“Art,” says a certain M.A., “if it be genuine and sincere, tends ever to the lofty and the beautiful. There is no rule of art more important than the sense of modesty. Vice grows not a little by immodesty of thought.” True. And immodesty of thought fulfils its mission in the “strong” book, which alone succeeds in winning the applause of that “Exclusive Set of Degenerates” known as the E.S.D. under the Masonic Scriptural sign of ISHBOSHETH (laying particular emphasis on the syllable between the “Ish” and the “eth,”) who manage to obtain temporary posts on the ever-changeful twirling treadmill of the daily press. The Ishbosheth singular is the man who praises the “strong” book--the Ishbosheth in the plural are the Exclusive Set who are sworn to put down Virtue and extol Vice. Hence the “strong” cult, also the “virile.” This last excellent and expressive word has become seriously maltreated in the hands of the Ishbosheth, and is now made answerable for many sins which it did not originally represent. “Virile” is from the Latin _virilis_, a male--virility is the state and characteristic of the adult male. Applied to certain books, however, by the Ishbosheth it will be found by the discerning public to mean coarse--rough--with a literary “style” obtained by sprinkling several pages of prose with the lowest tavern-oaths, together with the name of God, pronounced “Gawd.” Anything written in that fashion is at once pronounced “virile” and commands wide admiration from the Ishbosheth, particularly if it should be a story in which women are depicted at the lowest kickable depth of drab-ism to which men can drag them, while men are represented as the suffering victims of their wickedness. This peculiar kind of turncoat morality was, according to Genesis, instituted by Adam in his cowardly utterance: “The woman tempted me,” as an excuse for his own base greed; and it has apparently continued to sprout forth in various of his descendants ever since that time, especially in the community of the Ishbosheth. “Virility,” therefore, being the state and characteristic of the adult male, or the adult Adam, means, according to the Ishbosheth, men’s proper scorn for the sex of their mothers, and an egotistical delight in themselves, united to a barbarous rejoicing in bad language and abandoned morals. It does not mean this in decent every-day life, of course; but it does in books--such books as are praised by the Ishbosheth.