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Updated: June 9, 2025
The ancient satirists often used great liberties in their expressions; but their free- dom no more resembles the licentiousness of Rochester, than the nakedness of an Indian does that of a common prostitute. Wycherley was ambitious of the reputation of wit and libertinism, and he attained it: he was probably capable of reaching the fame of true comedy and instructive ridicule.
And although, in those of a more humorous cast, he was permitted a licence, borrowed either from real life or from the libertinism of the drama, still a distinction was demanded even from Peregrine Pickle, or Tom Jones; and the hero, in every folly of which he might be guilty, was studiously vindicated from the charge of infidelity of the heart.
"Roses smell sweeter when planted near garlic, and in like manner there are souls which grow more fervent in places where libertinism and irreligion seem to drag all virtue at their chariot wheels."
He was not quite forty when he died, and his life had been two lives, one of unchecked libertinism, and the other all integrity of purpose. But it was in the latter half that he wrote his best music. The domestic and home-establishing influences of music might be pleaded even more strongly from the life of Mendelssohn.
It is related that, at the time of the Concordat, Napoleon remarked to Senator Volney, "France wants a religion." The more serious charges included incest with his sister Pauline and his stepdaughter Hortense, and the poisoning of his plague-stricken soldiers at Jaffa. His palaces were said to be harems, and his libertinism to put Oriental potentates to the blush.
I expected to find libertinism there, but in fact I found none at all. One sees only the scum of libertinism, some blows, and drunken women lying in deathlike stupor on broken bottles. Ere I saw debauchery at table I had heard of the suppers of Heliogabolus and of the philosophy of Greece, which made the pleasures of the senses a kind of natural religion.
Not so, we trust, as to the belief expressed by Belle Brittan, in puffing "Jim Parton's, Fanny Fern's Jim's," Life of Burr, "more charming than a novel," because, as she implies, of the successful libertinism of its hero, when she says, speaking in the name of the maidens of America, "We all, I suppose, must fall, like our first parents, when the hour of our temptation comes"!
An intemperate, voluptuous atheist, is not more dangerous to society than a superstitions bigot, who knows how to connect licentiousness, punic faith, ingratitude, libertinism, corruption of morals, with his theological notions.
Such lessons daily repeated, necessarily destroyed the wise instructions of Massillon. When grown up, Louis XV saw the libertinism of cardinal Dubois and the orgies of the regency: madame de Maillis' shameless conduct was before his eyes and Richelieu's also. Louis XV could not conduct himself differently from his ministers and his family. His timid character was formed upon the example of others.
It is scarcely surprising if, in view of the history of Germany during the last hundred years, some of her sons have become intoxicated and in their zeal for German ideals threaten to destroy the very principles by which she has risen; if while affecting to despise the southern nations for libertinism they should themselves have cast off the bonds of self-restraint.
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