“Ay, poor fellows, ‘on compulsion!’” said my friend, with a compassionate sigh.—“But,” resumed he, falling in with my tone, “there is one point which I could have wished that our most melodious of lyrists had cleared up to my satisfaction—videlicet, what gender angels really are of?”
“Very little doubt, by logical reasoning, need exist upon that point,” answered I: “Mr. Moore represents his angels in the characters of gay deceivers, and those characters being performed by the male sex—ergo, angels must be males. You perceive the syllogism is complete?”
“Ay, ay,” said my friend; “but how comes it, then, that when we see a beautiful woman, we cry out involuntarily, ‘What an angel!’”
“The word homo signifies either man or woman,” replied I; “give a similar latitude to the word angel, and you have your choice of sexes! Divers of the classics, and some of the sculptors, perfectly authorise Mr. Moore’s delicious ambiguity.”
“That,” said my Moorish friend, “is certainly the fact, and most elegantly has our lyrist handled this question of celestial sexuality: he has paid the highest compliment ever yet conceived to human beauty, by asserting that ethereal spirits, instead of taking up with their own transparent species, prefer the opaque body-colouring of terrestrial dairy-maids—though fastidious casuists may, perhaps, call that a depraved taste.”
“No such thing,” replied I; “it is rather a proof of refined and filtered epicurism. The heathen mythology is crammed with precedents on that point. Every god and goddess in former times (and the sky was then quite crowded with them,)——”
“And may be so still,” interrupted my friend, “for any thing we know to the contrary.”
“They played their several pranks upon our globe,” continued I, “without the slightest compunction: even Jupiter himself frequently became a trespasser on the honour and peace of several very respectable fleshly families. The distinction between the spiritual and corporeal is likewise dexterously touched on by the dramatist Farquhar, who makes one of his characters[[29]] exclaim to another, ‘I’ll take her body, you her mind: which has the better bargain?’”
[29]. Archer in “The Beaux Stratagem.”