“But it is an exotic of the most delicate constitution: it requires the greatest art to introduce it into a state, and the smallest discouragement is sufficient to repress it again. Let us only consider with what ease it was formerly _extinguished in Rome_, and with what difficulty it was _lately revived in Europe_: it seemed to sleep for ages, and at last fought its way among us through tilts, tournaments, dragons, and all the dreams of chivalry. The rest of the world, _China only excepted_, are, and have ever been, utter strangers to its delights and advantages. In other countries, as men find themselves stronger than women, they lay a claim to rigorous superiority: this is natural, and love, which gives up this natural advantage, must certainly be the effect of art—an art calculated to lengthen out our happier moments, and add new graces to society.” To this conclusion the lady interlocutor in the dialogue objects on the ground that “the effects of love are too violent to be the result of an artificial passion”; and suggests, by way of accounting for the absence of love, that “the same efforts that are used in some places to suppress pity, and other natural passions, may have been employed to extinguish love”; and that “those nations where it is cultivated only make nearer advances to nature.” Goldsmith thus leaves it in doubt whether he considers Love a natural or an artificial passion. In the three passages which I have italicised, he errs: first, in saying that Love was “extinguished” in Rome, when in fact it never existed there, except incompletely in the poetic intuition of Ovid and possibly one or two other poets; secondly, he errs in remarking that it was lately “revived” in Europe, when in fact it was newly-born; and his excepting China, in speaking of the absence of Love, can only be looked on in the light of a joke in view of the absolute subjection of women to parental dictation, and the fact that, as one writer remarks, “a union prompted solely by love would be a monstrous infraction of the duty of filial obedience, and a predilection on the part of the female as heinous a crime as infidelity.” But his definition of Love as “the effect of art—an art calculated to lengthen out our happier moments and add new graces to society” is exceedingly good. The art in question is known as Courtship: and it is the latest of the fine arts, which even now exists in its perfection in two countries only—England and America. The Italian language has no equivalent for Courtship, as Professor Mantegazza tells us in his _Fisiologia dell’ Amore_; and a German commentator on this passage in Mantegazza comments dubiously: “Das Eutsprechende deutsche Wort _dürfte wohl_ Werbung sein;” “the corresponding German word is presumably _Werbung_.” “Presumably” is very suggestive. Yet the Germans have another expression of mediæval origin apparently, namely, “Einem Mädchen den Hof machen”—"to pay court