GOOD BISHOP VALENTINE


The reader will remember how Lamb imagines him as a rubicund priest of
Hymen, and pictures him 'attended with thousands and ten thousands of
little loves, and the air is

"Brush'd with the hiss of rustling wings."

Singing Cupids are thy choristers and thy precentors; and instead of the
crozier, the mystical arrow is borne before thee.' Alas! who indeed would
have expected the bitter historical truth, and have dreamed that poor
Valentine, instead of being that rosy vision, was one of the Church's most
unhappy martyrs? Tradition has but two pieces of information about him:
that during the reign of Claudius II., probably in the year 270, he was
'first beaten with heavy clubs, and then beheaded'; and likewise that he
was a man of exceptional chastity of character--a fact that may be
considered no less paradoxical in regard to his genial reputation. He was
certainly the last man to have been the patron saint of young blood, and
if he has any cognisance of the frivolities done in his name, the
knowledge must be more painful to him than all the clubs of Claudius.
Unhappy saint! To have his good name murdered also! To be, through all
time, the high-priest of that very 'paganism' which he died to repudiate:
the one most potent survival throughout Christian times of the joyous old
order he would fain supplant! Could anything be more characteristic of the
whimsical humour of Time, which loves nothing better than to make a
laughing-stock of human symbolism? The savage putting a stray dress-coat