'You'd prove firmer in his place? You'd find the courage--that first flurry over, That mild bit of romancing-work at end, ... To interpose with "It gets serious, this; Must stop here. Sir, I saw no ghost at all. Inform your friends I made--well, fools of them, And found you ready-made. I've lived in clover These three weeks: take it out in kicks of me!" I doubt it. Ask your conscience!' Says poor David:-- 'There's something in real truth (explain who can) One casts a wistful eye at.' Now he faces the same dilemma that the developing hysteric has to meet, and as the hysteric reaches a false salvation by the repression of the knowledge of deceit so does David:-- 'Why, when I cheat, Mean to cheat, do cheat, and am caught in the act, Are you, or, rather, am I sure o' the fact? Well then I'm not sure! I may be, perhaps, Free as a babe from cheating: how it began, My gift ... no matter; what 'tis got to be In the end now, that's the question; answer that! Had I seen, perhaps, what hand was holding mine, Leading me whither, I had died of fright.' Nor does the poet omit the development of Receptivity:-- 'I'm eyes, ears, mouth of me, one gaze and gape, Nothing eludes me, everything's a hint, Handle and help.' At the last the youth, once an innocent jester, pours a stream of half-believed lies upon the man who, having caught him in his fraud, lets him go with a chance to start life afresh. Browning does not carry the idea of repression as far as I do, Sludge producing clouds of rationalisations to cover his inconsistencies. The idea of dissociation does not present itself, but the whole picture can be taken to represent the evolution of many mediums with their mixture of belief and deception. Just as in the hysteric we meet with mechanical ways of deceit, shown by self-inflicted injuries, so in the medium we meet with mechanical tricks for the production of spurious phenomena. In both cases fully-conscious deceit, reconciled to the moral complexes by rationalisations, is the easiest explanation, but sometimes fully-conscious deceit is unlikely. There is a disappointing lack of originality in spiritualist literature, for the same stories of the marvellous are repeated in one book and another. The Fox Sisters, Slade, Eglington, Eusapia Palladino and others appear according to the fancy of the writer, and their fraudulent tricks may or may not be acknowledged. It is a peculiarity of spiritualist reasoning that if a medium is caught cheating it only proves that he was cheating when he was caught; if he is not caught next time, we must accept as genuine the phenomena then produced.