“I see you laughing at my fairy fancies, and calling me a voluptuous Mahometan; but I am certain I would be a happy creature beyond anything we call bliss here below; nay, it would be a paradise congenial to you too. Don’t you see us, hand in hand, or rather, my arm about your lovely waist, making our remarks on Sirius, the nearest of the fixed stars; or, surveying a comet flaming innoxious by us, as we just now would mark the passing pomp of a travelling monarch; or, in a shady bower of Mercury or Venus, dedicating the hour to love, in mutual converse, relying honour, and revelling endearment, while the most exalted strains of poesy and harmony would be the ready, spontaneous language of our souls.” Thus we have in the madman’s Illusions an analogy with Love’s Hyperbolising tendency; in the Delirium of Persecution a suggestion of Jealousy; in the Desire for Solitude a reminder of Love’s Exclusiveness, and desire to be cast on a desert island. Gallantry, again, has in the past frequently assumed an extravagant form bordering on madness. Thus, with reference to a Greek girl to whom Byron made love in Athens, Moore says, “It was, if I recollect right, in making love to one of these girls that he had recourse to an act of courtship often practised in that country—namely, giving himself a wound across the breast with his dagger. The young Athenian, by his own account, looked on very coolly during the operation, considering it a fit tribute to her beauty, but in no wise moved to gratitude.” In Spain, toward the beginning of the last century, Gallantry appears to have assumed a form of mad extravagance. As Mme. d’Aunoy relates in her _Mémoires sur l’Espagne_, no man who accompanied a lady was so rude as to give her his hand or to take her arm under his. He only wrapped his cloak around his arm, and then allowed her to rest her arm on the elbow. Nor was even a lover permitted to kiss his love or caress her otherwise than by tenderly grasping her arm with his hands. Of mediæval lovers’ madness cases have been cited elsewhere, showing to what crazy excess the Knight-errants and Troubadours sometimes carried their gallant devotion. One more amusing illustration may here be added: the oft-cited cases of Peire Vidal, a Troubadour of the twelfth century, who, to please his beloved, whose name was Loba (wolf), had himself sewed up in a wolf’s hide and went about the mountains howling until his manœuvres were brought to a sad end by some shepherd dogs, who, having no sense of humour, gave him such a shaking that he was only too glad to resume his normal attitude.