Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/253

 The English Commonwealth by its iron-bound, Hebraic, code of social and political life, made a profession of turning England into a second Canaan, with a Pentateuchal conscience as to thought and word and deed. Did it banish homosexualism? Could such a super-abomination of fleshly sins, according to Christian ideas, find any nourishment, while Cromwell was at the head of the nation?—with every parson and hedge-preacher, Leviticus in hand, a censor and a judge over his neighbour? We may be certain that not a thousand Cromwells, not the most sharp-seeing religious tyranny of even Protestant sort, could root it out; any more than could the confessionals of the Roman Church or the harshness of civil laws. Natural instinctive in Anglo-Saxons, it would defy the cant of pietism, the rule of Moses and the Prophets. One brilliant leader of the Cavalier party, Montrose, is said to have been dionian-uranian. We may observe here, by the by, that in the Scotch temperament, as in the Irish, there is a vivid, racial element of homosexualism.

With the Restoration period came quite another aspect of English social ethics. That most scandalously immoral, that most crudely licentious of royal courts, which centered on Charles II and his crew of familiars, male and female, was by no means wholly heterosexual, in spite of its putting a premium on feminine harlotry. Homosexual intimacies, often of repulsively gross sort, were a social jest. The curious can study this state of affairs in the secret diarists, the prurient back-stairs chroniclers of the time; can trace it also in the grosser satirical poets and dramatists of the date. Pepys has hints of it, though Pepys is chiefly preoccupied with heterosexual gossip as to the frail ladies of Whitehall. There is a curious pathos in one of Pepys serious anecdotes, vaguely uranian of motif—the foolish quarrel between "Sir H. Bellasis" and his best