Crossword-Solution: DUPERS 6 letters, 1 clue 🏆 scrabble score: 9

Suddenly he saw his enemies as less formidable, as something contemptible--things of a lower breed, dupers who might themselves be duped.

Those Viscontis, Castruccios, and Medici; those Richelieus and Mazarins and De Retzs; those Loyolas and Mohammeds and Cromwells; those Monks and Godolphins; those Markboroughs and Walpoles; those founders of history and dynasties and sects; those leaders and dupers of men, greater or lesser, corrupters or corrupt, all standing out prominent and renowned from the guiltless and laurelless obscure,--seemed to win, by the homage of posterity, the rewards that attend the deceivers of their time.

But what is this but the story of priestcraft and intolerance everywhere, which Old Spain can repeat as well as New Spain, the white race as well as the red? Blind leaders of the blind, dupers and duped fall into the ditch.

They are (such of them as are the dupes, not the dupers) men whose minds from childhood have been filled with anti-historic visions of Ireland's former grandeur, and who cherish patriotic indignation for her supposed wrongs, and patriotic hopes of her future glory.

The subplot of Thomas, concocted with clever ease, and furnished with varied devices appropriate to comic effect--disguisings, mouse-traps, dupers duped, street-frolics and mock sentimental serenades, scaling-ladders, convents, and a blackamoor girl for a decoy-duck,--is conceived in a rollicking spirit and executed in sprightly conversational style.