Konx Om Pax

proper adjustment of their braces than they ever did before. So we find as faith has ost power, prurience has gained sway. In the days of Alexander V1 a child would have been disembowelled for spelling Homousios with a second i and 2. Pope would not have been considered as worthy of the Vic erenc of Christ unless he had held secret intercourse with every single member 5? his family. But to-day with such pietistic parasites as the Protestant Pioneer and the Freethinker, with such Christian inverts as In-Gram and F66-Té, such puritanical broken-bottle-throwers as Victor Rayson and Lord Groberts, we find that the name of the Man of Sorrows may be spelt with any letter in the alphabet; but that to replace Adrian’s barge by the LC.C. privy is a crime that should carry with it instantaneous decapitation. Captain Fuller will have none of this; with a. ripple of virgin laughter he at once rips the rational bloomers from the unwashed Bacon of the Rev. Secularius Shake speare, and strips every button from the unsexed knickerbockers of Mrs. Lysistrata Ghoul. In a voice of thunder he proclaims a general strike among seamstresses and needle-women, button-makers and cotton- rowers, and condemns all such pus-brained pithecanthropoids to an enforced period 0 living statuary under La Milo. With a wit keener than that of a Rabelais, a Moliere and a Voltaire combined, he probes the social ulcer, and here we think he makes his one mistake; for in this age of literary duFf and watered Punch even our joblot Hacksons cannot tolerate what they cannot understand ; they bully their inferiors, and while cringing to their masters, talk vile scandal about them in the servants' Hall. For in this NEW AGE what is wanted is M UCK, and we think that should Crowley wish to stamp a hell-hoof into the ungroomed buttocks of the social mule, he should adopt as his motto the hitherto unpublished couplet of Lord Byron, which Oscar Wilde in his youth is supposed to have filched from Thomas Moore’s grandson: Take care, my friend, do not display thy wit! For what the people want to-day is But alasl the last word ofthe line is lost, and who shall find it? How much more so to-day, eighty years since that lusty decadent (l) swam the Hellespont; in this period, in which the blue blow-flies of Rational Rot have been stirred from the privies of our laboratories by such experts as Oliver Haeckel and Ernest Lodge, and which now batten on the sumptuous princeliness of mediaeval pedom. This age which has replaced the clashing steel of the Percys and Howards y the clubbed gamps of our Kennys and Pankhursts—this age of modesty and muck! Garbage is what the people grunt for—putrid slime, for like swine they nose glee full the dung hill. But Crowley cannot produce muck. 'lyherefore though we now know this Star to be the greatest master iece in all literature, we feel certain it will not raise a crop of that smutty wheat whic needs the left hand of Ezekiel to knead it into bread and the stomach of a Trimalchio to digest it. Captain Fuller has written his masterpiece for the few, those few who possess the mind of a Huxley and the Soul of a Loyola, and not for those many who possess the Station of 9. Victoria and the Memorial of an Albert. To become such we must indeed wrestle with God as Jacob wrestled at Bethel till the Deity beget on us a royal race as numerous as the stars of the heavens and the sands of the sea-shore. However many there be in this simmeri cesspit who perchance may perceive in the divine virility of Crowley's pen the deca ence of a Dr. Smiles—a seeker after the evanescent gems of the refuse heap. If so, let these would-be profaners of the mys terious beware, for perchance they themselves are sitting under the squatting buttocks of Mutinus, playing a game worthy of little school girls, or if they be hold, then like spliyed witc es at midnight they wildly circle the stars astride their peppered broom stic s. Crowley is no consumptive driveller, no erotic schoolboy seeking the mysteries of love in the cleavature of a turnip, for He stands above such bucolic pastimes virile u Eros, spiritual as Psyche, a fighter to the last round, a bull amongst men, a stallion \