those times they were merely natural. There are thirty examples in the
"Song of Songs," model of the most chaste union. Remark carefully that
these expressions, these images are always quite serious, and that in no
book of this distant antiquity will you find the least mockery on the
great subject of generation. When lust is condemned it is in definite
terms; but never to excite to passion, nor to make the smallest
pleasantry. This far-distant antiquity did not have its Martial, its
Catullus, or its Petronius.

It results from all the Jewish prophets and from all the Jewish books,
as from all the books which instruct us in the usages of the Chaldeans,
the Persians, the Phoenicians, the Syrians, the Indians, the
Egyptians; it results, I say, that their customs were not ours, that
this ancient world in no way resembled our world. Go from Gibraltar to
Mequinez merely, the manners are no longer the same; no longer does one
find the same ideas; two leagues of sea have changed everything.




_ON THE ENGLISH THEATRE_


I have cast my eyes on an edition of Shakespeare issued by Master Samuel
Johnson. I saw there that foreigners who are astonished that in the
plays of the great Shakespeare a Roman senator plays the buffoon, and
that a king appears on the stage drunk, are treated as little-minded. I
do not desire to suspect Master Johnson of being a sorry jester, and of
being too fond of wine; but I find it somewhat extraordinary that he
counts buffoonery and drunkenness among the beauties of the tragic