VALENTINE'S DAY, the 14th of February, is, or more correctly was, celebrated in England, Scotland, and in different parts of the continent, particularly Lorraine and Maine in France, by a very peculiar and amusing custom. On the eve a St. Valentine, a number of young folk—maids and bachelors—would assemble together, and inscribe upon little billets the names of an equal number of maids and bachelors of their acquaint ance, throw the whole into a receptacle of some sort, and then draw them lottery-wise —care, of course, being taken that each should draw one of the opposite sex. The per son thus drawn became one's valentine. Of course, besides having got a valentine for one's self, one became, by the universality of the practice, some other person's valentine; but, as Misson, a learned traveler in the early part of last century, remarks, " the man stuck faster to the valentine that had fallen to him, than to her to whom he had fallen." These imaginary engagements, as may readily be supposed, often led to real ones; be cause one necessary consequence of them was that, for a whole year, a bachelor re mained bound to the service of his valentine, somewhat after the fashion of a mediaeval knight of romance to his lady-love. At one period it was customary for both sexes to make each other presents, but latterly the obligation seems to have been restricted to young men. During the 15th c. this amusement was very popular among the upper classes, and at many European courts. From Pepys's Diary, we see that in Charles II.'s reign, married as well as single people could be chosen.
For some time back, the festival—at least in England and Scotland—has ceased to possess the graceful symbolic meaning it used to have, and has became a considerable nuisance. " The approach of the day is now heralded by the appearance in the print sellers' shop-windows of vast numbers of missives calculated for use on this occasion, each gen erally consisting of a single sheet of post-paper, on the first page of which is seen some ridiculous-colored caricature of the male or female figure, with a few burlesque verses below. More rarely, the print is of a sentimental kind, such as a view of Hymen's altar,
with a pair undergoing initiation into wedded happiness before it, while Cupid flutters above, and hearts transfixed with his darts decorate the corners. Maid-servants and young fellows interchange such epistles with each other on the 14th of February, no doubt conceiving that the joke is amazingly good; and, generally, the newspapers do rot fail to record that the London postmen delivered so many hundred thousand more letters on that day than they do in general."—Chambers's Book of Days, vol. i. p. 255.
The connection of the custom with St. Valentine is purely accidental. In the legends of the different saints of that name recorded in the Acta Sanctorum, no trace of the prac tice peculiar to the 14th of February is found. It has been suggested by Mr. Douce, in his Illustrations of Shakespeare, that the custom may have descended to us from the an cient Romhns, who, during the Lupercalia, celebrated in the month of February, were wont, among other things, "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 this pagan practice, gave it at least a religious aspect by substituting the names of particular saints for those of the women; and it is certainly a usage more or less widely extended in the Roman Catholic church to select, either on St. Valentine's day or some other, a patron saint for the year, who is termed a valentine. But it is far more probable that the custom of choosing valentines is a relic of that nature-religion which was undoubtedly the primitive form of religion in n.w. Europe— as elsewhere; and that it from a recognition of the peculiarity of the season. Hence the explanation, that "about this time of the year the birds choose their mates, and thence probably came the .custom of the voung men and maidens choosing valen tines or special loving friends on that clay." 'Valentines are now extensively manufac tured, the demand being yearly on the increase.