Page:Essays and Studies - Swinburne (1875).pdf/197

 of pleasure or gaiety are the last I should associate with a name so justly venerated, a fame so sound and round and solid. Rather would I regard it, as the author of "Mademoiselle de Maupin" used to regard virtue in the days which found him unambitious of academic eminence, with such eyes as turn towards a fond and watchful grandmother. It is dangerous to ruffle the robe of that dowager. But I cannot regard her bosom as a safe pillow for the yet unshorn head of a Nazarite champion. Too many of the uncircumcised Philistines lie in wait for him slumbering in the lap of M. Buloz. Are there not giants among them, and the sons of the old giant, all of them children of uncircumcision? and the least of these has twice the thews and seven times the wits of the heavy-headed horny-eyed English Philistine. Some of them there are that sleep with their father Goliath, and some abide to this day; and the acts of them past and present, and all that they did, and their might, are they not written in the books of the Revue des Deux Mondes? There is M. Gustave Planche, the staff of whose spear was so very like a weavers beam; there is M. Armand de Pontmartin, a man of great moral stature, having on every hand six fingers to fight with, if haply he may give the flesh of poets to the fowls of the air and to the beasts of the field; there is M. Louis Etienne, who lately laid lance in rest against me unoffending in championship of the upper powers. Since the time of Goliath it has been a holy habit and tradition with the Philistines to curse "by their gods"—which indeed seems the chief utility of those divine beings.

The comparative culture and relative urbanity of