They should not be too severe in such matters, especially where no pressing reason or serious impediment exists. It is good for a commonwealth. Plato holds that in making marriage agreements young men should never avoid kinship with poor families or seek it with rich ones. Poverty and low birth may be amply compensated by many other good qualities: modesty, virtue, religion and excellent upbringing.

“I am poor, I confess; but does that make me contemptible, an outcast? Love himself is naked, as are the Graces and the stars, while Hercules is clad in a lion’s skin.” Allow something to virtue, love, wisdom, a pleasing face, beauty and bodily form. Do not think only of money.

Besides, you must consider that “Love cannot be forced”: love cannot be compelled; people must love as they can. “Fate lies in those parts which the fold of the garment conceals.” As the saying goes, marriage and hanging follow destiny; matches are made in heaven.

It is not in our power to love or hate, For our will is overruled by fate.

A servant maid in Aristaenetus loved her mistress’s favourite. When her mistress discovered this, “in furious jealousy,” she dragged her about the house by the hair and tormented her cruelly. The girl cried out, “Oh, mistress, fortune has made my body your servant, but not my soul!” Affections are free and cannot be commanded.

Moreover, God in his just judgement may appoint and permit such marriages to restrain their ambition, pride and greed, and to correct those hereditary diseases of a family. For I agree with Plato and Bodin that families, like kingdoms, have their limits and allotted terms, beyond which they will not extend in power or duration—six or seven hundred years—as those writers illustrate with many examples, and as Peucer and Melanchthon also affirm;

yet they continue on an unbroken course, as we see from many pedigrees of knights, gentlemen and yeomen, remaining as they began for many generations with little change. However that may be, let parents, I say, make some allowance for youth and love. They must not suppose their children can love whomever they appoint.

“Love cannot be commanded: it is an affection as free as any, and demands a return.” This is a free passion, as Pliny said in one of his panegyrics, and cannot be forced. “Love craves liking,” as the saying goes: it requires mutual affection, a response. “It cannot be given or taken away against one’s will.” It cannot be learned. Ovid himself cannot teach us how to love, Solomon cannot describe it, Apelles paint it, or Helen embody it.

Parents must therefore neither compel nor impose: “For who,” as Fabius argues, “can love with another person’s heart?” They should also consider the misery of forced marriages and have pity on the young. Above all, those with daughters to marry should take great care and thought to marry them at the proper time.

Sirach, chapter 7, verse 25, calls it “a weighty matter to perform”: to marry a daughter to a man of understanding at the proper time. “For maidens must be married in good season,” as Lemnius advises in book 1, chapter 6. Husbands must be found for them in time to prevent many diseases, which Rodrigo de Castro, On the Diseases of Women, book 2, chapter 3, and Luis Mercado, On Women’s Disorders, book 2, chapter 4, “On the Melancholy of Maidens and Widows,” have both discussed at length.

It is therefore good to find them husbands early, both to avoid these deadly maladies and to prevent other serious troubles—and for another reason that I know. “When the time and age for marriage have arrived,” as Chrysostom advises, let parents not postpone it: otherwise the young people may marry on their own, or do worse.

If the lawyer Nevizanus is not misleading us, they may do so as a matter of right. For, as he proves from Curtius and other civil lawyers in The Marriage Grove, book 2, number 30, a maiden over twenty-five may, against her parents’ wishes, marry a man unworthy of her and beneath her in rank; and her father must by law be compelled to give her a suitable dowry.

Meanwhile, do not misunderstand me or suppose that I am defending headstrong, unruly, shameless hussies. I approve what St Ambrose writes about Rebecca’s betrothal, in his commentary on Genesis 24:51: a woman should leave the choice of her husband to her parents, lest she be thought forward and wanton if she undertakes to choose for herself; for she should appear to be desired by a man rather than to desire a man herself.

I turn Curtius’s argument solely against those harsh parents who, neglectful and careless of the proper time and their daughters’ marriageable years, fail the more modest maidens on whose behalf I speak. For if the women wait longer, to tell the truth, they are past their time, and no one will consider them.

“A woman of twenty-four here in Italy,” says Aretine’s Lucretia, “is already old, past her best and of no account.” An old man, as Lysistrata admits in Aristophanes, “though grey-haired, may soon take a young maiden as his wife”; and it is nothing new for an old man to marry a young girl. But, as the passage continues, “A woman’s opportunity is brief; if she fails to seize it, no one wants to marry her, and she sits waiting.” Who cares for an old maid? She may sit there, and so on.

A maiden, as the poet holds—“a lively and playful young virgin”—is like a flower, a rose that suddenly withers.

The rose the bright morning star just saw being born, It saw grown old when it returned late in the evening.

She who was lately a maiden as fresh as May Is now an old crone: so time steals away.

Then let them seize their opportunity while they can, make the most of youth, and, as he instructs,

Gather roses, maiden, while the blossom and your youth are fresh, And remember that your own lifetime hastens in the same way.

Fair maidens, go and gather roses in their prime, And remember that time passes like a flower.

Let us all love, “while our strength and years allow,” while we are in the flower of youth, fit for love’s affairs, and while the opportunity lasts; for