Love was hardly distinguished from mere animal desire.  The poets wrote of it coldly and conventionally, as of a thing which existed only in name.  The lover could only beg his mistress “to ease his pain.”  But the conventionality which extended through all thoughts and expressions relating to the higher emotions of the human soul, had no effect in diminishing the coarseness of thought and conversation.  Men were conventional as regards the nobler sentiments of life, but they were not conventional in the spirit which excludes from conversation and literature the gross and the immoral.  Chesterfield wrote to his son of honor, justice, and so forth, as qualities of which he should know the names, but of no consequence compared to “manners, good-breeding, and the graces.”  If a man blushed, it was not at his own indecency, nor at his own vice, but at the supposition that he could be so weak as to be influenced by sentiments of delicacy.  Coarseness is, of course, quite separate from immorality, although the two are usually found together.  In the earlier part of the eighteenth century there was a marked distinction between them.  Swift’s Stella, a woman of refinement, was highly indignant at remarks being made before her of a licentious character, but she herself used expressions of the grossest description without a thought of impropriety.  The same distinction is seen in the essays and novels of the time.  Swift, Defoe, Fielding, Richardson, all had a moral object in their fictions—­the exposure and condemnation of vice, the encouragement of virtue.  And yet most of these novels, especially intended to exert a good influence, are of so coarse a nature, and describe scenes so licentious that no parent would now allow them in their children’s hands.  The essayists wrote principally what we should now look upon as sermons, or moral teachings, and yet very many of their papers are unfit to be read in a mixed society.  Men and women were made then of coarser stuff than we.  Their eyes and ears were less sensitive.  They were, at best, accustomed to think and speak of things which to us seem disgusting, and of which, therefore, we think and speak as little as possible.  In view of the circumstances which influenced society in the last century, this condition was a perfectly natural one.  We must bear it in mind in reading contemporary literature, that we may not mistake an author’s intention.  But we must be careful in censuring what was, after all, only one necessary stage in the development of our own civilization.  It must be said, also, that the coarseness of the eighteenth century was a healthy coarseness, bred of energetic natures and animal spirits.  In our time, and in the midst of our advanced refinement there lurks a sickly sentimentality, a false modesty, and an unhealthy delicacy which are in a degree inimical to morality.  We have novels in great numbers, not broadly coarse, as those of Fielding or Smollett, but insidiously immoral, painting vice and unbridled passions in an attractive light.