Fanny Hill. John Cleland

a neck exquisitely turn’d, grac’d behind and on the sides with his hair, playing freely in natural ringlets, connected his head to a body of the most perfect form, and of the most vigorous contexture, in which all the strength of manhood was conceal’d and soften’d to appearance by the delicacy of his complexion, the smoothness of his skin, and the plumpness of his flesh.

      The platform of his snow-white bosom, that was laid out in a manly proportion, presented, on the vermilion summit of each pap, the idea of a rose about to bloom.

      Nor did his shirt hinder me from observing that symmetry of his limbs, that exactness of shape, in the fall of it towards the loins, where the waist ends and the rounding swell of the hips commences, where the skin, sleek, smooth, and dazzling white, burnishes on the stretch over firm, plump, ripe flesh, that crimp’d and ran into dimples at the least pressure, or that the touch could not rest upon but slid over as on the surface of the most polished ivory.

      His thighs, finely fashioned, and with a florid glossy roundness, gradually tapering away to the knees, seem’d pillars worthy to support that beauteous frame; at the bottom of which I could not, without some remains of terror, some tender emotions too, but fix my eyes on that terrible machine, which had, not long before, with such fury broke into, torn, and almost ruin’d those soft, tender parts of mine that had not yet done smarting with the effects of its rage; but behold it now! crestfall’n, reclining its half-capt vermilion head over one of his thighs, quiet, pliant and to all appearance incapable of the mischiefs and cruelty it had committed. Then the beautiful growth of the hair, in short and soft curls round its root, its whiteness, branch’d veins, the supple softness of the shaft, as it lay foreshorten’d, roll’d and shrunk up into a squab thickness, languid, and borne up from between his thighs by its globular appendage, that wondrous treasure-bag of nature’s sweets, which, rivell’d round, and purs’d up in the only wrinkles that are known to please, perfected the prospect, and all together formed the most interesting moving picture in nature, surely infinitely superior to those crudities furnish’d by the painters, statuaries, or any art, which are purchas’d at immense prices; whilst the sight of them in actual life is scarce sovereignly tasted by any but the few whom nature has endowed with a fire of imagination, warmly pointed by a truth of judgement to the spring-head, the originals of beauty of nature’s unequall’d composition, above all the imitations of art or the reach of wealth to pay their price.

      But everything must have an end. A motion made by this angelic youth, in the listlessness of sleep, replac’d his shirt and the bedclothes in a posture that shut up that treasure from longer view.

      I lay down then, and carrying my hands to that part of me in which the objects just seen had begun to raise a mutiny that prevail’d over the smart of them, my fingers now open’d themselves an easy passage; but I had not long time to consider the wide difference there,