ST. VALENTINE'S DAY. "This month bright Phoebus enters Pisces, POOR ROBIN'S ALMANACK, 1676. PRAED. MANY and varied have been the conjectures as to the origin of the custom of choosing valentines on St. Valentine's Day. It has been supposed by some to have originated on the strength of a popular tradition, that on this day "Birds of kind Their mates with mutual chirpings find," a circumstance that is frequently alluded to by the poets, and particularly by Chaucer: "Nature, the vicare of the Almighty Lord, That hole, colde, hevie, light, moist, and drie, Ye doe chuse your makes (mates), and after flie away With hem as I picke you with pleasaunce." But this appears to be nothing more than a poetical idea, borrowed, in all probability, from the custom itself. Monsieur Menage, in his Dictionnaire Etymologique, has accounted for the term "valentine," by stating that Madame Royal, daughter of Henri IV, having built a palace near Turin, which, on account of the great veneration in which the saint was held at that time, she called The Valentine. At the first entertainment which she gave there, she was pleased to order that the ladies should receive their lovers for the year by lots, reserving for herself the privilege of being independent of chance, and of choosing her own partner. At various balls which this gallant princess gave during the year, it was directed that each lady should receive a bouquet from her lover, and that at every tournament the knight's trappings for his horse should be furnished by his allotted ladie, with this proviso, that the prize obtained should be hers. This custom, adds Menage, occasioned the parties to be called valentines; but the practice of choosing valentines is of much earlier date, and doubtless originated with the celebration of the ancient Roman festivals, which were feasts in honor of Pan and Juno, whence the latter deity was named Februata. One of the ceremonies of that feast was the placing the names of certain women in a box from which they were drawn by the men as chance directed. The owner of the name drawn was expected to devote herself to the drawer, and he, on his part, was bound to be her devoted slave for the time being. The Fathers of the Church deemed these feasts and ceremonies pagan mummeries, and we read in that book, so dear to Catholics, The Lives of the Saints, "that in order to abolish the heathen, lewd, superstitious custom of boys drawing the names of girls, in honor of the goddess Februata Juno, several zealous pastors substituted the names of saints in billets given on that day," and that St. Francis de Sales "severely forbade the custom of giving boys in writing the names of girls to be admired and attended on by them; and to abolish it, he changed it into giving billets with the names of certain saints for them to honor and imitate in a particular manner." The saints thus drawn were considered their especial patrons for the ensuing year, and as the drawing took place on the Feast of St. Valentine, the patrons thus drawn were called valentines. The innovation, we are told, was not welcomed by the young men of Rome; they still cling to the names of the young women in preference (for the occasion) to those of the saints; and the honor they paid to the saints was to call the owners of the names drawn from the box their "valentines." Thus then we have the origin of the custom of choosing valentines on St. Valentine's Day. From Rome it spread to England, and we find that as early as 1420, the custom of choosing valentines was a sport practiced in the houses of the gentry of England. "Seynte Valentine, of custom yeere by yeere (LYDGATE'S Poem of Queen Catharine.) When Ash Wednesday happened to fall on the Feast of St. Valentine (as is the case this year) the "knyghtes and theyr ladyes fayre assembled in the afternoon, the morning being necessarily occupied in attending at the Holy Sacrifice of the mass and other pious practices, as appears by the quaint song quoted by Donne in his Illustrations of Shakspeare, vol. ii, 252-8. On St. Valentine's Day, 1667, Pepys says: "This morning came up to my wife's bedside (I being up dressing myself) little Will Mercer to be her valentine, and brought her name written upon blue paper, in gold letters, done by himself, very pretty, and we were both well pleased with it. But I am also this year my wife's valentine, and it will cost me £5; but that I must have laid out if we had not been valentines." On the 16th of February he adds: “I find that Mrs. Pierce's little girl is my valentine, she having drawn me, which I am not sorry for, it easing me of something more that I must have given to others; but here I do first observe the fashion of drawing of mottos as well as names; so that Pierce, who drew my wife, did also draw a motto, and this girl drew another for me. What mine was I forget; but my wife's was, 'most courteous and most fair,' which, as it may be used, or an anagram upon each name, might be very pretty." The practice of drawing valentines by lot is still common in the south of Scotland on St. Valentine's Eve. The young people assemble and write the names of their friends on separate pieces of paper, taking the precaution of putting the lads and lasses in separate bags; the girls draw from the former, the boys from the latter, three times in succession, returning the name after the first and second drawing; if one person takes out the same name three times consecutively, it is looked upon as a good omen of their being man and wife afterwards, as is shown in "Tam Glen :" "Yestreen at the valentine's drawing My heart to my mouth gied a stem (jump), Gay makes mention of a method of choosing valentines in his time, viz., that the lad's valentine was the first lass he saw in the morning, who the lass's valentine was the first young was not an inmate of the house; and man she met. Shakspeare bears witness to the custom of looking out of the winbe one, by making Ophelia sing: dow for a valentine, or desiring to "Good-morrow! 