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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Ancient Regime by Charles Kingsley: why should not the mountebank, for once, play the nobleman? The
nobleman's God had been his five senses, with (to use Mr. Carlyle's
phrase) the sixth sense of vanity: why should not the mountebank
worship the same God, like Carriere at Nantes, and see what grace
and gifts he too might obtain at that altar?
But why so cruel? Because, with many of these men, I more than
suspect, there were wrongs to be avenged deeper than any wrongs done
to the sixth sense of vanity. Wrongs common to them, and to a great
portion of the respectable middle class, and much of the lower
class: but wrongs to which they and their families, being most in
contact with the noblesse, would be especially exposed; namely,
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