Note 15 — VIRGINITY AND ITS TRADITIONS.

We can supplement these remarks by a further quotation from that curious work already noticed, The Battles of Venus, wherein we read: “This lust, then, after the untouched morsel, I take not to be an original dictate of nature; but consequently to result from much experience with women, which has been demonstrated to lead to novelty of wishes from fastidious impotence.... Yet, in truth, I esteem the fruition of a virgin to be, with respect both to the mind and body of the enjoyer, the highest aggravation of sensual delight. In the first place, his fancy is heated with the prospect of enjoying a woman, after whom he has perhaps long sighed and has been in pursuit, who he thinks has never before been in bed with a man, (in whose arms never before has man laid), and in triumphing in the first sight of her virgin charms. This precious operation, then, of fancy, has been shown in the highest degree to prepare the body for enjoyment. Secondly, his body perceives, in that of a virgin, the cause of the greatest aggravation of delight. I mean not only in the coyness and resistance which she makes to his efforts, but when he is on the point of accomplishing them: when arrived, as the poet sings, ‘on the brink of giddy rapture,’ when in pity to a tender virgin’s sufferings, he is intreated not to break fiercely in, but to spare ‘fierce dilaceration and dire pangs.’ The resistance which the small, and as yet unopened, mouth of bliss makes to his eager endeavours, serves only, and that on a physical principle, to strengthen the instrument of his attack, and concurs, with the instigation of his ardent fancy, to reinforce his efforts, to unite all the co-operative powers of enjoyment, and to produce an emission copious, rapid, and transporting.... ‘In this case, part of the delight arises from considering that ... you feel the convulsive wrigglings of the chaste nymph you have so long adored....’” Our acknowledgements are again due to Pisanus Fraxi, from whose Index Librorum Prohibitorum our extract is taken. The author of The Battles of Venus, it need hardly be said, is in no sense an authority; his work, indeed, is pornographic rather than artistic; at the same time, it is impossible to ignore his flashes of insight into a question which has exercised the minds of the greatest psychologists.