t 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