For Lovely Women

A large number of the world's eminent men have made fools of thernselves ior love of women. Holofernes lost his head - n tvvo senses - by accepttuR1 the caresses of Judith. Antooy was a lunatic to have sacrificed everything to his love of the charmin? Cleopatra. Paris, son of Priam, ought to have been put in a straightjacket for having tampercd with the matrimonial preserves of Menelans, the result of which poaching on his part eaused the spilling of oceans of human blood, as well as the destruction of ïroy. Petrarch spent his crazy life penning sonnets to the eyebrows of a portly married woman, the mother of a larg-e family, while he utterly neglected his legitímate wife and would not permit his daughter to live under his roof. Dante, in his maudlin love of lïeatrice says: ''So povverful was the spell of her presenoe that I had to avoid her. Vom thinking of this most gracious creatur I became so weak and lean that itwas irksome for my friends to look at me." Love found ready victims in the knights and troubadours of the middle ages. Ulrich von Lichtenstein, a mediieval Germán cavalier, loved a woman with all the intensity of a lunatic. He used to roam over hills and valleys in quest of other knights, wliom he challenged to duels if they dared to doubt that his Dulcinea was the fairest of the fair. On one occasion he amputated one of his fingers and presented it to his patroness as a proof of the torture ho could endure for her sweet sake. And meanwhile his wife pined alone in her chateau in the forest