Bathus, in the Tenth Idyllium of Theocritus, exclaims:—
“Charming Bombyce, you my numbers greet,
How lovely, fair, and beautiful your feet!”
While Paris in making choice of the many beautiful virgins brought before him, pays particular attention to their pedal attractions:—
“Their gait he marked as gracefully they moved,
And round their feet his eye sagacious roved.”
Ben Jonson describes a lover whose affection for his mistress was so great that he—
——“would adore the shoe,
And slipper was left off, and kiss it too.”
and again—
“And where she went the flowers took thickest root,
As she had sowed them with her odorous foot.”
Butler, too, has the same springing up of flowers in his “Hudibras”:—
“Where’er you tread, your foot shall set
The primrose and the violet.”