A similarity nearly equal may be observed with regard to the rites of lovers on St. Valentine's Day. The tradition, that birds choosing their mates on this day, occasioned the custom of drawing valentines, has been the opinion of our poets from Chaucer to the present hour. Shakspeare alludes to it in the following passage:
"Good-morrow friends. Saint Valentine is past;
Begin these wood-birds but to couple now?"[324:A]
The ceremony of this day, however, has been attributed to various sources beside the rural tradition just mentioned. The legend itself of St. Valentine, a presbyter of the church, who was beheaded under the Emperor Claudius, we are assured by Mr. Brand, contains nothing which could give rise to the custom; but it has been supposed by some to have originated from an observance peculiar to carnival time, which occurred about this very period. It was usual, on this occasion, for vast numbers of knights to visit the different courts of Europe, where they entertained the ladies with pageantry and tournaments. Each lady, at these magnificent feasts, selected a knight, who engaged to serve her for a whole year, and to perform whatever she chose to command. One of the never-failing consequences of this engagement, was an injunction to employ his muse in the celebration of his mistress.
Menage, in his Etymological Dictionary, has accounted for the term Valentine, by stating that Madame Royale, daughter of Henry the Fourth of France, having built a palace near Turin, which, in
honour of the Saint, then in high esteem, she called the Valentine, at the first entertainment which she gave in it, was pleased to order that the ladies should receive their lovers for the year by lots, reserving to herself the privilege of being independent of chance, and of choosing her own partner. At the various balls which this gallant princess gave, during the year, it was directed that each lady should receive a nosegay from her lover, and that, at every tournament, the knight's trappings for his horse should be furnished by his allotted mistress, with this proviso, that the prize obtained should be hers. This custom, says Menage, occasioned the parties to be called Valentines.
Mr. Brand, in his observations on Bourne's Antiquities, thinks, that the usages of this day are the remains of an antient superstition in the Church of Rome, of choosing patrons for the year ensuing, at this season; "and that, because ghosts were thought to walk on the night of this day, or about this time[325:A];" but Mr. Douce, with more probability, considers them as a relic of paganism. "It was the practice in ancient Rome," he observes, "during a great part of the month of February, to celebrate the Lupercalia, which were feasts in honour of Pan and Juno, whence the latter deity was named februata, februalis, and februlla. On this occasion, amidst a variety of ceremonies, the names of young women were put into a box, from which they were drawn by the men as chance directed. The pastors of the early Christian church, who by every possible means endeavoured to eradicate the vestiges of Pagan superstitions, and chiefly by some commutation of their forms, substituted, in the present instance, the names of particular saints instead of those of the women: and as the festival of the Lupercalia had commenced about the middle of February, they appear to have chosen Saint Valentine's day for celebrating the new feast, because it occurred nearly at the same time. This is, in part, the opinion of a learned and rational compiler of the lives of the saints, the Reverend Alban Butler. It should
seem, however, that it was utterly impossible to extirpate altogether any ceremony to which the common people had been much accustomed; a fact which it were easy to prove in tracing the origin of various other popular superstitions: and accordingly the outline of the ancient ceremonies was preserved, but modified by some adaptation to the Christian system. It is reasonable to suppose that the above practice of choosing mates would gradually become reciprocal in the sexes; and that all persons so chosen would be called Valentines, from the day on which the ceremony took place."[326:A]
The modes of ascertaining the Valentine for the ensuing year, were nearly the same in Shakspeare's age as at the present period; they consisted either in drawing lots on Valentine-eve, or in considering the first person whom you met early on the following morning, as the destined object. In the former case the names of a certain number of one sex, were, by an equal number of the other, put into a vase; and then every one drew a name; which for the time was termed their Valentine, and was considered as predictive of their future fortune in the nuptial state; in the second there was usually some little contrivance adopted, in order that the favoured object, when such existed, might be the first seen. To this custom Shakspeare refers, when he represents Ophelia, in her distraction, singing,
"Good morrow, 'tis Saint Valentine's day,