I shall never marry; you must be wife and children to me."[77] In all social classes and in all fields of activity, Germany during the nineteenth century produced a long series of famous or notorious homosexual persons.

At the one end we find people of the highest intellectual distinction, such as Alexander von Humboldt, whom Naecke, a cautious investigator, stated that he had good ground for regarding as an invert.[78] At the other end we find prosperous commercial and manufacturing people who leave Germany to find solace in the free and congenial homosexual atmosphere of Capri; of these F.A.Krupp, the head of the famous Essen factory, may be regarded as the type.[79] In England (and the same is true today of the United States), although homosexuality has been less openly manifest and less thoroughly explored, it is doubtful whether it has been less prevalent than in Germany.

At an early period, indeed, the evidence may even seem to show that it was more prevalent.

In the Penitentials of the ninth and tenth centuries "natural fornication and sodomy" were frequently put together and the same penance assigned to both; it was recognized that priests and bishops, as well as laymen, might fall into this sin, though to the bishop nearly three times as much penance was assigned as to the layman.

Among the Normans, everywhere, homosexuality was markedly prevalent; the spread of sodomy in France about the eleventh century is attributed to the Normans, and their coming seems to have rendered it at times almost fashionable, at all events at court.