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When, therefore, the Bishop of Constance himself, just at this time, in a pastoral letter to the clergy of his diocese, uttered, in the strongest terms, complaints of their thoroughly corrupt condition, and deplored, that "many of them, without regard to shame and the fear of God, kept lewd women in their houses, and would neither put them away nor do better, and that others were addicted to gambling and oftener to be met with in taverns than in their own rooms, wrangled in the streets, scolded, giving rise to uproar as well as blasphemy against the Savior, his blessed mother, and all the saints of God, wore weapons and clothes altogether unsuited to their condition, entered into unlawful agreements, crept into nunneries and otherwise led abandoned lives at variance with the priestly character," and acknowledged the urgent necessity of a remedy, was it a seditious movement, or not rather a noble effort to help on a good cause, when Zwingli thanked his chief pastor for this, but at the same time begged him to act as well as speak?
And some critics can only find a reason for the composition of the "Merry Wives of Windsor" and the "Sonnets" as an offering to the lewd queen. Nothing more did he owe to his time. And Milton, who, though his father was a Catholic, was himself a rank Puritan, something of what we have said of Shakespeare may be said of him. At all events, all his cultivation and taste came from Italy.
And it is a thing which I have very much and carefully observed in all my travels, both in Europe and America, that in those cities wherein there is most lewd licentiousness of life, there is also most cost in the temples, and most public superstitious worship of God and the saints." So much for worthy Thomas Gage, and his estimate of the Mexicans of his day.
Still I wish they were not there, and I hope the time will come when the beast-man will be so far subdued and tamed in us that the memory of him in literature shall be left to perish; that what is lewd and ribald in the great poets shall be kept out of such editions as are meant for general reading, and that the pedant-pride which now perpetuates it as an essential part of those poets shall no longer have its way.
Ah! if he, Kayser, had exhibited to the world a lewd picture, it would have been "a horse of a different color"! The dignity, seriousness, purity of art, that was right enough! But a woman! Pshaw! a woman! Nor was he heard once to express any uneasiness as to what might become of Marianne.
It was not seen how he was in fact already suffering punishment, not only by the very terror of retribution which he saw the whole city requiring as a just debt, but with several incurable diseases also; not to mention those unhallowed frightful excesses among impure and prostituted women, to which, at the very close of life, his lewd nature clung, and in them gasped out, as it were, its last; these, in the opinion of all reasonable men, being themselves the extremest punishment, and equal to many deaths.
THIS second epistle, beloved, I now write unto you; in both which I rouse up your sincere mind by awakening your recollection to remember the words, that have been spoken aforetime by the holy prophets, and the injunction of us the apostles of the Lord and Saviour: knowing this principally, that in the last of the days there will come scoffers, walking after their own lewd passions, and saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for ever since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue in the same state as from the beginning of the creation.
And some of them believed, and consorted with Paul and Silas; and of the devout Greeks a great multitude, and of the chief women not a few. 5. But the Jews which believed not, moved with envy, took unto them certain lewd fellows of the baser sort, and gathered a company, and set all the city on an uproar, and assaulted the house of Jason, and sought to bring them out to the people, 6.
She heard shrill cries and peals of laughter and the terrifying rattle of men at the point of death. Haggard women, dishevelled and lewd, carried wine; and when they spilt it there were stains like the stains of blood. And it seemed to Margaret that a fire burned in her veins, and her soul fled from her body; but a new soul came in its place, and suddenly she knew all that was obscene.
The brainless fools who only think of displaying themselves and making themselves notorious? the senseless idiots who pique themselves on surpassing lewd women in audacity, extravagance, and effrontery, who fleece their husbands as cleverly as courtesans fleece their lovers? Noble ladies! who drink, and smoke, and carouse, who attend masked balls, and talk slang!
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