Page:Edward Prime-Stevenson - The Intersexes.djvu/383

 are pagan suggestions, but of a deeadently French, colouring, rather than even hellenic.

The atmosphere of uranianism hangs around the personality, and some of the literary work, of two eminent British orientalists—Captain Sir Richard Burton and W. G-. Palgrave. Was it the excursions toward—into? homosexuality that were bruited about in Burton's life, and his attention to the topic so exhaustively in his oriental studies and translations, which stood in the way of the political advancement of one of the most remarkable men in similar service, in all the contemporary history of English oriental workers? Only the Foreign Office can answer that query.

W. G. Palgrave, that subtly-gifted and adventurous traveller (of Hebrew blood) also a man of letters of fine individuality, was frequently spoken of as sufficiently "easternized" to "accept the homosexual." His curious and beautiful oriental novel, "Hermann Agha", with its scenes in the wild country about Diarbekir in the end of the eighteenth century, is a book far superiour to anything of its type yet public from English hands and eyes; a perfect mirror of life and character. Cast into a heterosexual romance, occurs the incident of an Arabian uranian friendship, better to be called love, in the bond between the hero of the tale, Hermann Agha, and young Moharib; a tie first sealed in blood, then ended in blood. One of the many exquisite lyrics in this story occurs in Hermann's agnostic lament for the boy—