prise
that I read in one of those repulsively thorough studies which only a
German can make, a study made in 1668 of this very tract, "The Isle
of Pines," the assertion that Pines, masquerading as the name of the
discoverer and patriarch of the island, and accepted as the name of
the island itself, was only an anagram on the male organ of
generation--penis. On one of the German issues in the John Carter Brown
[39]Library this has also been noted by a contemporary hand.{1} Such an
interpretation reduces our tract to a screaming farce, but it closely
suits the general tone of other of Neville's writings, which are
redolent of the sensual license of the restoration. To this I would add
an emendation of my own. The name adopted by Neville was Henry Cornelius
van Sloetten. It suggests a somewhat forcible English word--slut--of
doubtful origin, although forms having some resemblance in sound and
sense occur in the Scandinavian languages.

1 Christian Weise, Prof. Polit, in augusteo in A. 1685.

Such interpretations seem to fit the work better than that of a German
critic, who sees in the book a sort of Utopia, a model community, or
an exhibition in the development of law and order. Free love led
to license, maids were ravished, and the complete promiscuity of
intercourse disgusted Pine, who sought to suppress it by force and, in
killing the leader of a revolt, a man with negro blood in his veins, to
impose punishments for acts which he had himself done. The ground for
believing that Neville had any such purpose when he wrote the book is
too slight to be accepted. In 1668 the author had no call to convey a
lesson in government to his countrymen by any means so frankly vulgar
and pointless as the "Isle of Pines." If Neville had intended such a
political object, a phrase would have sufficed to indicate it. No
such key can be found in the text, and there is nothing to show that,
politician as he was, he realized that such an intimation could be drawn
from his paragraphs.

To assume, therefore, that so carefully hidden a suggestion of a model
republic could have aided the circulation [40]of the pamphlet at the
time, or at any later period, is to introduce an element unnecessary
to explain the vogue of the relation. It passed simply as a story
of adventure, and as such it fell upon a time when a wide public was
receptive to the point of being easily duped. Wood asserts that the
"Isle of Pines," when first published, "was