whom he does not yet know to
be Cyrus and heir to Persia, is in love with her. Owing chiefly to the
wiles of a villain, Metrobate, he arrests the Prince, and is on the
point of having him executed, despite the protests of the allied kings.
But the whole army, with the Persian contingent at its head, assaults
the castle, and rescues Cyrus, after the traitor Metrobate has tried to
double his treachery and get Cyaxares assassinated. Nobody who remembers
the _Letter of Advice_ already quoted will doubt what the conduct of
Cyrus is. He only accepts the rescue in order that he may post himself
at the castle gate, and threaten to kill anybody who attacks Cyaxares.

After this burst, which is really exciting in a way, we must expect
something more soporific. Martesie takes the place of her absent
mistress to some extent, and a good deal of what might be mistaken for
"Passerelle"[169] flirtation takes place, or would do so, if it were not
that Cyrus would, of course, die rather than pay attention to anybody
but Mandane herself, and that Feraulas, already mentioned as one of the
Faithful Companions, is detailed as Martesie's lover. She is, however,
installed as a sort of Vice-Queen of a wordy tourney between four
unhappy lovers, who fill up the rest of the volume with their stories of
"Amants _In_fortunes" (cf. the original title of the _Heptameron_),
dealing respectively with and told by--

(1) A lover who is loved, but separated from his mistress.

(2) One who is unloved.

(3) A jealous one.

(4) One whose love is dead.[170]

They do it moderately, in rather less than five hundred pages, and
Martesie sums up in a manner worthy of any Mistress of the Rolls,
contrasting their fates, and deciding very cleverly against the jealous
man.

The first twenty pages or so of the sixth volume (nominally iii. 2)
afford a good example of the fashion in which, as may be observed more
fully below, even an analysis of the _Grand Cyrus_, though a great
advance on mere general description of it, must be still (unless it be
itself intolerably voluminous) insufficient. Not very much actually
"happens"; but if you simply skip, you miss a fresh illustration of
magnanimity not only in Cyrus, but in a formerly mentioned character,
Aglatidas, with reference to the heroine Amestris earlier inset in the
tale (_v. sup._). And this is an example of the new and sometimes very
ingenious fashion in which these apparent excursions are turned into
somet