Margaret of Scotland, who was betrothed to Charles the Seventh’s son, the Dauphin Louis (afterwards Louis XI.), one day walked through a hall where Alain Chartier was sitting asleep in a chair. On perceiving the sleeping poet, she went up to him and kissed him on the lips. Many of her suite were astonished at this, “for nature had, so far as Chartier was concerned, suffered a beautiful and rich mind to take up its abode in an ugly body.” The princess replied that they were not to marvel at what she had done, for it was not the man she had kissed, but the mouth from which so many golden words had proceeded. Margaret’s kiss was therefore an expression of the respect she had for the poet, and the admiration and regard inspired by his poetical genius. A little further back in the Middle Ages we meet with another striking instance of a kiss as expressive of veneration; but this kiss is of a more humble nature. We are told that, when the Emperor Otto I. had taken leave of his pious mother in the church attached to a monastery, the latter followed him with her eyes as long as she could, and then returned to the church and kissed the place whereon his feet had stood. The kiss of veneration is of ancient origin; from the remotest times we find it applied to all that is holy, noble, and worshipful--to the gods, their statues, temples, and altars, as well as to kings and emperors; out of reverence, people even kissed the ground, and both sun and moon were greeted with kisses. In the first book of Kings God says to Elijah: “Yet I have left me seven thousand in Israel, all the knees which have not bowed unto Baal, and every mouth which hath not kissed him” (xix. 18). In the thirty-first chapter of Job, Job extols his own piety: “If I beheld the sun when it shined, or the moon walking in brightness; and my heart hath been secretly enticed, or my mouth hath kissed my hand” (26, 27). Here, undoubtedly, allusion is made to the kissing of hands whereby the heathen were wont to salute the heavenly bodies. When the prophet Hosea laments over the idolatry of the children of Israel, he says that they make molten images of calves and kiss them. Even in remote classical times a similar homage was paid to the gods; people kissed the hands, knees, and feet, even the mouths, of their idols. Cicero informs us, in one of his speeches against Verres, that the lips and beard of the famous statue of Hercules at Agrigentum were worn away by the kisses of devotees.