Page:The Fleshly school of poetry - Buchanan - 1872.djvu/19

 for the very sake of the imputations they contain, the delight of vulgar débauchés and heartless libertines. No form of animal is more common than he who, when charged with folly and immorality, retorts with a smile—"All very well, but I am no worse than my neighbours; virtue—fudge! there is no such thing, at least in English society; everything is bought and sold;"—and this enlightened person, hearing on the best authority that love of the best sort procurable and lust of the gaudiest sort possible are equally in the market for the highest bidder, prefers purchasing his indulgence as the humour seizes him to making a bargain for a life-luxury of which he may get thoroughly tired. Nothing, meantime, gratifies the free lover more than to be told that marriage is a farce and continence a sham, that all forms of life are equally heartless, and that his betters in the social scale only commit in secret the follies in which he indulges openly. Is it true, then, that English society is honeycombed and rotten? More than one form of literature says so. The smart journal says so. So does the novel of the period. So does the artistic Bohemian. For my own part I am inclined to believe (though, as I have said, on very insufficient knowledge) that true English life is infinitely purer and better than our smart writers and lady novelists imagine it to be; that the pure rose of English maidenhood still blows as brightly as ever; that, in a word, the canker lies on the surface and has not yet eaten down into the body social. How then account for the portentous symptoms which are everywhere appalling us? Thus. There is on the fringe of real English society, and chiefly, if not altogether, in London here, a sort of demi-monde, not composed, like that other in France, of simple courtesans, but