"
"Find anything new, even if it fail to amuse me. I am sick of everything I
know."
"And then there is our midnight party at Millbank, the ghost-party, at
which you are to frighten your dearest friends out of their poor little
wits."
"Most of my dearest friends are in the country."
"Nay, there is Lady Lucretia Topham, whom I know you hate; and Lady Sarah
and the Dubbins are still in Covent Garden."
"I will have no Dubbin--a toping wretch--and she is a too incongruous
mixture, with her Edinburgh lingo and her Whitehall arrogance. Besides, the
whole notion of a mock ghost was vulgarised by Wilmot's foolery, who ought
to have been born a saltimbanque, and spent his life in a fair. No, I have
abandoned the scheme."
"What! after I have been taxing my invention to produce the most terrible
illusion that was ever witnessed? Will you let a clown like Spavinger--a
well-born stable-boy--baulk us of our triumph? I am sending to Paris for
a powder to burn in a corner of the room, which will throw the ghastliest
pallor upon your countenance. When I devise a ghost, it shall be no
impromptu spectre in yellow riding-boots, but a vision so awful, so true
an image of a being returned from the dead, that the stoutest nerves will
thrill and tremble at the apparition.
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