Part 6

This great immorality, centring in the irreproachable days of the Exhibition of 1851, or thereabouts--the pleasure in this particular form of human disgrace--has passed, leaving one trace only: the habit by which some men reproach a silly woman through her sex, whereas a silly man is not reproached through his sex. But the vulgarity of which I have written here was distinctively English--the most English thing that England had in days when she bragged of many another--and it was not able to survive an increased commerce of manners and letters with France. It was the chief immorality destroyed by French fiction.