i.

[380] From the thirteenth to the seventeenth centuries Ovid was, in
reality, the most popular and influential classic poet. His works played a
large part in moulding Renaissance literature, not least in England, where
Marlowe translated his _Amores_, and Shakespeare, during the early years
of his literary activity, was greatly indebted to him (see, e.g., Sidney
Lee, "Ovid and Shakespeare's Sonnets," _Quarterly Review_, Ap., 1909).

[381] This has already been discussed in Chapter II.

[382] By the age of twenty-five, as G. Hirth remarks (_Wege zur Heimat_,
p. 541), an energetic and sexually disposed man in a large city has, for
the most part, already had relations with some twenty-five women, perhaps
even as many as fifty, while a well-bred and cultivated woman at that age
is still only beginning to realize the slowly summating excitations of
sex.

[383] In his study of "Conjugal Aversion" (_Journal Nervous and Mental
Disease_, Sept., 1892) Smith Baker points out the value of adequate sexual
knowledge before marriage in lessening the risks of such aversion.

[384] "It may be said to the honor of men," Adler truly remarks (op. cit.,
p. 182), "that it is perhaps not often their conscious brutality that is
at fault in this matter, but merely lack of skill and lack of
understanding. The husband who is not specially endowed by nature and
experience for psychic intercourse with women, is not likely, through his
earlier intercourse with Venus vulgivaga, to bring into marriage any
useful knowledge, psychic or physical."

[385] "The first night," writes a correspondent concerning his marriage,
"she found the act very painful and was frightened and surprised at the
size of my penis, and at my suddenly getting on her. We had talked very
openly about sex things before marriage, and it never occurred to me that
she was ignorant of the details of the act. I imagined it would disgust
her to talk about these things; but I now see I should have explained
things to her. Before marrying I had come to the conclusion that the
respect owed to one's wife was incompatible with any talk that might seem
indecent, and also I had made a resolve not to subject her to what I
thought then were dirty tricks, even to be naked and to have her naked. In
fact, I was the victim of mock modesty; it was an artificial reaction from
the life I had been living before marriage. Now it seems to me to be
natural, if you love a woman, to do whatever occurs