An academic courtship; letters of Alice Freeman and George Herbert Palmer, 1886-1887.

He wanted, if possible, to find out something more about this man Holbrook, who must surely have been known to some one at Lidford during his secret courtship of Marian Nowell.

Their excuse was the same as Adam's: "Woman, he steal; man, how can he help it?" Nocturnal courtship was in vogue:

That's all one, Sir, the old People have adjusted the matter, and they are the most proper for a Negotiation of that kind, which saves us the trouble of a tedious Courtship.

"Matrimony may follow, but such a preliminary courtship is by no means considered necessary."

" Nay, in some cases, even this unceremonious "courtship" was perpetrated by proxy!

"Generally an honorable courtship ends in a more or less speedy elopement and marriage, but there are men and women who prefer dalliance, and it is this class that furnishes the heroes and heroines of the Wa-oo-wa-an.

The idea on which I placed so much emphasis, that opportunity for prolonged courtship is essential to the growth of romantic love, was some years later set forth by Dr. Drummond in his Ascent of Man where he comments eloquently on the fact that "affection needs time to grow.

" While exogamy thwarts love by minimizing the chances of intimate acquaintance and genuine courtship, there is another form of sexual taboo which conversely and designedly frustrates the tendency of intimate acquaintance to ripen into passion and love.

It had been, as I surmised, a swift, romantic courtship, in which Farquharson, quite irreproachable in antecedents and manners, had played the part of an impetuous lover.

In this place it may be as well to reveal the end of this ill-fated and unsuitable courtship, which never had my sanction, nor even toleration.

He loved with the same radiant enthusiasm that he gave to his music, and while some of his flirtations were of the utmost frivolity, such as his hilarious courtship of his pretty cousin, the "Bäsle," he was capable of the completest altruism, and could turn aside from the aristocracy to lavish his idolatry upon the fifteen-year-old daughter of a poor music copyist, whose wife took in boarders.

To this time belongs a curious Conjectural Biography, a pretty idyl of an ideal courtship and marriage as his fancy now painted it for himself.

We are confirmed in this suspicion by noticing Dalton's ecstatic delight over the immoral courtship customs of the Bhúiyas, which he found "marvellously pretty and romantic" and describes as follows:

Some less melancholy face, some more intelligible courtship, triumphed over the questionable flattery of the poet's gratuitous worship; and the idol of Dante Alighieri became the wife of Messer Simone de' Bardi.

The Archfield family still took a house in the Close for the winter months, and there a very sober-minded and conventional courtship of Lucy took place by Sir Edmund Nutley, a worthy and well-to-do gentleman settled on the borders of Parkhurst Forest, in the Isle of Wight.

In this manner many days passed pleasantly on with these young people; and the good-natured Aliena, seeing it made Ganimed happy, let him have his own way, and was diverted at the mock courtship, and did not care to remind Ganimed that the lady Rosalind had not yet made herself known to the duke her father, whose place of resort in the forest they had learnt from Orlando.

We cannot frequent the theatre without being sickened by the repetition of some nauseous courtship and love-making, the particulars of which, even in real life, can be agreeable to none but the parties themselves.

Rather an odd courtship, Steve?"

A vivid description of the pantomimic courtship preceding an elopement has been given by Kubary (Globus, 1885).

Orlando had no great faith in the remedy, yet he agreed to come every day to Ganimed's cottage, and feign a playful courtship; and every day Orlando visited Ganimed and Aliena, and Orlando called the shepherd Ganimed his Rosalind, and every day talked over all the fine words and flattering compliments, which young men delight to use when they court their mistresses.

In this case, however, the young people had their troubles too, and their pretty courtship was soon interrupted by an unwelcome and unexpected visitor, who, as a rule, avoided that part, for the very reason that Colonel Clifford frequented it.

There is a difference also in the busy, promiscuous courtship of Beethoven, who dedicated thirty-nine compositions to thirty-six women, and that of Chopin, who, though he could conduct three flirtations of an evening, seems to have loved but thrice, and to have planned marriage but once.

But it was not about the prosperous but uninteresting courtship of two people with "idees" that I set out to tell in this chapter.

The separation of the sexes, by preventing all possibility of refined and legitimate courtship, favored illicit amours on one side, loveless marriages on the other, thus proving one of the most formidable obstacles to love.