tion and a consequence; and the beauty of the soul leads on to the beauty of angels, while from the angelic beauty we may rise to a more sublime degree of contemplation, and arrive at God, the first fountain of all beauty. This, he says, is the fruit which Plato sought from his love. Marsilius Ficinus notices that Plato, in the Phædrus, proposes three exemplars of love: one of woman to man- -Alcestis and Admetus; one of man to womanOrpheus and Eurydice; and the third of man to manAchilles and Patroclus. In his mind, and, perhaps, in the general Greek notion, the last was the highest love; it was not feminine but masculine beauty that fired the imagination with the glowing sentiment and idealizing passion which was the stimulus of philosophy, and which raised a man above the vulgar and selfish pursuits of life, and even above the fear of death. With Plato, personal beauty was the one point of contact between the world of sense and the world of ideas. Justice and Temperance could clothe themselves in no visible shape, but Beauty became visible in the beautiful youth. With the vision of this corporeal beauty, love, he taught, begins; after a time it transfers itself to the mind and character of the beloved youth; by another step it passes over to the generalized idea of beauty in all objects, bodies as well as minds. Thence it enlarges itself to comprehend the worship of beauty in public institutions, in arts and sciences, till it ends in contemplation and worship of the self-beautiful.

That the love of man for man can be as ardent as that described in Shakespeare's sonnets, and yet entirely free from Greek corruption, is shown at length in Montaigne's Essay (Livre I. cap. xxvii.) de l'Amitié. His affection for Estienne de la Boëthie, which was a perfect community of soul and will, passing the love of women, is represented to be as ardent as that of Shakespeare for his friend. Sir Thomas Browne in his Religio Medici (Pt. ii. § 5, 6) hopes he does not "break the fifth commandment" if he loves his friend before the nearest of his blood. "I never yet," he says, "cast a true affection on a woman, but I have loved my friend as I do virtue, my soul, my God. . There are three most mystical unions-two natures in one person-three persons in one nature-one soul in two bodies. For though indeed they be really divided, yet are they so

united as they seem but one, and make rather a duality than two distinct souls." And some of the earliest English poetry that is left to us consists of addresses to an absent friend, the tone of which reminds one of Shakespeare's sonnets. In the Codex Exoniensis (Ed. Thorpe, p. 288), is a poem called the Wanderer. In it the exile dreams of his absent lord. Then it seems to him

"That he his lord

Embraces and kisses,
And on his knee lays
Hands and head,

As when he in former days
His gifts enjoyed."

And in a similar poem (p. 442), "The Exile's Complaint," the solitary laments that although he and his lord had often promised that nought should part them but death, they have yet been separated, and nothing remains but sorrow, and the imagination of the absent:

"The far country!
There my friend sits
Under a rocky shelter,
Whitened with storm."

With Plato, love is not merely the friendship which unites two persons by the bands of virtue and mutual kindness; it is also the passion for the infinite, the regretful reminiscence of something better than we see, and the presentiment of future immortality. Still in his estimation this high feeling is founded low down on the stimulus of passion. Love indeed, if it is to be perfect, suppresses this stimulus, or rather diverts it from its natural bias, and transforms it into something quite different. Yet Love is universally, in the highest and lowest forms alike, an impulse of generation. The impulse, in the brutal form, seeks only material pleasure; but as soon as it becomes human, it consciously seeks to bestow an immortality on what is mortal, to render lasting that which fades and dies. Its first human impulse is to produce a semblance of immortality by generating, through a person beloved for beauty, a new person, to replace the original one in its decay (Plato, Sympos. c. 32, p. 207), and thus to preserve the immortality of the species amidst the destruction of the individual. Of this impulse Beauty is the fuel; and lɔve kindled by beauty is not pre

cisely the love of beauty, but of generation in the beautiful. ἐστὶ γὰρ οὐ τοῦ καλοῦ ὁ ἔρως, ἀλλὰ τῆς γεννήσεως καὶ τοῦ τόκου ἐν T Kaλ (Sympos. p. 206). It is the doctrine which Shakespeare puts into the two opening lines of his sonnets, to be as it were the text and motto of the whole

"From fairest creatures we desire increase,

That thereby beauty's rose might never die."

The simplest and lowest form of this impulse manifests itself in the "vulgar love;" it is purified and exalted in the "domestic or "civil love; "it is transformed in the "chivalrous love." For there the impulse is not towards the perpetuation of corporeal beauty, but towards the creation of mental beauty. The material sympathy is transfigured into intellectual union. Then comes the "celestial love," in those few privileged persons in whom the faculty climbs to the contemplation of beauty in its Idea; when a man has attained to this, says Plato, he will have no eyes for the beauty of man or woman, or gold or colours (Symp. c. 35, p. 211). Thus of all love generation is the root and type. "When the fancy (says Messer Francesco Cattani da Diaceto, I Tre Libri d'Amore, L. iii. c. 3) conceives through the sight any vision which we pronounce to be beautiful, suddenly the mind desires not only to enjoy it, but to make it." This desire in the vulgar love and in the civil love is always material. But in the higher love, all that is material is suppressed, or rather transfigured and transformed into a purely spiritual act. Love has its roots in the earth, the corruption of which it has to suppress, and to transmute into the sweet flowers and fruit of art and science. An imperfect love fails to complete this transformation.

