me, some dear lady of the seventeenth
century has very conscientiously written out "a list of the Pairs of
Lovers," and there are thirteen pairs. _Pharamond_ begins almost in
the same manner as a novel by the late Mr. G.P.R. James might. When
the book opens we discover the amorous Marcomine and the valiant
Genebaud sallying forth along the bank of a river on two beautiful
horses of the best jennet-race. Throughout the book all the men are
valiant, all the ladies are passionate and chaste. The heroes enter
the lists covered with rubies, loosely embroidered over surcoats
of gold and silk tissue; their heads "shine with gold, enamel and
precious stones, with the hinder part covered with an hundred plumes
of different colours." They are mounted upon horses "whose whiteness
might outvie the purest snow upon the frozen Alps." They pierce into
woodland dells, where they by chance discover renowned princesses,
nonpareils of beauty, in imminent danger, and release them. They
attack hordes of deadly pirates, and scatter their bodies along the
shore; and yet, for all their warlike fire and force, they are as
gentle as marmozets in a lady's boudoir. They are especially admirable
in the putting forth of sentiments, in glozing over a subtle
difficulty in love, in tying a knot of silk or fastening a lock of
hair to their bonnet. They will steal into a cabinet so softly that a
lady who is seated there, in a reverie, will not perceive them; they
are so adroit that they will seize a paper on which she has sketched
a couplet, will complete it, pass away, and she not know whence the
poetical miracle has come. In valour, in courtesy, in magnificence
they have no rival, just as the ladies whom they court are unique in
beauty, in purity, in passion, and in self-denial. Sometimes they
correspond at immense length; in _Pharamond_ the letters which pass
between the Princess Hunnimonde and Prince Balamir would form a small
volume by themselves, an easy introduction to the art of polite
letter-writing. Mlle. de Scudery actually perceived this, and
published a collection of model correspondence which was culled bodily
from the huge store-house of her own romances, from _Le Grand Cyrus_
and _Clelie_. These interchanges of letters were kept up by the
severity of the heroines. It was not thought proper that the lady
should yield her hand until the gentleman had exhausted the resources
of language, and had spent years of amorous labour on her conquest.