The nineteenth century, which witnessed the triumph of timidity and prudery in this matter, also produced the first fruitful germ of new conceptions of nakedness. To some extent these were embodied in the great Romantic movement. Rousseau, indeed, had placed no special insistence on nakedness as an element of the return to Nature which he preached so influentially. A new feeling in this matter emerged, however, with characteristic extravagance, in some of the episodes of the Revolution, while in Germany in the pioneering _Lucinde_ of Friedrich Schlegel, a characteristic figure in the Romantic movement, a still unfamiliar conception of the body was set forth in a serious and earnest spirit. In England, Blake with his strange and flaming genius, proclaimed a mystical gospel which involved the spiritual glorification of the body and contempt for the civilized worship of clothes ("As to a modern man," he wrote, "stripped from his load of clothing he is like a dead corpse"); while, later, in America, Thoreau and Whitman and Burroughs asserted, still more definitely, a not dissimilar message concerning the need of returning to Nature. We find the importance of the sight of the body--though very narrowly, for the avoidance of fraud in the preliminaries of marriage--set forth as early as the sixteenth century by Sir Thomas More in his _Utopia_, which is so rich in new and fruitful ideas. In Utopia, according to Sir Thomas More, before marriage, a staid and honest matron "showeth the woman, be she maid or widow, naked to the wooer. And likewise a sage and discreet man exhibiteth the wooer naked to the woman. At this custom we laughed and disallowed it as foolish. But they, on their part, do greatly wonder at the folly of all other nations which, in buying a colt where a little money is in hazard, be so chary and circumspect that though he be almost all bare, yet they will not buy him unless the saddle and all the harness be taken off, lest under these coverings be hid some gall or sore. And yet, in choosing a wife, which shall be either pleasure or displeasure to them all their life after, they be so reckless that all the residue of the woman's body being covered with clothes, they estimate her scarcely by one handsbreadth (for they can see no more but her face) and so join her to them, not without great jeopardy of evil agreeing together, if anything in her body afterward should chance to offend or mislike them. Verily, so foul deformity may be hid under these coverings that it may quite alienate and take away the man's mind from his wife, when it shall not be lawful for their bodies to be separate again. If such deformity happen by any chance after the marriage is consummate and finished, well, there is no remedy but patience. But it were well done that a law were made whereby all such deceits were eschewed and avoided beforehand."