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58 CARNEGIE LIBRARY OF PITTSBURGH
Another Valentine also claims a share in the day, who has as little
to do with comedy or sentiment. He was the bishop who healed a son
of Craton the rhetorician, and was choked to death by a fish-bone...
Either Valentine would be surprised to find himself a lovers' saint.. .
In default of any light thrown upon the custom by biography, etymologists
and lexicographers, antiquarians and hagiologists, have drawn
more or less satisfactory explanations from their special studies...
[The etymologist] points out that v and g were frequently interchangeable
in popular speech, and as a notable instance produces the
words gallant and valiant, which both spring from the Latin valens. He
then explains that the Norman word galantin, a lover of the fair sex.. .
was frequently written and pronounced valantan or valentin. And from
these premises he concludes that by a natural confusion of names Bishop
Valentine was established as the patron saint of sweethearts and lovers,
although he has no real connection, not even an etymological one,
with that class of beings.
So far so good. As a guess why St. Valentine became associated
with the custom this is plausible, though not convincing. Still, it leaves
the origin of the custom as much in the dark as ever. . .
Let us turn to the antiquary. Francis Douce, in his "Illustrations
of Shakespeare" (1807), suggests that St. Valentine's Day is the Christianized
form of the classic Lupercalia, which were feasts held in Rome
during the month of February in honor of Pan and Juno (hence known
as Juno Februata),when among other ceremonies it was customary to
put the names of young women into a box, from which they were
drawn by the men as chance directed, and that the Christian clergy,
finding it difficult or impossible to extirpate the pagan practice, gave it
at least a religious aspect by substituting the names of particular saints
for those of the women.
He buttresses up his opinion by an appeal to the hagiologist. This
is no less a person than the Rev. Alban Butler, who, in his "Lives of the
Saints," explains that pastors of the Christian Church, "by every means
in their power, worked zealously to eradicate the vestiges of pagan
superstition; chiefly by the simple process of retaining the ceremonies,
but modifying their significance; and substituted, for the drawing of
names in honor of the goddess Februata Juno, the names of some particular
saints. But as the festival of the Lupercalia took place during
February, the 14th of that month, St. Valentine's Day, was selected
for this new feast, as occurring about the same time. . .
But see how strong is the old Adam in the hearts of the unregenerate.
. .Youth was not satisfied to imitate these holy fathers and
ballot for a ghostly partner in heaven. . . So it went back to something
like the pagan custom.
This was at least as early as the fourteenth century. . .In the latter