as satiety which proceeds from facility; nor anything that so much whets it as rarity and difficulty: "Omnium rerum voluptas ipso, quo debet fugare, periculo crescit. " 1 "Galla, nega; satiatur amor, nisi gaudia torquent." 2 To keep love in breath, Lycurgus 3 made a decree that the married people of Lacedæmon should never enjoy one another but by stealth; and that it should be as great a shame to take them in bed together as committing with others. The difficulty of assignations, the danger of surprise, the shame of the morning: these are what give the piquancy to the sauce? How many very wantonly pleasant sports spring from the most decent and modest language of the works on love? Pleasure itself seeks to be heightened with pain; it is much sweeter when it smarts and has the skin rippled. The courtesan Flora said she never lay with Pompey but that she made him wear the prints of her teeth: 5— "Quod petiere, premunt arcte, faciuntque dolorem Et stimuli subsunt, qui instigant lædere ad ipsum, And so it is in everything: difficulty gives all things their estimation; the people of the March of Ancona more "The pleasure of all things increases by the same danger that should deter it."-Seneca, De Benef., vii. 9. 2 44 "Galla, refuse me; love is glutted with joys that are not attended with trouble."-Martial, iv. 37. 3 Plutarch, Life of Lycurgus. "And languor, and silence, and sighs, coming from the innermost heart."-Hor., Epod., xi. 9. 5 Plutarch, Life of Pompey, c. 1. "What they have sought they press closely, and cause pain; on the lips fix the teeth, and every kiss indents: urged by latent stimulus the part to wound."-Lucretius, 1. 4. readily make their vows to St. James,1 and those of Galicia to Our Lady of Loreto; they make wonderful to-do at Liege about the baths of Lucca, and in Tuscany about those of Aspa: 2 there are few Romans seen in the fencing school of Rome, which is full of French. That great Cato also, as much as us, nauseated his wife whilst she was his, and longed for her when in the possession of another. I was fain to turn out into the paddock an old horse, as he was not to be governed when he smelt a mare: the facility presently sated him as towards his own, but towards strange mares, and the first that passed by the pale of his pasture, he would again fall to his importunate neighings and his furious heats as before. Our appetite contemns and passes by what it has in possession, to run after that it has not : "Transvolat in medio posita, et fugientia captat." 3 To forbid us anything is to make us have a mind to't : "Nisi tu servare puellam Incipis, incipiet desinere esse mea :"4 to give it wholly up to us is to beget in us contempt. Want and abundance fall into the same inconvenience : "Tibi quod superest, mihi quod desit, dolet."" Desire and fruition equally afflict us. The rigors of mistresses are troublesome, but facility, to say truth, still more so; forasmuch as discontent and anger spring from the esteem we have of the thing desired, heat and actuate 1 Of Compostella in Galicia. 2 Spa. 3 "He slights her who is close at hand, and runs after her who flees from him."-Horace, Sat., i. 2, 108. 4 "Unless you begin to guard your mistress, she will soon begin to be no longer mine."-Ovid, Amor., ii. 19, 47. 5 "Your superfluities trouble you, and what I want troubles me."Terence, Phorm., i. 3, 9. love, but satiety begets disgust; 'tis a blunt, dull, stupid, tired, and slothful passion : "Si qua volet regnare diu, contemnat amantem.” 1 "Contemnite, amantes: Sic hodie veniet, si qua negavit heri." 2 Why did Poppea invent the use of a mask to hide the beauties of her face, but to enhance it to her lovers? Why have they veiled, even below the heels, those beauties that every one desires to show, and that every one desires to see? Why do they cover with so many hindrances, one over another, the parts where our desires and their own have their principal seat? And to what serve those great bastion farthingales, with which our ladies fortify their haunches, but to allure our appetite and to draw us on by removing them farther from us? "Et fugit ad salices, et se cupit ante videri." 4 "Interdum tunica duxit operta moram.' To what use serves the artifice of this virgin modesty, this grave coldness, this severe countenance, this professing to be ignorant of things that they know better than we who instruct them in them, but to increase in us the desire to overcome, control, and trample underfoot at pleasure all this ceremony and all these obstacles? For there is not only pleasure, but, moreover, glory, in conquering and debauching that soft sweetness and that childish modesty, and to reduce a cold and matron-like gravity to the mercy of our ardent desires: 'tis a glory, say they, to triumph over modesty, chastity, and temperance; and whoever dissuades ladies from those qualities, betrays both them and himself. We are to believe that their hearts tremble with affright, 1 "She who would long retain her power must use her lover ill."