was published among the prisoners, and punished with thirty stripes, the pain of which co-operating with my disappointment and disgrace, bereft me of my senses, and threw me into an ecstasy of madness, during which I tore the flesh from my bones with my teeth, and dashed my head against the pavement.[179] While Smollett mingled such scenes of misery with coarse adventures and coarse humor, he is yet always true to nature and always picturesque. He keeps the reader's attention even when he offends his taste. He impaired the literary merit of "Perigrine Pickle," but at the same time added to its dissolute character and its immediate popularity by the forced insertion of the licentious "Memoirs of a Lady of Quality." Now a serious blemish, these memoirs formed at the time an added attraction to the book. They were eagerly read as the authentic account of Lady Vane, a notorious woman of rank, and were furnished to Smollett by herself, in the hope, fully gratified, that her infamous career might be known to future generations.[180] That the standard of public taste was rising, would appear from the fact that in the second edition of "Perigrine Pickle," Smollett found it advisable to "reform the manners and correct the expression" of the first; but when "he flatters himself that he has expunged every adventure, phrase, and insinuation that could be construed by the most delicate reader into a trespass upon the rules of decorum," he does not give a high idea of the standard of the "most delicate reader." But Smollett has left an account of his own views regarding the moral effect of the pictures of vice and degradation which his works contain, and that account is a striking statement of contemporary feeling upon the subject: