In Trilby, La Svengali employs 'that devil's trick' specifically to relieve the heroine of a painful 'Neuralgia in the eyes, or something'. Trilby's susceptibility to hypnotic suggestion, and the sexual abuse that implicitly forms part of her relationship with the leering Svengali, an eastern European domiciled in Bohemian Paris, would perversely seem to prove the rule voiced by the correspondent in the Daily News. The popularity of Trilby, though, at a time at which British mesmerism was itself apparently in abeyance, seems surprising. The reporting of Jean-Martin Charcot's practice may effectively represent the final word on mesmerism in popular British consciousness in the nineteenth century. The 'devil's trick' of mesmerism might very well display some temporary alleviation of symptoms, or an improvement, even, on the part of the patient, but its application apparently vouchsafed no lasting curative value.