MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD N1COLSON
FFRIDAY, Februa 13th, 1942, is scarcely an auspicious date ry for which to write an article, yet I am consoled by the thought that tomorrow will be the Feast of Saint Valentine. I have no idea why the alleged birthday of an obscure Bishop of Terni should have been chosen by our ancestors for the date upon which the young man's fancy was expected to turn to thoughts of love. It may be, of course, that, as with so many of our festivals, St. Valentine's Day was but a continuance of the Roman festival of Februata Juno, when ghosts were supposed to walk by night and when it was possible, by means of a few incantations, for the young men to be vouchsafed visions of their future brides. Chaucer, in the Parlement of Foules, contends that it is on the fourteenth of February that birds first choose their nesting-mates. "Ye know well," he makes Dame Nature exclaim : " Ye know well, how on St. Valentine's day By my statute and through my governaunce, Ye do chose your mates, and after flie away With hem as I pricke you with pleasaunce."
Believing in this delightful legend, young maidens, on the night of February 13th, would pin bay-leaves to each of the four corners of their pillows and would then swallow a hard-boiled egg complete with its shell. The dreams which this ceremony inevitably provoked brought visions of their future lovers. But by the beginning of the nineteenth century the old ceremony of drawing Valentines had sunk into disfavour. The lace-frilled missives and the gawky rhymes which still lingered in the writing-desks of our great-grandmothers were replaced, owing to the enterprise of the London merchants, by more substantial gifts of gloves and scent. The men found that the ceremony was becoming as onerous as the American system of " bunching belles," and the pretty superstition, having been brought up sharp and strong against the materialism of later civilisation, has died a silent little death. Yet we can still welcome St. Valentine's Day as the season when the snowdrops and the crocuses first push their tidy little noses through the mould, and I am quite convinced myself that it is on that day (or perhaps upon the previous evening) that the chaffinch chooses his mate.
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