Then there was the precious kiss which Margarida gave her troubadour lover, when “she stretched out her arms and sweetly embraced him in the love-chamber,” which coming to the knowledge of her husband (Raimon de Roussillon), he gave her the troubadour’s heart to eat, disguised as a savory morsel. And there was Francesca’s kiss, so sweet and yet so sad, so guilty and so pure, when trembling Paolo kissed her and they read no more that day. And there are the kisses that Antony wasted a world so gladly for, “on a brow of Egypt,”—or rather, we suspect, on lips of Egypt,—and Othello’s farewell kisses, which, tender and heart-broken as they were, had no magic in them to redeem poor Desdemona’s life. Who does not remember that grand kiss of Coriolanus— “Long as my exile, sweet as my revenge!”— which exhibits such a world of character and passion? and Romeo’s dying kiss in the vault of the Capulets? and the famous kiss of Bassanio? Then there is the kiss Queen Margaret gave Alain Chartier, the memory of which is still fresh after three centuries have passed away. He was a poet, and the ugliest man in France. The last of his race died in Paris in November, 1863. The queen with her maids found him asleep one day, and bent over him and kissed his dreaming lips. “I kiss not the man,” she said; “I kiss the soul that sings.” Another poet, the countryman of Chartier, had, two centuries later, the honor of being publicly kissed in the stage-box by the young and lovely Countess de Villars; but in Voltaire’s case the lady gave the osculatory salute not of her own free will, but in obedience to the commands of the _claqueurs_ in the pit, mad with enthusiasm for the poet’s “Merope.” Then there is the kiss which the fresh cheek of young John Milton received, during his college days, from the lips of the high-born Italian beauty, and the kisses of Laurence Sterne, concerning which he says, “For my own part, I would rather kiss the lips I love than dance with all the graces of Greece, after bathing themselves in the springs of Parnassus. Flesh and blood for me, with an angel in the inside.” Here is a white rose that has not faded through three hundred years,—the white rose sent by a Yorkist lover to his Lancaster inamorata:[8] “If this fair rose offend thy sight, Placed in thy bosom bare, ’Twill blush to find itself less white, And turn Lancastrian there. “But if thy ruby lips it spy, As kiss it thou mayst deign, With envy pale ’twill lose its dye, And Yorkist turn again.”