The "vulgar love" need not detain us. Shakespeare has thought it worth his while to devote a poem to it-his Venus and Adonis. The Lucrece is a contrast between the civil love of Lucrece and the evil dæmon of animal love which fires Tarquin. The later sonnets are also devoted to this animal love, which permits voluptuousness to overshadow and suppress the hope of increase. Their heroine is neither the wife nor the chivalrous mistress, but the tempter, the Cleopatra, the Cressida, the "bad angel" of the love of sense. But the contrast between the civil love

and the chivalrous love is worth considering. The end of civil love is marriage; that of chivalrous love the connection between the servente and his mistress. The text book of this love is the Codex Amoris, attributed to King Arthur, but capable of showing no higher antiquity than Andrew, a chaplain of Pope Innocent IV. The Code contains thirtyone articles. The faculty for which it legislates is that ordinary love which has its roots in our sensual nature (Art. VI. Masculus non solet nisi in plenâ pubertate amare), and which might naturally and properly end in marriage (Art. XI. Non decet amare quarum pudor est nuptias affectare). Yet as the chivalrous love was quite distinct from civil love, it was therefore cut short in its development, and failed to attain its own special end if the lovers married. The only senses allowed to be the vehicles of chivalrous love were the eyes and ears. The lover was forbidden to go beyond gazing on, or hearing, or thinking of, his love. Two grades of successful lovers were acknowledged. A lover of the lower grade (the écouté) was initiated by the lady giving him gloves or girdle; one of the higher grade (the ami) by her giving him a kiss-the first and generally the last he could hope to receive from her. It is to this kiss that Art. XII. refers (Verus amans alterius nisi suæ coamantis ex affectu non cupit amplexus). On all other occasions chivalrous love was forbidden to transgress the strict limits of eyes and mind (Art. XXIV. Quilibet amantis actus in coamantis cogitatione finitur. Art. XXX. Verus amans assiduâ sine intermissione coamantis imagine detinetur). The chivalrous love of the woman was a kind of adaptation of the Platonic friendship between man and man to that between a man and woman, and a regulation of it by the forms of feudalism. The woman took the place of the feudal lord, the man that of follower. The office of receiving a knight as servente was a complete feudal infeodation; the vassal often called his dame dominus, and their relationship is said by M. Fauriel to have been sometimes blessed by the Church. When a knight was accepted as ami, he knelt before his lady, his two hands joined palm to palm between hers, and swore to serve her faithfully till death, and to protect her against all evil and outrage. She, on the other hand, accepted his services, promised

him her tenderest affections, gave him a ring, and raised him up with a kiss. Chivalrous love was inconsistent with married love, because in marriage the chivalrous subordination of the lover to his mistress is impossible, the bounds of eyes and fancy are passed, and the life is domestic, not ideal. The lady is not supreme, nor her favours voluntary. The French knight in Fouqué's Sintram is not an accurate conception of chivalry. He would have had a mistress, but that mistress could not have been his own wife. His wife would have had her servente, but he could not have been her husband. There was no law of love more rigidly enforced than this by the Provençal Parliaments of love. Marriage between a servente and his lady destroyed the chivalrous relationship. On the other hand, no lady was allowed to give up a servente on the score that she was married to another. The first article of the Code defined that " causa conjugii ab amore non est excusatio recta." The division between married and chivalrous love, which all the raptures and awe of fancy made necessary, was one quite in accordance with the habits of Southern Europe, but could find no real home among the Teutonic races of the North. In the Greek the love of women was either the natural impulse or a domestic relationship, never idealized or refined beyond the limits of the utilitarian, the commonplace, the unenthusiastic. She was either Eraípa for pleasure, or Taλλakỳ for body servant and nurse, or yurn for housewife. But the Germans had a kind of religious veneration for women, very far surpassing these utilitarian limits. This veneration they were able to preserve intact even in the marriage state. But to the Southern imagination such a combination seemed preposterous. It could receive from the Germans their woman worship, but could not allow it to be a wife worship. The Southern idea of marriage was, that in it the man sought a mother for his children, a housekeeper, a stewardess, but not necessarily a companion to share his joys and sorrows, or a friend to commune with his thoughts: still less a mistress in the chivalrous sense, a suzeraine in whose presence the servente-husband was to exhibit the awe and terror prescribed by the Code (Art. XV. Omnis consuevit amans in coamantis aspectu palle

scere.

Art. XVI. In repentina coamantis visione cor tre