work which he was at this time engaged on at school and at the university, he was quite content with the society of quite young girls or even children when most of his friends would have sought out females of their own age.  Nothing could have been farther from his desires or intention than any lascivious or, indeed, unseemly act toward any female in whose company he might be:  no mother need have hesitated to trust her daughter in his company.  I firmly believe that the discipline of the same bed which Gibbon (Decline and Fall, ed.  Bury, vol. ii, p. 37) makes so merry over could have been endured by him without difficulty.  His outward conduct was in all these respects most seemly and decorous, yet night after night he could masturbate, his imagination glowing with visions of female nakedness.

“Curiously the one and only actual female for whom he felt any desire at the earlier period (aged 14 to 16) began to be the cousin who lived in the house.  On one occasion he touched her breasts, on another her naked thighs—­and that was all!  As she grew to puberty, she would have allowed far more liberties, but he contented himself with a sly glance now and again, when he could procure it, at her swelling bosom.  The fear of putting her with child was ample to keep him away from her bed.  Later on even so much as the foregoing occurred no more, and, as I have said, his outward life became absolutely decorous.

“Consequently he was in no danger of having dealings with prostitutes.  The preliminaries, the conversation of such women, especially their drinking habits, would have been disgusting and repugnant to him in the extreme.  He would have shunned the possibility of acquiring venereal disease like the plague.  But he was never free from solitary vice; he secretly envied those who had occasions for coitus in what I may call a seemly and cleanly manner, friends in the country with farm girls, etc., of whom he had heard.  He indulged also in lascivious reading, the obscene when he could procure it, rather than the merely suggestive, which has never been to his taste.  He was familiar with quite a large number of Latin and Greek indecent passages, knew the broader farces of the Canterbury Tales and of the Decameron, and, later, the ‘contes’ of La Fontaine and the Facetiae of Poggio.  As Ste.-Beuve says of Gibbon, I think, he acquired an ‘erudite and cold’ sort of obscenity in this way.

“All this, of course, is only one half, and by no means always the dominant half, of his nature.  He was often repentant for these delinquencies, and he was sincerely religious.  He was also fond of serious learning and contrived to take a first-class university degree.  Yet, ever and anon, the deeply sensual side of his nature made itself felt.  Scotched for a time it could be, but killed never.

“Yet, I do not think it could be said that he had the sexual instinct in any