Page:The Fleshly school of poetry - Buchanan - 1872.djvu/16

 ugliness of women who feed high and take no exercise (that, too, is familiar, though not perhaps on so large a scale); nor the dark blotches of life where disease squats for ever, nor the follies of the last new fashion, nor the hideousness of the last new public building. All these things are passed on one side, as I approach a phenomenon so strange and striking that to a superstitious mind it might seem a portent, and so hideous that it converts this great city of civilisation into a great Sodom or Gomorrah waiting for doom. Look which way I will, the horrid thing threatens and paralyzes me. It lies on the drawing-room table, shamelessly naked and dangerously fair. It is part of the pretty poem which the belle of the season reads, and it breathes away the pureness of her soul like the poisoned breath of the girl in Hawthorne's tale. It covers the shelves of the great Oxford-Street librarian, lurking in the covers of three-volume novels. It is on the French booksellers' counters, authenticated by the signature of the author of the "Visite de Noces." It is here, there, everywhere, in art, literature, life, just as surely as it is in the "Fleurs de Mal," the Marquis de Sade's "Justine," or the "Monk" of Lewis. It appeals to all tastes, to all dispositions, to all ages. If the querulous man of letters has his "Baudelaire," the pimpled clerk has his Day's Doings, and the dissipated artisan his