faster,
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggar'd all description: she did lie
In her pavilion (cloth-of-gold of tissue)
O'er-picturing that Venus, where we see
The fancy outwork nature: on each side her
Stood pretty dimpl'd boys, like smiling Cupids,
With diverse-color'd fans....
Her gentlewomen, like the Nereides,
So many mermaids, tended her i' the eyes.
... At the helm
A seeming mermaid steers....
... From the barge
A strange invisible perfume hits the sense
Of the adjacent wharves. The city cast
Her people out upon her; and Antony,
Enthroned i' the market-place, did sit alone,
Whistling to th' air; which, but for vacancy,
Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too,
And made a gap in nature."

Antony was completely fascinated with her charms. Her beauty, her wit,
and, above all, the tact, adroitness, and self-possession which she
displayed in consenting thus to appear before him, forced him to yield
his heart almost immediately to her undisputed sway. Cleopatra remained
at Tarsus for some time, in an incessant round of gayety and revelry,
and by her flatteries and caresses she prevailed on Antony, forgetful of
his wife Fulvia and his duty as a Roman, to spend the winter at
Alexandria, where the pair engaged in continual feastings, spectacles,
and sports, as well as in every species of riot, irregularity, and
excess. It is not our purpose to follow the well-known career of
Cleopatra during these years of turmoil, or to dwell on the
circumstances that caused her to prove the destruction of Antony's hopes
at the battle of Actium; neither shall we describe in detail those
closing days when both committed suicide rather than suffer the
consequences of humiliation and defeat.

The case of Mark Antony is the most conspicuous example in history of
the complete subjugation by the arts and fascinations of a woman of a
will stern and indomitable, if reckless, and of a heart that was
naturally generous and noble. Cleopatra led him to betray every public
trust, to alienate from himself the affections of all his countrymen, to
repel most cruelly the kindness and devotedness of a beautiful and
faithful wife; and at last she led him away in a most cowardly and
ignoble flight from the field of duty as a soldier, he knowing full well
that she was hurrying him on to disgrace and destruc