He describes his indigestions, and other more indescribable obstructions to happiness, as freely as Cicero wrote about the dysentery which punished him, when, after he had resisted oysters and lampreys at supper, he yielded to a dish of beet and mallow so dressed with pot-herbs, _ut nil posset esse suavius_.

Whatever men could say to one another or to their surgeons they saw no harm in saying to women.

We have to remember how Sir Walter Scott's great-aunt, about the very time when Diderot was writing to Mademoiselle Voland, had heard Mrs.Aphra Behn's books read aloud for the amusement of large circles, consisting of the first and most creditable society in London.

We think of Swift, in an earlier period of the century, enclosing to Stella some recklessly gross verses of his own upon Bolingbroke, and habitually writing to fine ladies in a way that Falstaff might have thought too bad for Doll Tearsheet.

In saying that these coarse impurities are only points of manners, we are as far as possible from meaning that they are on that account unimportant.