Page:The Fleshly school of poetry - Buchanan - 1872.djvu/17

 Day and Night. The streets are full of it. Photographs of nude, indecent, and hideous harlots, in every possible attitude that vice can devise, flaunt from the shop-windows, gloated over by the fatuous glint of the libertine and the greedy open-mouthed stare of the day-labourer. Never was this Snake, which not all the naturalists of the world have been able to scotch, so vital and poisonous as now. It has penetrated into the very sweetshops; and there, among the commoner sorts of confectionery, may be seen this year models of the female Leg, the whole definite and elegant article as far as the thigh, with a fringe of paper cut in imitation of the female drawers and embroidered in the female fashion!

When things have come to such a pass as this, it is difficult to be quite serious in dealing with them. The foot-and- mouth disease is dreadful, but the Leg-disease, though generally fatal, is egregiously absurd into the bargain. Now, to begin with, there is nothing indecent in the human Leg itself; on the contrary, it is a most beautiful and useful member. Nor is it necessarily indecent to show the