Tetins, Dieu fait, & croupe de Chanoine!
And the celebrated Poet Rousseau, happening, in one of his Epigrams, to speak of the abovementioned Temple which the Greeks had erected to Venus, declares that it would have been that Temple of Greece which he would have frequented with the greatest devotion.
Nay, other persons have thought, that, besides the above advantages, the part we mention was moreover capable of dignity, and partaking of the importance of its owners. This is an opinion which the Poet Scarron (to continue to draw our examples from French Authors) clearly expressed, in a copy of verses he wrote to a certain Lady, whose Husband having lately been made a Duke, she had thereby acquired a right to be seated in the Queen’s Assembly, or, as they express it, had been given the Tabouret (a stool.) ‘To the no small pleasure of all (said Scarron, who, we may observe, had assumed a right to say every thing he pleased) and of your own legs, your Backside, which is without doubt one of the handsomest Backsides in France, like a Backside of importance, has at last, at the Queen’s, received the Tabouret.’
Au grand plaisir de tous & de vôtre jarret,
Vôtre cû, qui doit être un des beaux cûs de France,
Comme un cû d’importance,
A recu chez la Reine enfin le tabouret.
Favourable sentiments of the kind just mentioned, seem also to have been entertained by the celebrated Lord Bolingbroke, whose distinguished character as a Statesman, a Politician, and a Philosopher, render him extremely fit to be quoted in this place: it was on that part of his Mistress’s body we are alluding to, his Lordship, then a Secretary of State, chose to write, and to sign, one of the most important dispatches of his Ministry, and on which the repose of Europe depended at that time[106].
In fine, others have carried their notions still farther, and have thought that the part in question was capable, not only of beauty and dignity, but even of splendor. Thus, Mons. Pavillon, a French Bel Esprit under the reign of Lewis XIV. who filled the office of King’s General Advocate at Metz, who was one of the forty Members of the French Academy, and Nephew to a Bishop, wrote a copy of verses that is inserted in the Collection of his Works, which he intitled, Métamorphose du Cû d’Iris en Astre. ‘The Metamorphose of Iris’s Bum, into a Star.’ By a Star of that kind, the Duke of York, afterwards King James II., was dazzled, when he became enamoured with Miss Arabella Churchill, a Maid of Honour to the Duchess, at the time that Lady had a fall from her horse, in a party of hunting: and to his Royal Highness being so dazzled, the first advancement of the great Duke of Marlborough, then Mr. Churchill, the Lady’s Brother, became owing; together with the capital advantages that accrued to this Nation, from his getting afterwards into great employments.