This was not completely new, but it now became central to the question of his authority as a writer. Even among earlier generations, his talk of buttocks, cracks, and tools had occasionally bothered people. Lord Halifax, the dedicatee of an English translation in the seventeenth century, remarked: “I cannot abide that, after having discoursed of the exemplary life of a holy man, he should immediately talk as he does of cuckoldom and privy-parts, and other things of this nature … I wish he had left out these things, that ladies might not be put to the blush, when his Essays are found in their
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