There is, in fact, hardly a feature of Love which, in its exalted manifestations, does not occasionally suggest a madhouse. The extravagant Pride shown by a commonplace man in his more commonplace bride, is quite as ludicrous as a lunatic’s delusion that he is a millionaire or emperor of the five continents. The sham capture of a bride still practised among many nations when all parties are willing, illustrates a form of Coyness which would appear as pure lunacy to one unfamiliar with the origin of that custom. EROTOMANIA, OR REAL LOVE-SICKNESS Besides these general analogies there is a form of mental disease which is genuine love-sickness, the outcome of brain disease, and which often seems, for all the world, like a deliberate caricature of Coquetry. “It often happens,” says Dr. Hammond, “that the subjects of emotional monomania of the variety under consideration do not restrict their love to any one person. They adore the whole male sex, and will make advances to any man with whom they are brought into even the slightest association. If confined in an asylum they simper and clasp their hands, and roll their eyes to the attendants, especially the physicians, and even the male patients are not below their affections. There is very little constancy in their love. They change from one man to another with the utmost facility and upon the slightest pretext. ‘I am very much in love with Dr. ——,’ said a woman to me in an asylum that I was visiting, ‘but he was late yesterday in coming to the ward, and now I love you. You will come often to see me, won’t you?’ While she was speaking the superintendent entered the ward. ‘Oh, here comes my first and only love!’ she exclaimed. ’Why have you stayed away so long from your Eliza?‘” Professor von Krafft-Ebing, in his admirable _Lehrbuch der Psychiatrie_, thus characterises Erotomania in general: "The kernel of the whole matter is the delusion of being singled out and loved by a person of the other sex, who regularly belongs to a higher social sphere. And it deserves to be noted that the love felt by the patient towards this person is a romantic, ecstatic, but entirely ‘Platonic’ affection. In this respect these patients remind one of the knight-errants and minstrels of bygone times, whom Cervantes has so incisively lashed in his _Don Quixote_....