The Scented Garden

23 Ye were too childlike, too innocent, too hopeful of mankind, that ye did proclaim your pearly gos- pel to the swinish multitude ! The old law, silence, is the master : therefore whoso looketh for my name, let him find it darkling in these lines of power ! R. is the Father, W. the Son, And E. the Holy Spirit, three and one : But if they esoterically are read My equal name shall glitter out instead. Yes ! we must not sing hymns to Pan to- day : we must pretend to be German professors, with a keen scientific interest in these very re- markable phenomena which look so much like madness, and which our own perfect sanity and the effulgence (possibly a shade alto) of our dis- creet and legal passion for our Limburger-tainted hausfrau hide from our fuller comprehension. As is right, therefore : In nomine v. Krafft-Ebing, v. Schrenk-Notzing, et Havelock Ellis, Amen. The Holy Trinity (invoked above) have brought within the knowledge of the English-speaking races all those facts connected with ‘ sexual perversion ’ (in its infinite variety) which occur in the diseased. The late Sir Richard Burton has informed us of all that need be known on the subject in the matter of its historical, geographical, ethnographical dis- tribution : and his Priapeia, and the verses of the and Hermaphrodite of Panormita, form a valuable commentary on his remarks. Ulrichs and Sy- monds have treated the subject sympathetically (though rather timidly and as it were with the cold ardour of the special pleader) in its modern prac- tical aspects : but with the exception of Verlaine in Hombres, Wilde in ‘ Teleny ’, the pseudonymous (as