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It is thus that fatuous old maids are led to look under their beds for fabulous ravishers, and to cry out that they have been stabbed with hypodermic needles in cinema theatres, and to watch furtively for white slavers in railroad stations. It is thus, indeed, that the whole white-slave mountebankery has been launched, with its gaudy fictions and preposterous alarms.
The sentimentality is very often simply maudlin, almost always tiresome to us, and in very, very few cases justified by brilliant success even in its own very doubtful kind. Most questionable of all, perhaps, is the merely mechanical mountebankery the blanks, and the dashes, and the rows of stops, the black pages and the marbled pages which he employs to force a guffaw from his readers.
Snodgrass at Mrs. Leo Hunter's fete champetre? I wish I could fathom Aunt Jessica's reasons for her attempts at involving me in her social mountebankery. If the girls get no better dance-partners than me, heaven help them! Only a fortnight ago I drove with them to Hurlingham.
Now, Lackaday in his manuscript relates this English episode, not so much as an appeal to pity for the straits to which he was reduced, although he winces at its precarious mountebankery, and his sensitive and respectable soul revolts at going round with the mendicant's hat and thanking old women and children for pennies, as in order to correlate certain influences and coincidences in his career.
Much was required of him in a world where a high fantastical acrobatic mountebankery was almost a matter of ceremony, where riders stand on their heads in passing their rivals and cooks punt a casserole over their heads to the wall behind by way of giving notice: much was required of him and he proved worthy. He saw himself, I suppose, as a great imaginative master of fiction sees a hero.
Possibly, the sensational style has been found to have lost its force, and a more quiet and stately tone to be more promotive of the popularity of bread-pills and root-bitters. It looks more professional. Mountebankery in physic has been overdone, as it has in a great many other things.
I must insist on this, so that you can recognize that the young and successful mountebank, although dead set on the perfection of his mountebankery, and, in serious fact, never dreaming of a work-a-day existence outside the walls of a Variety Theatre yet had the tentacles of his being spread gropingly, blindly, octopus-like, to the major potentialities of life.
Many of the Turks are so handy at this nasty trick, that they can make the Smoke they have swallowed come out of their ears, eyes, and nostrils; but I envy them not such Mountebankery, and when I smoke my Pipe, am content to Blow a Cloud in a moderate and Christian manner.
"There are times when I lie awake, inventing lingering deaths for you. You occupy yourself too much with my affairs. It's time our partnership in this degrading mountebankery should cease." "Until it does, it's going to be efficient," said Andrew. "It's a come down for both of us to play on the sands and pass the hat round.
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