"The form of the first, and also another fashion, the curious reader may here see (being without any immodestie) as they are represented by Pignerius, _de servis_, p. 82. But whatsoever the fashion or invention was, the trust was but fond that was committed to them, seeing that the art of lust and gold could make them as vain as the Italian engines of jealousy in this day. Thus, 'O Lentulus,' says the poet, speaking figuratively to some nobleman, 'it is that thou art married; but it is some musician's or fencer's bastard that is born under thy lordly canopie.'"[213] [Illustration: PLATE VII., Figs. 1-2, PHALLIC FIBULÆ.] Winkleman furnishes us with a description of an infibulated musician,[214] it being a small bronze statue representing a naked deformed individual, as thin as a skeleton, and carrying a ring in his _enormi mentula_. Martial, who laughs at everything, speaks of these singers sometimes breaking their ring, and says that it becomes necessary to send them to the fibula-makers in order to have the damage repaired:[215] "Et cujus refibulavit turgidum, faber, penem, Il di cui turgido membro abbia fabro fibbiato." The practice of infibulation was very common in India, from religious motives. As a proof of their sanctity, many of the Santons, or Mohammedan saints, as well as other devout persons, bonzes, fakirs, and the like, devoted themselves to perpetual virginity. Whether it was with the intention of placing themselves beyond the possibility of breaking their vow, or of giving evidence of their constancy, certain it is that they loaded their prepuce with an enormous fibula, or ring; and, in their warm climate, where nudity does not shock ideas of propriety or decency, devout women not unfrequently repaired to these _soi-disant_ saints, to admire and venerate such efforts of virtue and self-denial; they are even reported to have knelt down, and, in that humiliating posture, to have kissed the preputial ring, no doubt with the vain hope of thereby obtaining indulgences. In some places, these martyrs fasten their fibula with a lock, the key which they deposit with the magistrate of the town or village. But, nature insisting upon her rights, is often too strong for this self-violence, nor can desire, or the not-to-be-mistaken symptom of it, be opposed, or even prevented, from being gratified; and since the lock, which obstructs the extremity of the prepuce only, cannot hinder a kind of erection, nor, indeed, of effusion of the seminal fluid, it cannot do more than oppose the introduction of the male organ into the receptacle destined for it.