Then he turned to his laurels:  but, behold, they were all withered.

So, after a while, he donned hat and coat, and went forth to seek a flatterer as a pick-me-up.

GOOD BISHOP VALENTINE

The reader will remember how Lamb imagines him as a rubicund priest of Hymen, and pictures him ’attended with thousands and ten thousands of little loves, and the air is

    “Brush’d with the hiss of rustling wings.”

Singing Cupids are thy choristers and thy precentors; and instead of the crozier, the mystical arrow is borne before thee.’  Alas! who indeed would have expected the bitter historical truth, and have dreamed that poor Valentine, instead of being that rosy vision, was one of the Church’s most unhappy martyrs?  Tradition has but two pieces of information about him:  that during the reign of Claudius II., probably in the year 270, he was ‘first beaten with heavy clubs, and then beheaded’; and likewise that he was a man of exceptional chastity of character—­a fact that may be considered no less paradoxical in regard to his genial reputation.  He was certainly the last man to have been the patron saint of young blood, and if he has any cognisance of the frivolities done in his name, the knowledge must be more painful to him than all the clubs of Claudius.  Unhappy saint!  To have his good name murdered also!  To be, through all time, the high-priest of that very ‘paganism’ which he died to repudiate:  the one most potent survival throughout Christian times of the joyous old order he would fain supplant!  Could anything be more characteristic of the whimsical humour of Time, which loves nothing better than to make a laughing-stock of human symbolism?  The savage putting a stray dress-coat to solemn sacerdotal usage, or taking some blackguard of a Mulvaney for a very god, is not more absurd than mankind thus ignorantly bringing to this poor martyr throughout the years the very last offering he can have desired.  Surely it must have filled his shade with a strange bewilderment to have watched us year by year bringing him garlands and the sweet incense of young love, to have seen this gay company approach his shrine with laughter and roses, a very bacchanal, where he had looked for sympathetic sackcloth and ashes—­surely it must have all seemed a silly sacrilegious jest.  However, he is long since slandered beyond all hope of restitution.  So long as the spring moves in the blood, lovers will doubtless continue to take his name in vain, and feign his saintly sanction for their charming indiscretions.  Indeed, he is fabled by the poets to be responsible for the billing and cooing of the whole creation.  Everybody knows that the birds, too, pair on St. Valentine’s Day.  We have many a poet’s word for it.  Donne’s charming lines, for instance—­