'tis St Valentine's Day, HAMLET, act iv, scene 5. And the valentine when seen was bound to give a pair of gloves if at once addressed with: "The rose is red, the violet's blue, The gillyflower's sweet, and so are you; These are the words you bade me say, For a pair of new gloves on Easter Day." Though the following uncourteous retort is reported to have been occasionally made: "The rose is red, and the violet's blue, The gillyflower's sweet; but I'll none of you." 66 The learned Moresin tells us that at this festival the men used to make the women presents; and we learn from Pepys, that when the Duke of York was valentine to the celebrated Miss Stuart, who became Duchess of Richmond, he presented her with "a jewel of about £800," and that Lord Manderville, her valentine in 1667, gave her a ring of about £300;' and it appears from the MS. diary of Joyce Jeffereys-1630 to 1640-that the ladies also made presents to their valentines, for we find carefully inserted in her accountbook a pecuniary notice of her valentine each year (being the first male person she met on February 14th), thus: "Gave Tom Ashton for being my valentine two shillings. "I gave Timothy Pickering, of Clifton on Teme, that was my valentine at Horn Castle, 4d." Notes and Queries, 3d s., vol. iii. It is supposed that the earliest poetical valentines were written by Charles, Duke of Orleans, the father of Louis XII, who fell into the hands of the English at the battle of Agincourt, on 25th October, 1415. Whilst a prisoner in the Tower of London he wrote several thousand verses of poetry, many of which were written on St. Valentine's Day. The following extract is given as containing allusions to the subject before us: "A ce jour de Saint Valentin A ce jour de Saint Valentin." There'is preserved in the royal library of MSS. in the British Museum a magnificent volume containing probably all that the poet-duke wrote during his captivity in England, which extended over a period of twenty-five years. There are many curious species of divination practiced on St. Valen tine's Day or eve, among which are the following. The west country girls drop some hempseed on the ground in the churchyard as the clock is striking twelve, and then face round three times, saying: "Hempseed I sow, hempseed I mow, Let him rake this hempseed after me," and the man that is to be their husband will then be seen raking up the hempseed attired for the nonce in a winding-sheet, even though he be at the farthest part of the world. But perhaps the most curious is that described in Connoisseur, No. 56, "Last Friday was Valentine's Day, and the night before I got five bayleaves and pinned four of them to the four corners of my pillow, and the fifth to the middle; and then, if I dreamt of my sweetheart, Betty said we should be married before the year was out. But to make it more sure I boiled an egg hard and took out the yolk and filled it with salt, and when I went to bed, eat it shell and all, without speaking or drinking after it. We also wrote our lovers' names upon bits of paper, and rolled them up in clay, and put them into water, and the first that rose up was to be our valentine. Would you think it? Mr. Blossom was mine. I lay abed and shut my eyes all the morning till he came to our house; for I would not have seen another man before him for all the world." St. Valentine's Day is still one of the best observed of our popular festivals, but we do not, however, keep it up in its primitive form. We are not satisfied with names now, we keep them secret, and send out pretty devices and poetic effusions, leaving the question to the happy recipients as to who the sender may be. Although we have been able to prove that the custom of choosing valentines is an ancient practice, that of sending them is of comparatively recent date. Brand Houe and all the best authorities on folk-lore may be searched in "And those now rhyme who never rhymed before, And those who always rhymed now rhyme the more." " vain for evidence of sending valen- all persons are seized with furore tines being an old custom. It prob- poeticæ : ably does not date farther back than the beginning of the last century, and it has grown with the development of the penny post. Some time previous to the return of this day, so dear to the minds of thousands of merrymaking and mischievous lads and lasses, the stationers' shops display a profusion of valentines, some of them very beautiful and others extremely ridiculous. On this day It may be some consolation to those who complain of the gradual decline of our "good old customs to know that the practice of sending valentines is in no way diminished, nor is it likely to be whilst loving hearts are left. DIEGO COLUMBUS AND HIS DESCENDANTS. IN the October number of this journal for 1876 I gave a sketch of Fernando Columbus, taken principally from the French of Count De Lorguis. I now, from the same sources, proceed to say something in relation to his elder brother, Diego, and to mention what became of the vice-royalty of the New World after the demise of its illustrious dis coverer. The birth and early years of Diego having been mentioned in my De Lorguis's Life of Christopher Columbus, I will, in this paper, only notice the outlines of Diego's history after the death of his immortal father. After the mournings attendant on the sad event referred to, Don Diego besought King Ferdinand to accord him the dignities and the government justly and legally due to him as the heir of his father. King Ferdinand, with that craftiness which ever characterized him, appeared very desirous to satisfy him, but said he had not the right himself to settle this affair, which solely pertained to the crown of Castile. Limited now to the kingdom of Arragon, his patrimony, abandoned by the grandees, detested by the people who were indignant at his shameful forgetfulness of the Queen, to whom he owed his glory and his title of Catholic, and resolved to retire to his kingdom of Sicily, he left to Don Diego the task of obtaining, as best he could, justice from the new Queen of Castile. Ovando, faithful to the instructions of Juan de Fonseca, continued to pursue with a vengeance in the son the enmity he had conceived against his father. The orders he had previously received from the King to send Don Diego what pertained to his father he disregarded. Don Diego wrote about the matter to the King, who answered him that he was truly sorry he was not treated better. The unexpected death of the Archduke Philip totally subverted the reason of Donna Juana. The poor maniac would not consent to have his body consigned to the tomb. In her inconsolable grief she retired to Hornillos, refusing any longer to attend to the duties of royalty. The cities, at the recommendation of the Duke of Alba, notwithstanding their disesteem for King Ferdinand, sent him addresses praying him to return and resume the reins of government. As soon as Ferdinand returned from Naples, Don Diego ceased not to renew his petitions, reminding him of the encouraging words of his letters. Ferdinand always replied with courtesy and kindness, but would decide nothing in the matter. At length Don Diego one day dared to ask him why His Highness could not accord to him as a grace what pertained to him as a plain right, to him who served him so faithfully, having been principally raised under his eyes in the royal household. Without being offended at the question, Ferdinand replied that assuredly he had full confidence in him, but that he could not have the same in his sons and successors. Don Diego rejoined that it did not appear to him to be very just to be punished at present for faults which may be committed by children who, perchance, might never be born, he being still unmarried. Undoubtedly the government of the Indies would never have been accorded to their lawful titulary if an affair of the heart supervening in the household or family of the King himself had not suddenly modified his disposition, and changed the destiny of Don Diego. Although the glory of Christopher Columbus appeared, for the time, eclipsed in Spain, yet the immensity of his discoveries developing it self from year to year, the grandeur of his services and the fair fame of his name were appreciated by some minds, among whom was a young lady of the royal blood. By the beauty of his person, the maturity of his judgment, and his noble bearing, Don Diego touched and won the heart of the illustrious Donna Maria de Toledo, daughter of Fernando de Toledo, grand commander of Leon, duke and niece to Don Fadrique de Toledo, the celebrated Duke of Alba, and to King Ferdinand himself. To her high birth and personal beauty, Donna Maria united the noblest qualities of mind and of heart. In the exaltedness of her piety were recognized the influences of the education she had received under the eye of Isabella the Catholic. Indeed, Diego Columbus could never have chosen a wife more capable of rendering him happy, independently of the high connection which he would thus form. The Duke of Alba took under his special patronage the inclination of his niece. The proposition of Don Diego for her hand being accepted, he made the reclamation for the government of the Indies his personal affair. Already, as soon as the Duke had perceived the attraction of these young hearts for each other, he wrote to King Ferdinand, his cousin, who was then at Naples, urging him to render to the successor of the Admiral of the Indies the rights he inherited from his father. Ferdinand could not resist the persistent solicitations of the duke, who was his cousin-german, and to whom he was under great personal obligations, and would not, by the obstinacy of his refusal, be prejudicial to the interests of their niece, Donna Maria. He yielded at last to the importunities of the father and uncle of the bride. Still it was with such restrictions as fully showed his cautious and distrustful disposition. Ovando having incurred the displeasure of Fonseca, his recall was decided upon. On the 9th of August, 1508, Ferdinand signed an authorization for Don Diego Columbus to reside in the Indies. But without recognizing him as viceroy, he accorded to him, by the order of December, 1508, only the authorization to replace Ovando, with the same provisory title, and with the same salary and honors that had been accorded to Ovando, declaring that by this authorization he meant not to add to the rights which may be fixed by the judges; for then the |