SOME OLD VALENTINES.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXVIII, Issue 2746, 26 February 1910, Page 4 (Supplement)

SOME OLD VALENTINES.

(“The Queen.”)

The girl of to-day enjoys many pleasures and privileges' that former generations of women sighed for in vain, or else never dreamed of aspiring to at all. But she is denied at least one delight which her mother and grandmother could recldii upon with certainty. She has her club and .her latch-key, and she will probably have a vote, before long, but of valentines she knows relativelv nothing. Not for her the delicious thrills and enchanting mysteries that glorified tho fourteenth' of February for every damsel of every degree when the world "was younger and less matter-of-fact than it is now.

Among the most carefully guarded treasures in tho British Museum are. some vhlentines in verse nearly 600 years old. They were written in tho Tower of London by Charles, Duke of Orleans, who was taken prisoner at tho battle of Agincourt, in 1415. Chaucer, Spencer, and rare Old Herrick all sing of the pranks played by Cupid at “Ye feaste of Synte Valentine,” when (to quote the father of English poetry) : Men according to usance of this

region Do chose, theyr choyse with grete

affecioun. It seems to have been a very ancient custom, and one that continued to tho end of St. Valentine’s reign, for a woman to regard tho first man she saw on February 14 as her Valentine. Shakespeare, for instance, represents Ophelia as saying:

Good morrow, ’tis St. Valentine’s Day, All in the morning botime, And I a maid at your window,

To be your Valentino. Another custom was for an equal number of men and women to meet together on St. Valentino’s Eve and hold a kind of a lover’s lottery: Their names, real or assumed, having been written on separate pieces of. paper, were drawn for, the maids, of course, drawing the bachelor’s names, and vice versa. This practice is thus referred to in Poor Robin’s Almanac for 1676. Now Andrew, Anthony, and "William For Valentines .drew Prue, Kate, Jillian.

It was an unwritten law that each favored swain should give a present to the Valentine so conferred upon him by fate. Thus the unforgettable Pcpys, in his ever-entertaining diary, relates how “Miss Frances Stuart (whose effigy as Britannia still adorns our copper coinage), being this year Valentine to the Duke of York, tne Duke gave her a jewel -worth £800.” This popular court beauty found another generous valentine the following yoar (1667) in Lord Mandeville, who presented her with a ring worth £3OO. ■ With the beginning of the nineteenth century began.the vulgarisation of the Valentine, for it was then that Cupid’s fourteenth of February messages took printed form and became articles of commerce. One comes across specimens of these early publications among a. grandmother’s or a greatgrandmother’s faded treasures, and marvels that offerings so crude, both as regards letterpress and pictoral matter, could have been prized so highly and preserved so carefully. Perhaps their expectations atoned for their lack of artistic quality. There is nothing, for 1 instance, ambiguous about the following:—

My own dear love, Oh, name the.(lay Tihe happy day that makes thee mine/ And from thine arms I’ll never .stray, But live and die thy Valentine. Accompanying this verse is the picture of a- thin young man; with a melancholy countenance, red trousers, yol]ow waistcoat most elaborately embroidered, and bright blue coat. He is in the act of despatching a dove, having a letter (presumably the appeal quoted above) in' its beak. A church spire towers suggestively in the background. The valentine makers of tihe early and mid-Victorian periods had a softspot in their 'hearts for ladies who might be inclined to avail themselves of the opportunity offorded by Leap Year, and every February containing twenty-nine days eaw the publication of Valentines especially designed to meet the case of any damsel 1 with a mind to propose. • ■ . ... . . What kind of a s wain, one would like to know, could be coldly indifferent to a young lady in a triple-flounced mauve gmvn, carrying a tiny blue parasol and caressing a pet lamb, who put her case thus: —

Vanquished by the little god, I at your feet Lay constant heart with tend’rest love replete. How ‘happy I, (how doubly blessed, To be of thee and love possessed!.

Loss languishing, but not less lurid, is a damsel in a long-waisted muslin dress, distended by an enormous crinoline, who points to a vivid heart pierced with an arrow, while she makes the following declaration: —

Dear youth,-here is a little heart, Like what a. heart should be; A heart of truth, a heart of love, That warmly beats for thee. Then come, accept this little heart, A heart both good and true, And when ’tis thine, dear Valentine, I’ll gladly wed with you. After the end of the fifties designers developed more variety of idea, and the postman’s Valentine Day_ burden became proportionately heavier. The records of St. Martin’s-le-Grand show that 1,634,000 valentines passed through the post on February 14, 1882, bo St. Valentine was still king of young hearts and hopes so lately as a quarter of a century ago. What can have happened in the interval to drive him. so completely from the throne which had been his for a thousand vears? Nobody seems to know. It hardly seems possible that nobody cares.