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Updated: October 23, 2025
He noted that the small-talk amongst the others, mere un individualized lumpish fellows with scant voice in the government of their common enterprise, had ceased, and that they no longer busied themselves with the necessary work about the still, nor with the snickering interludes and horse-play with which they were wont to beguile their labors.
Gradually at Rome this exquisite fooling has degenerated under the influence of modern notions, till the bouquets having become cabbage stalks, very effective as offensive missiles, and the bonbons plaster of Paris pellets, with an accompanying substitution of a spiteful desire to inflict injury for the old horse-play, it has become necessary to limit the duration of the Saturnalia to the briefest span, with the sure prospect of its being very shortly altogether prohibited.
Every salesman should cultivate a musical and well-modulated voice as one of the chief assets in salesmanship. The salesman should cultivate dignity of speech and manner. People generally dislike familiarity, joking, and horse-play. It is well to assume that the customer is serious-minded, that he means business and nothing else.
Teamsters withheld their oaths and their uplifted whips as the two girls passed by; weary miners, toiling in ditches, looked up with a pleasure that was half reminiscent of their past; younger skylarkers stopped in their horse-play with half smiling, half apologetic faces; more ambitious riders on the highway urged their horses to greater speed under the girls' inspiring eyes, and "Vaquero Billy," charging them, full tilt, brought up his mustang on its haunches and rigid forelegs, with a sweeping bow of his sombrero, within a foot of their artfully simulated terror!
Angele had come to feel what he was beneath the surface. She felt how unimaginative he was, and how his humour, which was but the horse-play of vanity, helped him little to understand the world or himself.
The children of the row her own among them were having their usual street games in spite of the fog and chill, but Dick would not be there, she knew. For he was different from the rest, and hated the rough horse-play and bad language with all his might. "I must have a sup to make me forget it," she muttered again. "He looked for all the world like his father.
Horse-play, romping, frequent and loud fits of laughter, jokes, waggery, and indiscriminate familiarity, will sink both merit and knowledge into a degree of contempt. They compose at most a merry fellow; and a merry fellow was never yet a respectable man. Indiscriminate familiarity either offends your superiors, or else dubbs you their dependent and led captain.
Such a horse-play for the benefit of the political gallery gods would be contemptuously ignored by the ICONOCLAST were not the Advertiser's betters indulging in the same unmitigated bosh. Our Alabama contemporary is but an anile echo of the New York Tribune, a faint adumbration of the Chicago Inter-Ocean. The bigwigs cut out the work for the journalistic wiggletails.
There was more horse-play than anger in all this, and cases in which serious mischief was inflicted were rare. But the mob was in a highly explosive state for all that, and any sturdy attempt at resistance or self-defence might at any moment have led to bloodshed. The surrender of M. Rochefort was really, when all things are considered, one of the drollest spectacles I have ever seen.
Through it passion and philosophy are as well expressed as through any other medium. But the rhyming frenzy of Browning has no particular relation even to the poems in which it occurs. It is not a dance to any measure; it can only be called the horse-play of literature.
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