There are two ways of dealing with the heart of a woman. You may have confidence in it, believe in it, regard it as a real element of strength and happiness, uplift and develop it, touching it then to fine issues in love, religion, philosophy. These are the lines on which the modern world proceeds. Or you may treat it as a frail organ of the body, unruly, incapable of good; you may bind it down, early and with due care, with all sorts of reasonable chains, the chief of which, marriage, will keep it fast prisoned, and reduce it to nothingness and oblivion. This, of course, was the system of former days. Singularly enough, these two systems, contrary as they are, spring from precisely the same practical starting-point, which indeed remains the sole point of contact between them: the principle, namely, that marriage and love are distinct, and must neither be confused nor blended. To Battista Spagnuoli of Mantua,[12] poet and monk, in the solitude of his cloister, marriage shone with a rosy light. Cornelius Agrippa,[13] with his utilitarian and paradoxical mind, regarded it as a compulsory conscription of the German type, with no possible exemptions, or almost none, and fancied that if men would but go in quest of a pretty woman instead of being so much absorbed with the proprieties and the main chance, the result would prove far more satisfactory. With the exception of these two, and a few more or less ingenuous or eccentric people like them, no one believed in the utility or the possibility of love in marriage. Caviceo’s romance _Il Peregrino_ was considered sheer perversity, for after innumerable intrigues and adventures it ends—how? With wedding bells! So that, according to Caviceo, marriage was to turn out a romance of cloak and sword![14]