{
 "id": "ambrose-bierce/two-shows",
 "title": "Two Shows",
 "ordinal": null,
 "subtitle": null,
 "poet": "Ambrose Bierce",
 "poet_slug": "ambrose-bierce",
 "language": "en",
 "book": "Shapes of Clay",
 "book_slug": "shapes-of-clay",
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 "sequence": 115,
 "container": "Shapes of Clay",
 "epigraph": null,
 "first_published": {
  "year": 1903,
  "venue": "Shapes of Clay (1903)",
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   "https://archive.org/details/literarycalifor05mighgoog",
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  "rights": "public domain (SE dedication; underlying text pre-1931)"
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  [
   {
    "text": "The showman (blessing in a thousand shapes!)",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Parades a “School of Educated Apes!”",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Small education’s needed, I opine,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Or native wit, to make a monkey shine.",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The brute exhibited has naught to do",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "But ape the larger apes that come to view⁠—",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The hoodlum with his horrible grimace,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Long upper lip and furtive, shuffling pace,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Significant reminders of the time",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "When hunters, not policemen, made him climb;",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The lady loafer with her draggling “trail,”",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "That free translation of an ancient tail;",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The sand-lot quadrumane in hairy suit,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Whose heels are thumbs perverted by the boot;",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The painted actress throwing down the gage",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "To elder artists of the sylvan stage,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Proving that in the time of Noah’s flood",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Two ape-skins held her whole profession’s blood;",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "The critic waiting, like a hungry pup,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "To write the school⁠—perhaps to eat it⁠—up,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "As chance or luck occasion may reveal",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "To earn a dollar or maraud a meal.",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "To view the school of apes these creatures go,",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "Unconscious that themselves are half the show.",
    "indent": 0
   },
   {
    "text": "These, if the simian his course but trim",
    "indent": 3
   },
   {
    "text": "To copy them as they have copied him,",
    "indent": 3
   },
   {
    "text": "Will call him “educated.” Of a verity",
    "indent": 3
   },
   {
    "text": "There’s much to learn by studying posterity.",
    "indent": 3
   }
  ]
 ]
}