Page:The Satyricon of Petronius Arbiter (1922), vol. 2.djvu/249

 since then the revenues of the sacred college have continued to decrease, the beautiful courtesans have abandoned the capital of the Christian world, and their pleasures have fled with them. And can anyone | longer believe in the perfection of the human race, since the best, the most holy of human institutions has so visibly degenerated!

 

One of the reasons which caused the learned and paradoxical Hardouin to assert that all the works which have been attributed to the ancients, with the exception of the Georgics and the Natural History of Pliny, were the compositions of monks, was doubtless the very frequent repetition of scenes of love for boys, which one notices in most of these writings: this savant was a Jesuit. But this taste is not peculiar to convents; it is to be found among all peoples and in all climates; its origin is lost in the night of the centuries; it is common in the most polished nations and it is common among savage tribes. Profound philosophers have argued in favor of it; poets have Rh