Manhood commonly saves itself by its own innate healthiness, though the decent apron bequeathed to us in the old legend of the fall, the thick veil of a more than legendary reserve, prevents us from really measuring the actual waste of delicacy and the finer forces.

Rousseau, most unhappily for himself, lacked this innate healthiness; he never shook off the demon which would be so ridiculous, if it did not hide such terrible power.

With a moral courage, that it needs hardly less moral courage in the critic firmly to refrain from calling cynical or shameless, he has told the whole story of this lifelong depravation.

In the present state of knowledge, which in the region of the human character the false shamefacedness of science, aided and abetted by the mutilating hand of religious asceticism, has kept crude and imperfect, there is nothing very profitable to be said on all this.

When the great art of life has been more systematically conceived in the long processes of time and endeavour, and when more bold, ffective, and far-reaching advance has been made in defining those pathological manifestations which deserve to be seriously studied, as distinguished from those of a minor sort which are barely worth registering, then we should know better how to speak, or how to be silent, in the present most unwelcome instance.