But this piece is to be comedy, pure and simple : not comedy of the modern, drawing‐room species, but comedy of the genuine, old‐fashioned sort, wherein even the diabolesque dénouement is not without the true “ comic ” flavour of the mediævalistic stage‐play.

… Shane kept looking into the open box with the morbid curiosity of a freeway rubbernecker passing a fatal accident. All of his mid-nineties career pileups were collected there.

He had acted unmanly, unworthy of a gentleman.

Despicable trickery at elections; under-handed tamperings with public officers; cowardly attacks upon opponents, with scurrilous newspapers for shields, and hired pens for daggers; shameful trucklings to mercenary knaves […]