y call
the Second Division) has plenty of business--showing that the author or
her adviser was also a business-like person--to commence the new
venture. Cyrus, after being victorious in the field and just about to
besiege Sardis in form, receives a "bolt from the blue" in the shape of
a letter "From the unhappy Mandane to the faithless"--himself! She has
learnt, she tells him, that his feelings towards her are changed,
requests that she may no longer serve as a pretext for his ambition,
and--rather straining the prerogatives assumed even by her nearest
ancestresses in literature, the Polisardas and Miraguardas of the
_Amadis_ group, but scarcely dreamt of by the heroines of ancient Greek
Romance--desires that he will send back to her father Cyaxares all the
troops that he is, as she implies, commanding on false pretences.

Now one half expects that Cyrus, in a transport of
Amadisian-Euphuist-heroism, will comply with this very modest request.
In fact it is open to any one to contend that, according to the
strictest rules of the game, he ought to have done so and gone mad, or
at least marooned himself in some desert island, in consequence. The
sophistication, however, of the stage appears here. After a very natural
sort of "Well, I never!" translated into proper heroic language, he sets
to work to identify the person whom Mandane suspects to be her
rival--for she has carefully abstained from naming anybody. And he
asks--with an ingenious touch of self-confession which does the author
great credit, if it was consciously laid on--whether it can be Panthea
or Araminta, with both of whom he has, in fact, been, if not exactly
flirting, carrying on (as the time itself would have said) a "commerce
of respectful and obliging admiration." He has a long talk with his
confidant Feraulas (whose beloved and really lovable Martesie is,
unluckily, not at hand to illuminate the mystery), and then he writes as
"The Unfortunate Cyrus to the Unjust Mandane," tells her pretty roundly,
though, of course, still respectfully, that if she knew how things
really were "she would think herself the cruellest and most unjust
person in the world." [I should have added, "just as she is, in fact,
the most beautiful."] She is, he says, his first and last passion, and
he has never been more than polite to any one else. But she will kindly
excuse his not complying with her request to send back his army until he
has vanquished all his Rivals--where, no dou