"There are things which men have a right to keep secret," he says, "and if a prurient curiosity prompts others officiously to pry into them, there is nothing criminal or dishonest in refusing to minister to such a spirit.

They enact all that was ever portrayed by prurient artists in a bacchanalian festival or pandean orgy; and as the light of the sun they adore and the presence of numerous spectators seem to be no restraint on their indulgence, it cannot be expected that chastity is preserved when the shades of night fall on such a scene of licentiousness and debauchery.

As a mild refrigerant juice, it is preferred where an acrimonious state of the fluids prevails, indicated by prurient eruptions upon the skin, or in what has been called the hot scurvy.

Another fingered his spear with a prurient hand.

Yet the book was by no means the wanton freak of a prurient imagination; it had a serious purpose and was believed by its author to present the essentials of a new and beautiful theory of life, art and religion.

Lesbia, once married to a worthy man, such a man as Lord Hartfield, for instance, would soon rise to a higher level than that Belgravian swamp over which the malarian vapours of falsehood, and slander, and self-seeking, and prurient imaginings hang dense and thick.

I found this brown room of the Commons-house, with its green benches, and grilled galleries, so agreeable to my mood, that I went again the next morning, and listened to more records, till they tired me: for what I had was a prurient itch to hear secret scandals, and revelations of the festering heart, but these cylinders, gathered from a shop, divulged nothing.

I have watched you and your crew, how you preach up selfish ambition for divine charity and call prurient longings celestial love, while you blaspheme that very marriage from whose mysteries you borrow all your cant.

As a convicted criminal, who served for two years at hard labor in Reading jail, and afterwards, a prey to chronic alcoholism, died in obscurity in Paris, he still remains a subject of whispered conversation in private, and his crime a taboo to the public, mentionable only at the risk of arousing the terrible odium sexicum of the prurient majority.

The beaux are attorneys' apprentices, with chapeau bras and Limerick glovesfiddlers, harp teachers, and clerks of genius: the belles are faded fan-twinkling spinsters, prurient vulgar misses from school, and enormous citizens' wives.

Had he been a European of the same origin and habits, awkwardness would have betrayed him fifty times, before the dessert made its appearance; but, being the man he was, one who overlooked a certain prurient politeness that rather illustrated his deportment, might very well have permitted him to pass among the oi polloi of the world, were it not for a peculiar management in the way of providing for himself.

Here he is making a fine art of crime, There he is fussing in a Puritan panic; Here with MCMUCK he plays the prurient spy, And there with OSCAR in a paroxysm Of puerile paradox spreads to Cultchaw's eye The fopperies of "Artistic Hedonism"!

Longus knew very well that nothing is so tempting to libertines as purity and ignorant innocence; hence he made purity and ignorant innocence the pivot of his prurient story.

The Charter of Exemption from Tolls is not in existence, and the story of Peeping Tom is the embroidery of the prurient age (1678), in which the pageant was instituted.

Such publications as pander to a prurient taste find a large circulation with a portion of society who read them for the same reason that the inebriate seeks his bowl, or the gambler the instruments of his vocationfor the excitement they produce.