ists before the world. The men of that robust generation were better able to bear the theory of their amusements, and vices were quite content to flourish shamelessly under their proper names. Cruelty then took the form of pastime,—bear-baiting, badger-drawing, cock-fighting; questionable pleasures, doubtless, yet gentle as the sports of cherubs when compared with the ever-increasing agonies of vivisection, with the ceaseless and nameless experiments of German and Italian scientists, the "Fisiologia del Dolore" of Professor Mantegazza, all of which horrors are justified and turned into painful duties by our new evolutionary morality. Sensuality, too, which used to show itself coarse, smiling, unmasked, and unmistakable, is now serious, analytic, and so burdened with a sense of its responsibilities that it passes muster half the time as a new type of asceticism. The moral animus with which Frenchmen write immoral books is one of the paradoxes of our present system of ethics; and it occasionally happens that the simple-minded reader, failing to appreciate the shadowy elevation of their platform, fancies they are working con amore
