taste as satiety
which proceeds from facility; nor anything that so much whets it as
rarity and difficulty:

"Omnium rerum voluptas ipso, quo debet fugare, periculo crescit."

["The pleasure of all things increases by the same danger that
should deter it."--Seneca, De Benef., vii. 9.]

"Galla, nega; satiatur amor, nisi gaudia torquent."

["Galla, refuse me; love is glutted with joys that are not attended
with trouble."--Martial, iv. 37.]

To keep love in breath, Lycurgus made a decree that the married people of
Lacedaemon should never enjoy one another but by stealth; and that it
should be as great a shame to take them in bed together as committing
with others. The difficulty of assignations, the danger of surprise, the
shame of the morning,

"Et languor, et silentium,
Et latere petitus imo Spiritus:"

["And languor, and silence, and sighs, coming from the innermost
heart."--Hor., Epod., xi. 9.]

these are what give the piquancy to the sauce. How many very wantonly
pleasant sports spring from the most decent and modest language of the
works on love? Pleasure itself seeks to be heightened with pain; it is
much sweeter when it smarts and has the skin rippled. The courtesan
Flora said she never lay with Pompey but that she made him wear the
prints of her teeth.--[Plutarch, Life of Pompey, c. i.]

"Quod petiere, premunt arcte, faciuntque dolorem
Corporis, et dentes inlidunt saepe labellis . . .
Et stimuli subsunt, qui instigant laedere ad ipsum,
Quodcunque est, rabies unde illae germina surgunt."

["What they have sought they dress closely, and cause pain; on the
lips fix the teeth, and every kiss indents: urged by latent stimulus
the part to wound"--Lucretius, i. 4.]

And so it is in everything: difficulty gives all things their estimation;
the people of the march of Ancona more readily make their vows to St.
James, and those of Galicia to Our Lady of Loreto; they make wonderful
to-do at Liege about the baths of Lucca, and in Tuscany about those of
Aspa: there are few Romans seen in the fencing school of Rome, which is
full of French. That great Cato also, as much as us, nauseated his wife
whilst she was his, and longed for her when in the possession of another.
I was fain to turn out into the paddock an old horse, as he was not to be
governed when he smelt a mare: