This good however came not unalloyed. Those in whom the religious feeling was least genuine, those who had merely caught it by contagion from others, were, as usual, the most anxious to make it prominent and conspicuous. They thought they could not exhibit too striking a contrast to the sceptical indifference and irreligious frivolity of the former age in their language and deportment. Piety, which is of a retiring nature, seldom conscious of her own actions, and never wishing them to be observed, was forced against her will into all companies upon all occasions, was made to occupy the foremost place, to study attitudes and gestures, to think aloud and deliver herself in set terms. A new kind of spiritual dialect came into fashion, and threatened to infect the whole tone of conversation and literature. It was not precisely the cant which with us is the property and badge of certain religious sects, and which to unaccustomed ears is either ludicrous or disgusting; it was a more refined compound of mysticism and sentiment, rather cloying from excess of sweet, but not without a charm for the young and inexperienced, and very easy to be caught by habit or learnt from design. In the endeavour to exclude from society all symptoms and tokens of the freethinking age, the moral taste grew alarmingly squeamish, and began to reject the most wholesome food as savouring of profaneness. As the freedom of Shakespeare scandalizes our sectaries, so among the circles, in which religion was most the mode in Germany, the unconstrained and unaffected purity of Göthe began to pass for licentiousness. We are indeed ourselves very far gone in this distemper, and value ourselves on our superior delicacy, because we cannot see without a blush what in times less refined was not supposed to need a veil, as none suspected it could ever raise an impure thought.