Clit-Orations

Sir John Suckling wrote that a lover serves for the love of service, nothing more:

After all, the wages will not be high, for [his heart] hath been brought up under Platonics, and knows no other way of being paid for service than by being commanded more; which truth when you doubt, you have but to send to its master and your humble servant

He will follow her will blindly, asking not the reason:

Yet, hearing you have resolved it otherwise for me, my faith shall alter without becoming more learned upon it, or once knowing why it should do so.

Though he is not ashamed to worship her, he knows that he has no more claim to her beauty & favors than any man have to light and beauty, secrecy is essential:

though you have left behind you faces whose beauties might well excuse perjury in others, yet in me they cannot, since to the making that no sin love’s casuists have most rationally resolved that she for whom we forsake ought to be handsomer than the forsaken, which would be here impossible.

…yet since the world is full of profane eyes, the best way, sure, is to keep all mysteries from them, and to let privacy be (what indeed it is) the best part of devotion.

And always, he accepts both his own nature and hers:

And now, since I know your ladyship is too wise to suppose to yourself impossibilities, and therefore cannot think of such a thing as making me absolutely good, it will not be without some impatience that I shall attend to know what sin you will be pleased to assign me

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