, prince of biographers, and Herodotus,
flower of historians. What have we now? Traits of character
not to be mentioned, incidents of conduct, accounts of
manners, minute details of customs, which our modern
historical dandies would never venture upon recording. Out
with Plutarch and Herodotus!

"Here is Shakespeare: 'indecent passages' everywhere; every
drama, every poem thickly inlaid with them; all that men do
displayed, sexual acts treated lightly, jested about,
mentioned obscenely; the language never bolted; slang, gross
puns, lewd words, in profusion. Out with Shakespeare!

"Here is the Canticle of Canticles: beautiful, voluptuous poem
of love literally, whatever be its mystic significance;
glowing with the color, odorous with the spices, melodious
with the voices of the East; sacred and exquisite and pure
with the burning chastity of passion, which completes and
exceeds the snowy chastity of virgins. This to me, but what to
the Secretary? Can he endure that the female form should stand
thus in a poem, disrobed, unveiled, bathed in erotic splendor?
Look at these voluptuous details, this expression of desire,
this amorous tone and glow, this consecration and perfume
lavished upon the sensual. No! Out with Solomon!

"Here is Isaiah. The grand thunder-roll of that righteousness,
like the lion-roar of Jehovah above the guilty world, utters
coarse words. Amidst the bolted lightnings of that sublime
denunciation, coarse thoughts, indelicate figures, indecent
allusions, flash upon the sight, like gross imagery in a
midnight landscape. Out with Isaiah!

"Here is Montaigne. Open those great, those virtuous pages of
the unflinching reporter of man; the soul all truth and
daylight, all candor, probity, sincerity, reality, eyesight.
A few glances will suffice. Cant and vice and sniffle have
groaned over these pages before. Out with Montaigne!

"Here is Swedenborg. Open this poem of prose, the Conjugal
Love, to me, a temple, though in ruins; the sacred fane,
clothed in mist, filled with moonlight, of a great though
broken mind. What spittle of critic epithets stains all here?
'Lewd,' 'sensual,' 'lecherous,' 'coarse,' 'licentious,' etc.
Of course these judgments are final. There is no appeal from
the tobacco-juice of an expectorating and disdainful virtue.
Out with Swedenborg!

"Here is Goethe: th