Nor is the cause far to seek. The Roman patrician was sexually incompetent from indulgence and overstimulation. He was a supersaturated libertine, in whom even the erotic scenes amid which he lived, and the luscious wines of Syria and the Grecian Isles, could hardly awaken a sexual impulse. He numbered as his slaves the toilers, artisans, scholars and warriors of the world. The amber gatherers of the Baltic, the nutmeg growers of Equatorial Africa, the mulberry spinners of China, the tin miners of Cornwall, the black hunters of the Soudan, the steel workers of Spain and Damascus, all carried their daughters, as well as the choicest product of their art and toil, to grace the banquets and festivals which equally slavish poets stood ready to celebrate in eong.*

* Sine Cerere el Baccho friget Venus—love grows cool without bread and wine— is an elegant and truthful saying of the poet. This kind of devil, as I think Ambrose piously remarks, is not cast out except by fasting and prayer. As hunger is the friend of virginity, so it is the enemy of lasciviousness, but "fulness overthrows chastity and fostereth all manner of provocations." And Vives makes an equally acute observation: "A lover that hath lost himself through impotency must be called home, as a traveller, by music, feasting, good wine and, if need be, drunkenness itself," {De Anima, lib. 3.) He might have added, variety, for even the homosexualist seeks a change. Socrates did not scruple to play false to the fair Alcibiades when be got a chance, and Petrarch became bo used to the charms of Laura, in singing her praises, that when the pope offered her to him he refused her. When Fan was asked by his father, Mercury, whether he were married, the young scamp replied: "No, no, father, I am a lover yet, one woman would never content me"—Nequáquam paler, amaler enim sum, etc. {Juvenal); and the "for better for worse, sickness-or-health, richer-or-poorer " doctrine of marriage would have been, as the same iititlmr remarks, :i duru» ktim to the sensual Roman. According to all this, lust ought to be called the Millionaire's Disease.

'"The Roman manners, in polishing, weakened them in everything; and instead of that masculine vigor which formerly appeared in all their pleasures, it was observed that they more and more considered their ease and convenience." (Gibbon, iv, 40.)