these maxims the most significant, and some of the most
remarkable, are the following:

The plea of wedlock is not a sufficient excuse from love.

None can be bound by a double love.

It is undoubted that love is always diminishing or increasing.

A two years' widowhood is enjoined for a deceased lover.

It is shameful to love those with whom marriage would be shameful.

A true lover does not desire the embrace of any one save his
companion in love.

Love rarely endures when made public.

Easy acceptance renders love contemptible; a slow acceptance causes
it to be held dear.

A man full of love is ever full of fear.

Love can deny nothing to a lover.

There is nothing to prevent one woman from being loved by two men,
nor one man by two women.

In the last quoted of these remarkable laws (which were the work of
women and of a few men who wished to please women), it will be observed
that no authority or countenance is given to the loving of two women by
one man. Our author regards the effect of these courts and their code
as on the whole beneficial. His judgment may be sound, monstrous as the
code seems to us, recognizing and even sanctioning as it did relations
of the sexes not formed according to civil laws; for, as he says, "it
refined the inevitable evil, substituted an easy for an almost
impracticable moral code, and being compelled to draw a new line
between venial offences and coarse licentiousness, exacted a rigid
obedience to those laws." There is also some force in his plea that the
courts of love "rescued woman from what would have become a condition
of intolerable degradation, elevated affection rather than passion into
the place of honor, and encouraged devotion in the stronger sex, grace
and propriety in the weaker." It is undoubtedly true that when society
became more rigid in sexual morality, and the mediaeval code of love
disappeared, there remained the tenderness and courtesy for the fairer
and weaker sex which that code had done so much to develop.

Mr. Van Laun's first volume brings us down only to the Renaissance. But
at that period the characteristic trait of French literature developed
itself strongly. That trait is satire; not the bloody scourge of
Juvenal, but a light, caustic, reserved, and almost pleasant although
malicious satire--malicious in the French sense of _malice_, which is
not so strong a word as its English counte