d, and could have entangled no
heart in soul-enwoven labyrinths." Having painted this
life-like picture of the Greek female mind, Shelley goes on
to say perversely:

"Let it not be imagined that because the Greeks were
deprived of its legitimate object, that they were
incapable of sentimental love, and that this passion is
the mere child of chivalry and the literature of modern
times."

He tries to justify this assertion by adding that

"Man is in his wildest state a social being: a certain
degree of civilization and refinement ever produces the want
of sympathies still more intimate and complete; and the
gratification of the senses is no longer all that is sought
in sexual connection. It soon becomes a very small part of
that profound and complicated sentiment, which we call love,
which is rather the universal thirst for a communion not
merely of the senses, but of our whole nature, intellectual,
imaginative, and sensitive."

Here Shelley contradicts himself flatly by saying, in two consecutive
sentences, that Greek women were "certainly devoid of the moral and
intellectual loveliness" which inspires sentimental love, but that the
men nevertheless could feel such love. His mind was evidently hazy on
the subject, and that is probably the reason why his essay remained a
fragment.

MACAULAY, BULWER-LYTTON, GAUTIER

Macaulay, with deeper insight than Shelley showed, realized that the
passion of love may undergo changes. In his essay on Petrarch he notes
that in the days of that poet love had become a new passion, and he
clearly realizes the obstacles to love presented by Greek
institutions. Of the two classes of women in Greece, the respectable
and the hetairai, he says:

"The matrons and their daughters, confined in the
harem--insipid, uneducated, ignorant of all but the
mechanical arts, scarcely seen till they were married--could
rarely excite interest; while their brilliant rivals, half
graces, half harpies, elegant and refined, but fickle and
rapacious, could never inspire respect."

Lord Lytton wrote an essay on "The Influence of Love upon Literature
and Real Life," in which he stated that

"with Euripides commences the important distinction in the
analysis of which all the most refined and intellectual of
modern erotic literature consists, viz., the distinction
betwee