“Si nunquam Danaen habuisset ahenea turris,
               Non esses, Danae, de Jove facta parens;”

     ["If a brazen tower had not held Danae, you would not, Danae, have
     been made a mother by Jove.”—­Ovid, Amoy., ii. 19, 27.]

and that there is nothing naturally so contrary to our taste as satiety which proceeds from facility; nor anything that so much whets it as rarity and difficulty: 

     “Omnium rerum voluptas ipso, quo debet fugare, periculo crescit.”

     ["The pleasure of all things increases by the same danger that
     should deter it.”—­Seneca, De Benef., vii. 9.]

          “Galla, nega; satiatur amor, nisi gaudia torquent.”

     ["Galla, refuse me; love is glutted with joys that are not attended
     with trouble.”—­Martial, iv. 37.]

To keep love in breath, Lycurgus made a decree that the married people of Lacedaemon should never enjoy one another but by stealth; and that it should be as great a shame to take them in bed together as committing with others.  The difficulty of assignations, the danger of surprise, the shame of the morning,

                    “Et languor, et silentium,
                    Et latere petitus imo Spiritus:” 

     ["And languor, and silence, and sighs, coming from the innermost
     heart.”—­Hor., Epod., xi. 9.]

these are what give the piquancy to the sauce.  How many very wantonly pleasant sports spring from the most decent and modest language of the works on love?  Pleasure itself seeks to be heightened with pain; it is much sweeter when it smarts and has the skin rippled.  The courtesan Flora said she never lay with Pompey but that she made him wear the prints of her teeth.—­[Plutarch, Life of Pompey, c. i.]

          “Quod petiere, premunt arcte, faciuntque dolorem
          Corporis, et dentes inlidunt saepe labellis . . . 
          Et stimuli subsunt, qui instigant laedere ad ipsum,
          Quodcunque est, rabies unde illae germina surgunt.”

     ["What they have sought they dress closely, and cause pain; on the
     lips fix the teeth, and every kiss indents:  urged by latent stimulus
     the part to wound”—­Lucretius, i. 4.]

And so it is in everything:  difficulty gives all things their estimation; the people of the march of Ancona more readily make their vows to St. James, and those of Galicia to Our Lady of Loreto; they make wonderful to-do at Liege about the baths of Lucca, and in Tuscany about those of Aspa:  there are few Romans seen in the fencing school of Rome, which is full of French.  That great Cato also, as much as us, nauseated his wife whilst she was his, and longed for her when in the possession of another.  I was fain to turn out into the paddock an old horse, as he was not to be governed when he smelt a mare:  the facility presently sated him as towards his own, but towards strange mares, and the first that passed by the pale of his pasture, he would again fall to his importunate neighings and his furious heats as before.  Our appetite contemns and passes by what it has in possession, to run after that it has not: