Of this kind were two passions of Lamb, concerning which a biographer says, “A youthful passion, which lasted only a few months, and which he afterwards attempted to regard lightly as a folly past, inspired a few sonnets of very delicate feeling and exquisite music.” And of his second flame, “His stay at Pentonville is remarkable for the fugitive passion conceived by Lamb for a young Quakeress named Hester Savory, which he has enshrined and immortalised in the little poem of _Hester_.” Goethe has the reputation of having been of all famous lovers the most fickle. Like Byron, Goethe appears to have endeavoured to make himself appear more frivolous than he was. His amorous Roman _Elegies_, which have given so much offence, were in reality written in Thuringia, after his return from Italy; and their heroine was no one but the girl who subsequently became his wife. It remained for a Scotchman to write the best apology for Goethe’s love-affairs. “To Goethe,” says Professor Blackie, “the sight of any beautiful object was like delicate music to the ear of a cunning musician; he was carried away by it, and floated in its element joyously, as a swallow in the summer air, or a sea-mew on the buoyant wave. Hence the rich story of Goethe’s loves, with which scandal, of course, and prudery have made their market, but which, when looked into carefully, were just as much part of his genius as _Faust_ or _Iphigenia_—a part, indeed, without which neither _Faust_ nor _Iphigenia_ could have been written.... Let no one, therefore, take offence when I say that Goethe was always falling in love, and that I consider this a great virtue in his character.” One more case: “Beethoven constantly had his love-affairs,” says Wegeler. His first love was a Cologne beauty, who coquetted with him and another man till both discovered she was engaged to a _third_! Several times Beethoven made up his mind to marry; he made two definite proposals, both of which were refused. One fatal objection was his habit of falling in love with women above him in “rank.” “It is a frightful thing,” he once wrote, “to make the acquaintance of such a sweet creature and to lose her immediately; and nothing is more insupportable than thus to have to confess one’s own foolishness.” One of his flames, an opera singer, gave as a reason why she refused him that he was “so ugly and half-cracked!” IV.—MULTIPLICITY Perhaps the most unique trait in the love of men of genius is the apparent occasional absence of the element of Monopoly. It was Ovid who first discussed the question whether a man could love two women at once. His friend Græcinus denied the possibility of such a thing; but in one of his _Elegies_ Ovid refutes him by citing his own case of a double simultaneous infatuation. He hesitates which of the two to choose, chides Venus for torturing him with double love—for adding leaves to the trees, stars to the heavens, water to the ocean.