Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: INTRODUCTION rHEN Adam and Eve were chased from a blameless Paradise, they were forced to cover that which it had never been a dishonour to reveal. It was not until the devil murmured in the branches that a knee became more guilty than an eyebrow, and the prophets of concealment would be wise to remember that the reticence which they account the chief of virtues was the first penafty paid by guilty man to an enraged deity. Thus, in expiation of the primaeval disobedience, we are still cursed or blessed with a shamefaced diffidence ; we are compelled to the public denial of many truths which we acknowledge in secret; from our cradles to our graves we hide behind a mask of prudent discretion, or mincing chicanery; and we still share with the Puritan the punishment imposed upon the world by Eve's complacency. The Puritan, in truth, forgetting the cause of his modesty, makes righteousness of necessity, and believes that in prolonging a garment or blinking an eye he is doing a reputable service to the cause of virtue. But he is only bowing his neck beneath theinevitable yoke; he is only bearing his part in the universal condemnation. Though reticence was our first and heaviest punishment, it did not come upon us without compensations. The mere command that man should clothe his nakedness was sufficient to create the love of adornment and its attendant vanity. So the manifold arts of dandyism and coquetry came into being ; and man, by giving a separate colour to his life, distinguished himself from the beasts who know neither ornament nor shame. Then, also, was born sin ; then lawlessness, which hitherto had recognised vice as little as virtue, became law, and parcelled out all the possible actions of mankind into right and wrong, involving the pristine simplicity in unnumbere...