UNDER THE MICROSCOPE
sheepfold! Clown masquerading in the guise of Pantaloon; and in place of the man of God at whose admonition the sinner was wont to tremble with Felix, perhaps a comic singer, a rhymester of boyish burlesque; there is no saying who may not usurp the pulpit when once the priestly office and the priestly vesture have passed into other than consecrated hands. For instance, we hear in October, say, a discourse on Byron and Tennyson; we are struck by the fervour and unction of the preacher; we feel, like Satan, how awful goodness is, and see virtue in her shape how lovely; see, and pine our loss, if haply we too have fallen; we stand abashed at the reflection that never till this man came to show us did we perceive the impurity of a poet who can make his heroine "so familiar with male objects of desire" as to allude to such a person as an odalisque "in good society;" we are ashamed to remember that never till now did we duly appreciate the chastity of Dudù and her comrades, as contrasted with the depravity of the Princess Ida and her colleagues; we blush, if a blush be left in us, to hear on such authority "that exception might be taken without excess of prudery to 'The Sisters,'" and to think that we should ever have got by heart, without a thought of evil to alloy the delight of admiration, a poem "in which sensual passion is coarsely blended with the sense of injured honour and revenge." We read, and regret that ever the
8
