Page:Queen Mab (Shelley).djvu/231

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TO QUEEN MAB.
39

cal superstition:—a greater foe to natural temperance, even than unintellectual sensuality; it strikes at the root of all domestic happiness, and consigns more than half of the human race to misery, that some few may monopolize according to law!" Is the author of such sentiments anxious to qualify himself for Bedlam? Does he envy the felicitous ravings of incurable lunatics? I have heard that celibacy is a monkish superstition: and I can believe it injurious to the interests of society; but chastity and celibacy have no necessary connection with each other! On such a topic, it is hardly possible to enlarge. One can only shudder at the insult offered to decency, morality, and justice. He himself seems to shrink from his proposition, when he denies supposing that promiscuous intercourse would follow the abolition of marriage; but he must have contemplated a promiscuous intercourse, when he pronounced this outrageous anathema against chastity:—and again when he says—"Young men, excluded by the fanatical idea of chastity, from the society of modest and accomplished women, associate with vicious and miserable beings, &c." How can modesty be separated from the idea of chastity? How could it escape the grossest rhapsodist, that the