the lover’s mind, and the more sensitive and imaginative and emotional he is the more certainly will such features and objects crystallize into erotic symbols.  “Devotion and love,” wrote Mary Wollstonecraft, “may be allowed to hallow the garments as well as the person, for the lover must want fancy who has not a sort of sacred respect for the glove or slipper of his mistress.  He would not confound them with vulgar things of the same kind.”  And nearly two centuries earlier Burton, who had gathered together so much of the ancient lore of love, clearly asserted the entirely normal character of erotic symbolism.  “Not one of a thousand falls in love,” he declares, “but there is some peculiar part or other which pleaseth most, and inflames him above the rest....  If he gets any remnant of hers, a busk-point, a feather of her fan, a shoe-tie, a lace, a ring, a bracelet of hair, he wears it for a favor on his arm, in his hat, finger, or next his heart; as Laodamia did by Protesilaus, when he went to war, sit at home with his picture before her:  a garter or a bracelet of hers is more precious than any Saint’s Relique, he lays it up in his casket (O blessed Relique) and every day will kiss it:  if in her presence his eye is never off her, and drink he will where she drank, if it be possible, in that very place,” etc.[9]

Burton’s accuracy in describing the ways of lovers in his century is shown by a passage in Hamilton’s Memoires de Gramont.  Miss Price, one of the beauties of Charles II’s court, and Dongan were tenderly attached to each other; when the latter died he left behind a casket full of all possible sorts of love-tokens pertaining to his mistress, including, among other things, “all kinds of hair.”  And as regards France, Burton’s contemporary, Howell, wrote in 1627 in his Familiar Letters concerning the repulse of the English at Rhe:  “A captain told me that when they were rifling the dead bodies of the French gentlemen after the first invasion they found that many of them had their mistresses’ favors tied about their genitories.”

Schurig (Spermatologia, p. 357) at the beginning of the eighteenth century knew a Belgian lady who, when her dearly loved husband died, secretly cut off his penis and treasured it as a sacred relic in a silver casket.  She eventually powdered it, he adds, and found it an efficacious medicine for herself and others.  An earlier example, of a lady at the French court who embalmed and perfumed the genital organs of her dead husband, always preserving them in a gold casket, is mentioned by Brantome.  Mantegazza knew a man who kept for many years on his desk the skull of his dead mistress, making it his dearest companion.  “Some,” he remarks, “have slept for months and years with a book, a garment, a trifle.  I once had a friend who would spend long hours of joy and emotion kissing a thread of silk which she had held between her fingers, now the only