Hear what an amorous votary of the Muses in the olden time, Robert
Herrick, saith with respect to kissing:--.

"Pout your joined lips--then _speak_ your kiss."

If this were the present orthodox creed of kissing, it would most
woefully spoil the sport of many a gallant youth, who, with the most
polite officiousness, extinguishes (by pure accident of course) while
professing to snuff, the candles, only that he may snatch a hasty,
unobserved kiss of the smiling maiden, whose proximity hath so
irresistibly tempted him. I wish the professor who hath already obliged
us with a chapter on kissing, would lay us under greater and more
manifold obligations, by a course of lectures on the same subject; and if
I laid wagers, I would wager my judgment to a cockle-shell, that
Socrates' discourse on marriage did not produce a more beneficial effect
than would his lecture; and that few untasted lips would be found,
either among his auditors, or those whose fortune it should be to fall in
the way of those auditors; but as it is at present, (for, alas! these are
not the days of Polydore Virgil or Erasmus,) we are compelled, albeit
somewhat grumblingly, to be content with but a very limited share of such
blisses. Not that I doubt (heaven forbid that I should) the real
inclination or the ability of at least the juvenile part of my fair
countrywomen to be much more liberal than they generally are in this way;
but, "dear, confounded creatures," as Will Honeycomb says, what with the
trammels of education and domestic restraint, they are prevented from
appearing, as they "really are, the best good-natured things alive." So
much innocent hypocrisy, so much _mauvaise honte_, so many of "the
whispered _no_, so little meant," that they are practical antitheses to
themselves. "Can danger lurk within a kiss." But all fathers are not
Coleridges, nor are all mothers Woolstonecrafts.

I plead not for libertinism, though only in so simple and innocent a form
as kissing. I do not long for the repetition (or more properly
commencement) of Polydore Virgil's days of "promiscuous" kisses. Let
these remain, as heretofore, in fiction, and in fiction alone. "A glutted
market makes provisions cheap," saith Pope. True, saith experience.

"------The lip that all may press,
Shall never more be pressed by mine,"

saith Moore. _Sic ego_. But there is a medium to be observed between
gluttony and absolute starvation, and "_medio tutis-simus ibis_," sait