On this ancient festival, it was formerly the custom for men to make presents to the women. In Scotland these valentine gifts were reciprocal, as indeed they are still in some parts.
Hurdis calls this
The day Saint Valentine,
When maids are brisk, and at the break of day
Start up and turn their pillows, curious all
To know what happy swain the fates provide
A mate for life. Then follows thick discharge
Of true-love knots and sonnets nicely penned.
St. Valentine is the lover’s saint. Not that lovers have more superstition than other people, but their imaginings are more. As it is fabled that Orpheus “played so well, he moved old Nick;” so it is true that Love, “cruel tyrant,” moves the veriest brute. Its influence renders the coarsest nature somewhat interesting. A being of this kind, so possessed, is almost as agreeable as a parish cage with an owl inside; you hear its melancholy tee-whit tee-who, and wonder how it got there. Its place of settlement becomes a place of sentiment; nobody can liberate the starveling, and it will stay there. Its mural notes seem so many calls for pity, which are much abated on the recollection, that there are openings enough for its escape. The “tender passion” in the two mile an hour Jehu of an eight-horse waggon, puzzles him mightily. He “sighs and drives, sighs and drives, and drives and sighs again,” till the approach of this festival enables him to buy “a valentine,” with a “halter” and a “couple o’ hearts” transfixed by an arrow in the form of a weathercock, inscribed
“I’ll be yours, if you’ll be mine,
I am your pleasing Valentine.”
This he gets his name written under by the shopkeeper, and will be quite sure that it is his name, before he walks after his waggon, which he has left to go on, because neither that nor his passion can brook delay. After he is out of the town, he looks behind him, lest anybody should see, and for a mile or two on the road, ponders on the “two hearts made one,” as a most singular device, and with admired devotion. He then puts it in the trusty pocket under his frock, which holds the waggon bill, and flogs his horses to quicken their pace towards the inn, where “she,” who is “his heart’s delight,” has been lately promoted to the rank of under kitchen-maid, vice her who resigned, on being called “to the happy estate of matrimony” by a neighbouring carter. He gives her the mysterious paper in the yard, she receives it with a “what be this?” and with a smack on the lips, and a smack from the whip on the gown. The gods have made him poetical, and, from his recollection of a play he saw at the statute-fair, he tells her that “love, like a worm in the mud, has played upon his Lammas cheek” ever since last Lammas-tide, and she knows it has, and that she’s his valentine. With such persons and with nature, this is the season of breaking the ice.
St. Valentine, be it repeated, is the saint of all true lovers of every degree, and hence the letters missive to the fair, from wooers on his festival, bear his name. Brand thinks “one of the most elegant jeu-d’esprits on this occasion,” is one wherein an admirer reminds his mistress of the choice attributed by the legend to the choristers of the air on this day, and inquires of her—
Shall only you and I forbear
To meet and make a happy pair?
Shall we alone delay to live?
This day an age of bliss may give.
But, ah! when I the proffer make,
Still coyly you refuse to take;
My heart I dedicate in vain,
The too mean present you disdain.