[375] Quaestionum Convivalium, lib. iii, quaestio 6.

[376] E.D.  Cope, “The Marriage Problem,” Open Court, Nov. 1888.

[377] Columbus meeting of the American Medical Association, 1900.

[378] Ellen Key, Ueber Liebe und Ehe, p. 24.

[379] In an admirable article on Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde (Mutterschutz, 1906, Heft 5), Heinrich Meyer-Benfey, in pointing out that the Catholic sacramental conception of marriage licensed love, but failed to elevate it, regards Lucinde, with all its defects, as the first expression of the unity of the senses and the soul, and, as such, the basis of the new ethics of love.  It must, however, be said that four hundred years earlier Pontano had expressed this same erotic unity far more robustly and wholesomely than Schlegel, though the Latin verse in which he wrote, fresh and vital as it is, remained without influence.  Pontano’s Carmina, including the “De Amore Conjugali,” have at length been reprinted in a scholarly edition by Soldati.

[380] From the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries Ovid was, in reality, the most popular and influential classic poet.  His works played a large part in moulding Renaissance literature, not least in England, where Marlowe translated his Amores, and Shakespeare, during the early years of his literary activity, was greatly indebted to him (see, e.g., Sidney Lee, “Ovid and Shakespeare’s Sonnets,” Quarterly Review, Ap., 1909).

[381] This has already been discussed in Chapter II.

[382] By the age of twenty-five, as G. Hirth remarks (Wege zur Heimat, p. 541), an energetic and sexually disposed man in a large city has, for the most part, already had relations with some twenty-five women, perhaps even as many as fifty, while a well-bred and cultivated woman at that age is still only beginning to realize the slowly summating excitations of sex.

[383] In his study of “Conjugal Aversion” (Journal Nervous and Mental Disease, Sept., 1892) Smith Baker points out the value of adequate sexual knowledge before marriage in lessening the risks of such aversion.

[384] “It may be said to the honor of men,” Adler truly remarks (op. cit., p. 182), “that it is perhaps not often their conscious brutality that is at fault in this matter, but merely lack of skill and lack of understanding.  The husband who is not specially endowed by nature and experience for psychic intercourse with women, is not likely, through his earlier intercourse with Venus vulgivaga, to bring into marriage any useful knowledge, psychic or physical.”