the great
ages, however desirable it might seem to the men of more
degenerate ages, or to close the avenues to that literature
against the young. All our religious and literary traditions
serve to fortify the position of the Bible and of Shakespeare.
"So many men and women," writes a correspondent, a literary man,
"gain sexual ideas in childhood from reading the Old Testament,
that the Bible may be called an erotic text-book. Most persons of
either sex with whom I have conversed on the subject, say that
the Books of Moses, and the stories of Amnon and Tamar, Lot and
his daughters, Potiphar's wife and Joseph, etc., caused
speculation and curiosity, and gave them information of the
sexual relationship. A boy and girl of fifteen, both friends of
the writer, and now over thirty years of age, used to find out
erotic passages in the Bible on Sunday mornings, while in a
Dissenting chapel, and pass their Bibles to one another, with
their fingers on the portions that interested them." In the same
way many a young woman has borrowed Shakespeare in order to read
the glowing erotic poetry of _Venus and Adonis_, which her
friends have told her about.

The Bible, it may be remarked, is not in every respect, a model
introduction for the young mind to the questions of sex. But even
its frank acceptance, as of divine origin, of sexual rules so
unlike those that are nominally our own, such as polygamy and
concubinage, helps to enlarge the vision of the youthful mind by
showing that the rules surrounding the child are not those
everywhere and always valid, while the nakedness and realism of
the Bible cannot but be a wholesome and tonic corrective to
conventional pruderies.

We must, indeed, always protest against the absurd confusion
whereby nakedness of speech is regarded as equivalent to
immorality, and not the less because it is often adopted even in
what are regarded as intellectual quarters. When in the House of
Lords, in the last century, the question of the exclusion of
Byron's statue from Westminster Abbey was under discussion, Lord
Brougham "denied that Shakespeare was more moral than Byron. He
could, on the contrary, point out in a single page of Shakespeare
more grossness than was to be found in all Lord Byron's works."
The conclusion Brougham thus reached, that Byron is an