— Ovid, Amor., ii. 19, 33. 2 "Slight your mistresses; she will to-day come who denied you yesterday."-Propertius, ii. 14, 19. 3 Tacitus, Annal., xiii. 45. 4 "She flies to the osiers, and desires beforehand to be seen going."Virgil, Eclog., iii. 65. "The hidden robe has sometimes checked love."-Propertius, ii. 15, 6. that the very sound of our words offends the purity of their ears, that they hate us for talking so, and only yield to our importunity by a compulsive force. Beauty, all powerful as it is, has not wherewithal to make itself relished without the mediation of these little arts. Look into Italy, where there is the most and the finest beauty to be sold, how it is necessitated to have recourse to extrinsic means and other artifices to render itself charming, and yet, in truth, whatever it may do, being venal and public, it remains feeble and languishing. Even so in virtue itself, of two like effects, we notwithstanding look upon that as the fairest and most worthy, wherein the most trouble and hazard are set before us. "Tis an effect of the divine Providence to suffer the holy Church to be afflicted, as we see it, with so many storms and troubles, by this opposition to rouse pious souls, and to awaken them from that drowsy lethargy wherein, by so long tranquillity, they had been immerged. If we should lay the loss we have sustained in the number of those who have gone astray, in the balance against the benefit we have had by being again put in breath, and by having our zeal and strength revived by reason of this opposition, I know not whether the utility would not surmount the damage. We have thought to tie the nuptial knot of our marriages more fast and firm by having taken away all means of dissolving it, but the knot of the will and affection is so much the more slackened and made loose, by how much that of constraint is drawn closer; and, on the contrary, that which kept the marriages at Rome so long in honour and inviolate, was the liberty every one who so desired had to break them; they kept their wives the better, because they might part with them, if they would; and, in the full liberty of divorce, five hundred years and more passed away before any one made use on't.1 1 "Quod licet, ingratum est; quod non licet, acrius urit." 2 "Il se passa cinq cent ans et plus, avant que nul s'en servist."Valerius Maximus, ii. 1, 4. 2 "What you may, is displeasing; what is forbidden, whets the appetite."-Ovid, Amor., ii. 19. We might here introduce the opinion of an ancient upon this occasion, "that executions rather whet than dull the edge of vices: that they do not beget the care of doing well, that being the work of reason and discipline, but only a care not to be taken in doing ill:" "Latius excisa pestis contagia serpunt.”1 I do not know that this is true; but I experimentally know, that never civil government was by that means reformed; the order and regimen of manners depend upon some other expedient. The Greek histories 2 make mention of the Argippians, neighbours to Scythia, who live without either rod or stick for offence; where not only no one attempts to attack them, but whoever can fly thither is safe, by reason of their virtue and sanctity of life, and no one is so bold as to lay hands upon them; and they have applications made to them to determine the controversies that arise betwixt men of other countries. There is a certain nation, where the enclosures of gardens and fields they would preserve, are made only of a string of cotton; and, so fenced, is more firm and secure than by our hedges and ditches : "Furem signata sollicitant . . . aperta effractarius præterit.” 3 Peradventure, the facility of entering my house, amongst other things, has been a means to preserve it from the violence of our civil wars: defence allures attempt, and defiance provokes an enemy. I enervated the soldiers' design by depriving the exploit of danger and all manner of military glory, which is wont to serve them for pretence and excuse: whatever is bravely, is ever honourably, done, at a time when justice is dead. I render them the conquest 1 "The infection of the checked plague spreads all the more."— Rutilius, Itinerar., iv. 397. 2 Herodotus, iv. 23. 3 "Things sealed up invite a thief: the housebreaker passes by open doors."-Seneca, Epist., 68. VOL. III. 17 B |