Among the delicate and beautiful things which Science brushes away from life, I cannot omit to number a certain modesty which has hitherto prevailed among educated people. The decline of decency in England, apparent to every one old enough to recall earlier manners and topics of conversation, is due in great measure, I think, to the scientific (medical) spirit. Who would have thought thirty years ago of seeing young men in public reading-rooms snatching at the _Lancet_ and the _British Medical Journal_ from layers of what ought to be more attractive literature, and poring over hideous diagrams and revolting details of disease and monstrosity? It is perfectly right, no doubt, for these professional journals to deal plainly with these horrors, and with the thrice abominable records of “gynæcology.” But, being so, it follows that it is _not_ proper that they should form the furniture of a reading-table at which young men and young women sit for general—not medical—instruction. Nor is it only in the medical journals that disease-mongering now obtains. The political press has adopted the practice of reporting the details of illness of every eminent man who falls into the hands of the doctors, and affords those gentlemen an opportunity of advertising themselves as his advisers. The last recollection which the present generation will retain of many an illustrious statesman, poet, and soldier, will not be that he died like a hero or a saint, bravely or piously, but that he swallowed such and such a medicine, and, perhaps, was sick in his stomach. Death-beds are desecrated that doctors may be puffed and public inquisitiveness assuaged. So far does the materialist spirit penetrate into literature that in criticising books and men the most exaggerated importance is attached by numberless writers to the physical conditions and “environments” of the personages with whom they are concerned, till we could almost suppose that—given his ancestry and circumstances—we could scientifically construct the Man, with all his gifts and passions. As if, forsooth, a dozen brothers were alike in character, or even all the kittens in a litter! It is refreshing to read the brisk _persiflage_ on this kind of thing in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_ for March 1. The writer, reviewing Mr. Lecky’s books, states that but little of that splendid historian’s private life has been published, and adds:— “Je ne me plains pas de cette sécheresse, je la bénis. C’est un plaisir, devenu si rare aujourd’hui, de pouvoir lire un livre sans en connaître l’auteur: de juger une œuvre directement et en elle-même, sans avoir à étudier ce composé d’organes et de tissus, de nerfs et de muscles, d’où elle est sortie: sans la commenter à l’aide de la physiologie, de l’ethnographie, et de la climatologie: sans mettre en jeu l’atavisme et les diathèses héréditaires!”[7]