Read "What Will He Do With It? Book I" by Edward Bulwer-lytton online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Showing the arts by which a man, however high in the air Nature may have formed his nose, may be led by that nose, and in directions perversely opposite to those which, in following his nose, he might be supposed to take; and, therefore, that nations the most liberally endowed with practical good sense, and in conceit thereof, carrying their noses the most horizontally aloof, when they come into conference with nations more skilled in diplomacy and more practised in "stage-play," end by the surrender of the precise object which it was intended they should surrender before they laid their noses together.
We all know that Demosthenes said, Everything in oratory was acting, -- stage-play. Is it in oratory alone that the saying holds good? Apply it to all circumstances of fife, "stage-play, stage-play, stage-play! " -- only /ars est celare artem/, conceal the art. Gleesome in soul to behold his visitors, calculating already on the three pounds to be extracted from them, seeing in that hope the crisis in his own checkered existence, Mr. Waife rose from his seat in superb /upocrisia/ or stage-play, and asked, with mild dignity, -- "To what am I indebted, gentlemen, for the honour of your visit?"