difficulty between the United States and Great Britain, that when a commission of this sort has been set at work to ascertain the facts, the howling of partizans and screaming of sensation-mongers will cease, and the finding of the commission be calmly awaited. So, too, the plans adopted for mediation can hardly fail to aid in keeping off war.

News of many sorts can now be circulated only by word of mouth. The queerest stories are whispered about and find at least temporary credence. Sensation-mongers appear at every old-woman's knitting circle. And all this has an effect on conduct. Two young wives of noble officers now in France have just run away with two other young noblemen to the scandal of a large part of good society in London.

They suffer from the "fakirs" even more than do the people of the United States who read the stories of both, and who confound the sensation-mongers with those who go to find the truth at the risk of their lives. For these latter do risk their lives, daily and hourly, when they go into these conflicts looking for the facts.