e Sicilian Court. Nevertheless she still went forth
every day with the sheep, veiling her face from the Sun with a garland
of flowers; which attire became her so well, that she seemed the
goddess Flora herself for beauty.

King Egistus had an only son, named Dorastus, a Prince so adorned with
gifts and virtues, that both King and people had great joy of him. He
being now of ripe age, his father sought to match him with some
princess; but the youth was little minded to wed, as he had more
pleasure in the exercises of the field and the chase. One day, as he
was pursuing this sport, he chanced to fall in with the lovely
shepherdess, and while he was rapt in wonder at the vision one of his
pages told him she was Fawnia, whose beauty was so much talked of at
the Court.

The story then goes on to relate the matter of their courtship; how
the Prince resolved to forsake his home and inheritance, and become a
shepherd, for her sake, as she could not think of matching with one
above her degree; how, forecasting the opposition and dreading the
anger of his father, he planned for escaping into Italy, in which
enterprise he was assisted by an old servant of his named Capnio, who
managed the affair so shrewdly, that the Prince made good his escape,
taking the old shepherd along with him; how, after they got to sea,
the ship was seized by a tempest and carried away to Bohemia; and how
at length the several parties met together at the Court of Pandosto,
which drew on a disclosure of the facts, and a happy marriage of the
fugitive lovers.

I must add one more item from the novel, as it aptly shows what
advantage is sometimes to be gained by tracing the Poet in his
reading. In the play, the Shepherd on finding the babe is made to
exclaim, "What have we here? Mercy on 's, a bairn; a very pretty
bairn! a boy, or a child, I wonder?" For some hundred years, editorial
ingenuity has been strained to the utmost to explain why _child_
should be thus used in opposition to _boy_; and nothing would do but
to surmise an obsolete custom of speech which made _child_ signify
_girl_. The simple explanation is, that _boy_ is a misprint for _god_.
For this felicitous restoration we are indebted to Mr. R.G. White, of
New York, who was guided to it by the corresponding passage of the
novel: "The shepherd, who before had never seen so fair a babe nor so
rich jewels, thought assuredly that it was _some little god_, and
began with great devotion to knock o