Mr Stelling was very far from being led astray by enthusiasm, either religious or intellectual; on the other hand, he had no secret belief that everything was humbug.
There was no humbug or hypocrisy about Mr Glegg; his eyes would have watered with true feeling over the sale of a widow's furniture, which a five-pound note from his side pocket would have prevented; but a donation of five pounds to a person "in a small way of life" would have seemed to him a mad kind of lavishness rather than "charity," which had always presented itself to him as a contribution of small aids, not a neutralizing of misfortune.
"As to humbug, Hawley," he said, "that's a word easy to fling about.
"He would have it, the medical profession was an inevitable system of humbug.
"There's no greater humbug in the world.
There was another attraction in his profession: it wanted reform, and gave a man an opportunity for some indignant resolve to reject its venal decorations and other humbug, and to be the possessor of genuine though undemanded qualifications.
"What's the good of trying to humbug me?
And on the strength of peccadillos, reprehensible in an author, but excusable in a son, the Anglo-Saxon race is accused of prudishness, humbug, pretentiousness, deceit, cunning, and bad cooking.
"I thought you must be a humbug all along, from the conceited way you talked.
The pompous, bewhiskered old humbug!
"What an old humbug you are!
"Bah, humbug!
The signposts I try to follow as an architect are these: to keep the innocent eye with which we are all born, and therefore always to be astonished; to respect the scholar but not the style snob; to like what I like without humbug, but also to train my eye and mind so that I can say why I like it; to use my head but not to be frightened to listen to my heart (for there are some things which can be learned only through emotion); finally, to develop to the best of my ability the best that lies wit
" "Silver, if you like," cried the squire; "but as for that intolerable humbug, I declare I think his conduct unmanly, unsailorly, and downright un-English.
Full of political humbug.
