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Thus began a regular and very full correspondence between the prisoners, and soon Casanova who had not lived on his wits for nothing was able to form a shrewd estimate of Balbi's character. The monk's letters revealed it as compounded of sensuality, stupidity, ingratitude, and indiscretion. "In the world," says Casanova, "I should have had no commerce with a fellow of his nature.
The great Italian reformer saw and felt that in his own day and in his own country the glory and beauty of the movement had vanished in sensuality; that hardness of heart and indifference to primary human needs had diverted the waters of the Renaissance from their main fertilizing channel.
Oh, sir, if you could once place yourself in my position and feel what it was for me to leave that polluted atmosphere of sensuality, treachery, and hatred, and to come into this pure air of refinement, truth, and love, you would understand how it is that I can feel no trouble now!" "I do; but still I wonder to see you so well."
For God had put into their hearts to fulfil His will, and to agree, and to give their kingdom to the beast, until the words of God should be fulfilled..... Everywhere sensuality, division, hatred, treachery, cruelty, uncertainty, terror; the vials of God's wrath poured out.
Cromwell had around him, to carry out the puritan program, the moral elite of the nation, an army of rigorists, with narrow consciences, but much more strict towards themselves than towards others, men who never drank and who never swore, who never indulged for a moment in sensuality or idleness, who forbade themselves every act of omission or commission about which they held any scruples, the most honest, the most temperate, the most laborious and the most persevering of mankind, the only ones capable of laying the foundations of that practical morality on which England and the United States still subsist at the present day.
This man was far advanced in years, but appeared to have been possessed of a constitution which sustains sensuality, or perhaps that retrospective spirit which gloats over its polluted recollections, on the very verge of the grave.
On the other hand, if he wallows in sensuality, and is careless about all discipline, civil or military, we then find as commonly that he loses the esteem and affections of the army to some rival of severer habits.
I blamed myself besides for my suspicions of the night before; wondered that I should ever have attributed those shocking cries to one of whom I now conceived as of a saint, spectral of mien, wasted with maceration, bound up in the practices of a mechanical devotion, and dwelling in a great isolation of soul with her incongruous relatives; and as I leaned on the balustrade of the gallery and looked down into the bright close of pomegranates and at the gaily dressed and somnolent woman, who just then stretched herself and delicately licked her lips as in the very sensuality of sloth, my mind swiftly compared the scene with the cold chamber looking northward on the mountains, where the daughter dwelt.
GROSSNESS OF SENSUALITY. The poor degraded harlot draws in the victims like a heavily charged lodestone; these men are found in large numbers throughout the entire community; they would make fine men were they not weighted with the grossness of sensuality; as it is, they frequent the race-course, the card-table, the drinking-saloon, the music-hall, and the low theaters, which abound in our cities and towns; the great majority of these are men of means and leisure.
English history presents no period so disgraceful as the Restoration. To use the words of Macaulay, it was "a day of servitude without loyalty and sensuality without love, of dwarfish talents and gigantic vices, the paradise of cold hearts and narrow minds, the golden age of the coward, the bigot, and the slave.
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