This malignant and terrible contortion, combined with the low forehead, blunt nose, and prognathous jaw gave the dead man a singularly
simious and ape-like appearance, which was increased by his writhing, unnatural posture.
Swinburne invokes "that lost love of Burton's, the beloved and blue object of his Central African affections, whose caudal charms and
simious seductions were too strong for the narrow laws of Levitical or Mosaic prudery which would confine the jewel of a man to the lotus of a merely human female by the most odious and unnatural of priestly restrictions" Whatever its value as evidence, Swinburne's sentence captures nicely the malodorous blend of mincing coyness and gaseous verbiage that makes his, and Burton's, prose pretty much unreadable today.