Book-bot.com - read famous books online for free

Taboo - A Legend Retold from the Dirghic of Sævius Nicanor, with - Prolegomena, Notes, and a Preliminary Memoir by James Branch Cabell
page 9 of 24 (37%)
or less arbitrarily, but usually some natural function--as the things
which must not be written about. To violate any such taboo so long as
it stays prevalent is to be "indecent": and that seems absolutely all
there is to say concerning this topic, apart from furnishing some
impressive historical illustration....

The most striking instance which my far from exhaustive researches
afford, sprang from the fact, perhaps not very generally known, that
the natural function of eating, which nowadays may be discussed
intrepidly anywhere, was once regarded by the Philistines, of at all
events the Shephelah and the deme of Novogath, as being
unmentionable. This ancient tenet of theirs, indeed, is with such
clearness emphasized in a luckily preserved fragment from the Dirghic,
or pre-Ciceronian Latin, of Sævius Nicanor that the readiest way to
illustrate the chameleon-like traits of literary indecency appears to
be to record, as hereinafter is recorded, what of this legend
survives.

Bülg and Vanderhoffen, be it said here, are agreed that it is to this
legend Milton has referred in his _Areopagitica_, in a passage
sufficiently quaint-seeming to us (for whom a more advanced
civilization has secured the right of free speech) to warrant an
abridged citation:--

"What advantage is it to be a man, over it is to be a boy at school,
if serious and elaborate writings, as if they were no more than the
theme of a grammar lad under his pedagogue, must not be uttered
without the cursory eyes of a temporizing and extemporizing licenser?
whenas all the writer teaches, all he delivers, is but under the
tuition, under the correction of his patriarchal licenser, to blot or
DigitalOcean Referral Badge