While not a few of the commentators thus rejected or ridiculed my thesis, others hinted that I had been anticipated.  Several suggested that Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy had been my model.  As a matter of fact, although one of the critics referred to my book as “a marvel of epitomized research,” I must confess, to my shame, that I was not aware that Burton had devoted two hundred pages to what he calls Love-Melancholy, until I had finished the first sketch of my manuscript and commenced to rewrite it.  My experience thus furnished a striking verification of the witty epitaph which Burton wrote for himself and his book:  “Known to few, unknown to fewer still.”  However, after reading Burton, I was surprised that any reader of Burton should have found anything in common between his book and mine, for he treated love as an appetite, I as a sentiment; my subject was pure, supersensual affection, while his subject is frankly indicated in the following sentences: 

“I come at last to that heroical love, which is proper to men and women ... and deserves much rather to be called burning lust than by such an honorable title.”  “This burning lust ... begets rapes, incests, murders.”  “It rages with all sorts and conditions of men, yet is most evident among such as are young and lusty, in the flower of their years, nobly descended, high fed, such as live idly, at ease, and for that cause (which our divines call burning lust) this mad and beastly passion ... is named by our physicians heroical love, and a more honorable title put upon it, Amor nobilis, as Savonarola styles it, because noble men and women make a common practice of it, and are so ordinarily affected with it.”  “Carolus a Lorme ... makes a doubt whether this heroical love be a disease....  Tully ... defines it a furious disease of the mind; Plato madness itself.”

     “Gordonius calls this disease the proper passion of
     nobility.”

     “This heroical passion or rather brutish burning lust
     of which we treat.”

The only honorable love Burton knows is that between husband and wife, while of such a thing as the evolution of love he had, of course, not the remotest conception, as his book appeared in 1621, or two hundred and thirty-eight years before Darwin’s Origin of Species.

HEGEL ON GREEK LOVE

In a review of my book which appeared in the now defunct New York Star, the late George Parsons Lathrop wrote that the author

“says that romantic love is a modern sentiment, less than a thousand years old.  This idea, I rather think, he derived from Hegel, although he does not credit that philosopher with it.”

I read this criticism with mingled emotions.  If it was true that Hegel had anticipated me, my claims to priority of discovery would vanish, even though the idea had come to me spontaneously; but, on the