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Sir, The language of gratitude has been so prostituted by servile adulation and designing flattery that I know not how to express myself when I would acknowledge receipt of your last letter. I beg and hope, ever-honoured "Friend of my life and patron of my rhymes," that you will always give me credit for the sincerest, chastest gratitude.
In effect, according to the proverb, To a shitten tail fails never ordure, he hath found, it seems, some simple ninny in those rude times of old, when the wearing of high round bonnets was in fashion, who gave some trust to his writings, according to which they carved and engraved their apophthegms and mottoes, trapped and caparisoned their mules and sumpter-horses, apparelled their pages, quartered their breeches, bordered their gloves, fringed the curtains and valances of their beds, painted their ensigns, composed songs, and, which is worse, placed many deceitful jugglings and unworthy base tricks undiscoveredly amongst the very chastest matrons and most reverend sciences.
He assures his reader that in the whole course of the work, he will find "nothing prejudicial to the Cause of Religion and Virtue; nothing inconsistent with the strictest Rules of Decency, nor which can offend even the chastest Eye in the Perusal."
At the performance I perceived with dismay that all these had remained unnoticed, and I had to see imagine my horror! for example, that my Tannhauser in the contest of the singers shouted the hymn of Venus "Wer dich mit Gluth in seine Arme geschlossen, Was Liebe ist, weiss der, nur der allein!" at Elizabeth, the chastest of virgins, before a whole assembly of people.
"However curious I may have been, nature placed that mole in such a position as to escape any but the most minute search." "You have never felt it, then?" "It is too small to be felt." "I don't believe it." She allowed my hand to wander indiscreetly, and my happy fingers felt all the precincts of the temple of love. This was enough to fire the chastest disposition.
See the Study of Modesty in the first volume of these Studies. Moreover, he adds, the chaste man is unable to choose a wife wisely, and it is among teachers and clergymen the chastest class that most unhappy marriages are made. Milton had already made this fact an argument for facility of divorce.
Recollecting however the pure manners, and the delicate and ingenuous language to which Imogen had been inured among the inhabitants of Clwyd, the subtle sorcerer did not permit an expression to escape him, that could offend the chastest ear, or alarm the most suspicious virtue.
Suzanne did not answer, and he, emboldened by this silence, pressed between his the hand which she abandoned to him. I was so much accustomed to see you in our church that, when you ceased to come there, it seemed to me that everything was in mourning. You were the most charming and the chastest ornament of it.
That deep, thrilling voice, bearing all the perfume of the womanly soul in its flow, rarely finds utterance; and if uttered vainly, if called out by tempting devices, and by a trust that is abused, desolate indeed is the maiden heart, widowed of its chastest thought! The soul shrinks affrighted within itself.
Defoe thought that "Moll Flanders" would not "offend the chastest reader or the modestest hearer"; Richardson, that the prolonged effort to seduce Pamela could be described "without raising a single idea throughout the whole that shall shock the exactest purity"; Fielding, that there was nothing in "Tom Jones" which "could offend the chastest eye in the perusal."
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