271).
The nineteenth century, which witnessed the triumph of timidity and prudery in this matter, also produced the first fruitful germ of new conceptions of nakedness.

To some extent these were embodied in the great Romantic movement.

Rousseau, indeed, had placed no special insistence on nakedness as an element of the return to Nature which he preached so influentially.

A new feeling in this matter emerged, however, with characteristic extravagance, in some of the episodes of the Revolution, while in Germany in the pioneering _Lucinde_ of Friedrich Schlegel, a characteristic figure in the Romantic movement, a still unfamiliar conception of the body was set forth in a serious and earnest spirit.
In England, Blake with his strange and flaming genius, proclaimed a mystical gospel which involved the spiritual glorification of the body and contempt for the civilized worship of clothes ("As to a modern man," he wrote, "stripped from his load of clothing he is like a dead corpse"); while, later, in America, Thoreau and Whitman and Burroughs asserted, still more definitely, a not dissimilar message concerning the need of returning to Nature.
We find the importance of the sight of the body--though very narrowly, for the avoidance of fraud in the preliminaries of marriage--set forth as early as the sixteenth century by Sir Thomas More in his _Utopia_, which is so rich in new and fruitful ideas.

In Utopia, according to Sir Thomas More, before marriage, a staid and honest matron "showeth the woman, be she maid or widow, naked to the wooer.