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Updated: May 5, 2025
But when, at Rome, there was no Cicero, no Octavius, no Mecaenas, no Horace, the artists toiled to please imperial gluttons, pretentious freedmen, ignorant generals, drunken senators, and venal judges. Their sublime art became the handmaid of effeminacy, of vanity, of sensuality. It could not rise above the level of those who dedicated themselves to its service. It did not make men better.
There is a point of diseased mellowness and effeminacy in the history of society, at which society itself takes the part of him who injures it, the part of the CRIMINAL, and does so, in fact, seriously and honestly. To punish, appears to it to be somehow unfair it is certain that the idea of "punishment" and "the obligation to punish" are then painful and alarming to people.
He indulged in some bitter lamentations over modern breakfasts of tea and toast, which he censured as among the causes of modern effeminacy and weak nerves and the decline of old English heartiness; and, though he admitted them to his table to suit the palates of his guests, yet there was a brave display of cold meats, wine, and ale on the sideboard.
His life was so marred by coarse sensuality, weak effeminacy, heartless cruelty, unblushing hypocrisy, and heaven-defying blasphemy, that but for his stupendous achievements, and his sublime and persistent self-assertion, he would long since have been buried beneath the contempt of mankind.
But Sparta, under every supposed error of its form, prospered for ages, by the integrity of its manners, and by the character of its citizens. When that integrity was broken, this people did not languish in the weakness of nations sunk in effeminacy. They fell into the stream by which other states had been carried in the torrent of violent passions, and in the outrage of barbarous times.
But thou art not Hercules, thou sayest, and canst not deliver others from their iniquity not even Theseus, to deliver the soil of Attica from its monsters? Purge away thine own, cast forth thence from thine own mind, not robbers and monsters, but Fear, Desire, Envy, Malignity, Avarice, Effeminacy, Intemperance.
Thus, in the murder to which he gave his concurrence he was cruel, base in his flight and effeminacy, miserable in his death. "The nobility being assembled by the contrivance of his mother, and the day being appointed for Dunstan, in right of his see, to crown him, he, though he might be ill-affected to them, forebore to resist, being a prelate of mature age well versed in secular matters.
I remember a hack-writer, and of such, I am afraid, is too exclusively my literary kingdom, who classified the vices which Swift smote so fearfully in "The Voyage to the Houyhnhnms"; and the curious catalogue contained "avarice, fraud, cheating, violence, rapine, extortion, cruelty, oppression, tyranny, rancor, envy, malice, detraction, hatred, revenge, murder, bribery, corruption, pimping, lying, perjury, subornation, treachery, ingratitude, gaming, flattery, drunkenness, gluttony, luxury, vanity, effeminacy, cowardice, pride, impudence, hypocrisy, infidelity, blasphemy, idolatry, and innumerable other vices, many of them the notorious characteristics of the bulk of humankind."
It is strange to notice that De Quincey found in Endymion "the very midsummer madness of affectation, of false vapoury sentiment, and of fantastic effeminacy"; while one is ashamed for the timidity of the publisher who chose to return all unsold copies to George Keats because of "the ridicule which has, time after time, been showered upon it."
He was tall and slender as a girl, with an air of languid indolence that was obviously a pose, for it was slipping from him now fast as he talked. His face was strikingly handsome, only saved from effeminacy by a firm chin. He was patently aware of his good looks. But he was also patently in awe of his chief, and the news that he brought was apparently not welcome.
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