Subtle, insidious, false, and plausible;
He can with ease assume all outward forms ...
While with the lynx’s beam he penetrates
The deep reserve of every other breast.
R. Jephson, Braganza, ii. 2 (1785).
Velinspeck, a country manager, to whom Matthew Stuffy makes application for the post of prompter.--Charles Mathews, At Home (1818).
Vellum, in Addison’s comedy, The Drummer (1715).
Velvet (The Rev. Morphine), a popular preacher, who feeds his flock on eau sucrée and wild honey. He assures his hearers that the way to heaven might once be thorny and steep, but now “every hill is brought low, every valley is filled up, the crooked ways are made straight, and even in the valley of the shadow of death, they need fear no evil, for One will be with them to support and comfort them.”
Veneering (Mr.), a new man, “forty, wavy-haired, dark, tending to corpulence, sly, mysterious, filmy; a kind of well-looking veiled prophet, not prophesying.” He was a drug merchant of the firm of Chicksey, Stobbles and Veneering. The two former were his quondam masters, but their names had “become absorbed in Veneering, once their traveller or commission agent.”
Mrs. Veneering, a new woman, “fair, aquiline-nosed and fingered, not so much light hair as she might have, gorgeous in raiment and jewels, enthusiastic, propitiatory, conscious that a corner of her husband’s veil is over herself.”