Page:The Fleshly school of poetry - Buchanan - 1872.djvu/18

 Leg, as some ladies do upon the stage, without in the least shocking our propriety. But the Leg, an excellent thing in itself, becomes insufferable if obtruded into every concern of life, so that instead of humanity we see a demon resembling the Manx coat-of-arms, cutting capers without a body or a head. The Leg, as a disease, is subtle, secret, diabolical. It relies not merely on its own intrinsic attractions, but on its atrocious suggestions. It becomes a spectre, a portent, a mania. Turn your eyes to the English stage. Shakspere is demolished and lies buried under hecatombs of Leg! Open the last new poem. Its title will possibly be this, or similar to this—"Leg is enough." Walk along the streets.The shop-windows teem with Leg. Enter a music-hall—Leg again, and (O tempora! O mores!) the Can-Can. Jack enjoys it down Wapping way just as Jones does in the Canterbury Hall. It is only in fashionable rooms and in the stalls of the theatre that Leg is at a discount; but that is not because life there is more innocent and modest, but because Leg is in the higher circles altogether eclipsed by its two most formidable rivals—Bosom and Back.

If popular writers are to be credited, there is running rampant in English society a certain atrocious form of vice, a monster with two heads—one of which is called Adultery, the other Dipsomania—and these two heads, blind to all else in the world, leer and ogle at each other. I have not sufficient knowledge of English polite society to say whether or not the terrible impeachment is based on a careful study of facts; but I do know that the writings in which these facts have been chronicled, the prurient pictures given of vice masking in the garb of virtue, become in their turn, and