Hero’s Letter to Leander in the _Heroides_ contains some pretty touches. Leander has informed his love that when the storm prevents him from swimming over to her, his mind yet hastens to meet her. But Hero is in great trouble at his prolonged absence, and her deepest anguish is Jealousy of a possible rival: in the absence of real grounds of apprehension, her imagination invents them, as in a modern lover’s mind. She suspects that his passion has lost the ardour which sustained him in his difficult feat; and, too weak to quite swim over to him and back again, and anxious to save him the double journey, she suggests that they should meet in the middle of the sea, exchange a kiss, and each return to the shore whence they came. Is there anything more exquisitely romantic or pathetic in all modern Love-poetry—in Shakspere, Heine, Burns, or Byron? BIRTH OF GALLANTRY Becker says of the Greeks that “The men were very careful as to their behaviour in the presence of women, but they were _quite strangers to those minute attentions which constitute the gallantry of the moderns_.” This holds true apparently of all other nations of antiquity; and to a student of the history of Love it is therefore of exceeding interest to find in Ovid’s poetry the first evidences of the existence of Gallantry—a disposition on the part of the men to sacrifice their own comfort to the pleasures and whims of women. Mr. G. A. Simcox was the first writer, so far as I know, who pointed out Ovid’s priority in this matter (in his _History of Latin Literature_). In Ovid, he says, “The whole description of gallantry implies that the idea was a novelty, and that the lover would require a great deal of encouragement to enable him to make the sacrifice of paying such attentions as could be commanded from a servant. This throws a new light on the habit the Augustan poets have of calling their mistress _domina_, which is more noteworthy, for they call no man _dominus_. One does not trace the idea at all in Latin comedy, where the heroines are for the most part _only too thankful to be caressed and protected_. One finds the word in Lucilius, but even in Catullus it is hardly established.”