nd Martesie are ladies, which the others, unfortunately, are not. And
then we pay for our _ecphrasis_ by an immense _Histoire_ of the Tyrian
Elise, its original.

At the beginning of VII. ii. Cyrus is in the doldrums. Many of his
heroes have got their heroines--the personages of bygone
_histoires_--and are honeymooning and (to borrow again from Mr. Kipling)
"dancing on the deck." He is not. Moreover, the army, like all
seventeenth-century armies after victory and in comfortable quarters, is
getting rather out of hand; and he learns that the King of Pontus has
carried Mandane off to Cumae--not the famous Italian Cumae, home of the
Sibyl whom Sir Edward Burne-Jones has fixed for us, and of many
classical memories, but a place somewhere near Miletus, defended by
unpleasant marshes on land, and open to the sea itself, the element on
which Cyrus is weakest, and by which the endlessly carried off Mandane
may readily be carried off again. He sends about for help to Phoenicia
and elsewhere; but when, after a smart action by land against the town,
a squadron does appear off the port, he is for a time quite uncertain
whether it is friend or foe. Fortunately Cleobuline, Queen of Corinth, a
young widow of surpassing beauty and the noblest sentiments, who has
sworn never to marry again, has conceived a Platonic-romantic admiration
for him, and has sent her fleet to his aid. She deserves, of course, and
still more of course has, a _Histoire de Cleobuline_. Also the
inestimable Martesie writes to say that Mandane has been dispossessed of
her suspicions, and that the King of Pontus is, in the race for her
favour, nowhere. The city falls, and the lovers meet. But if anybody
thinks for a moment that they are to be happy ever afterwards,
Arithmetic, Logic, and Literary History will combine to prove to him
that he is very much mistaken. In order to make these two lovers happy
at all, not only time and space, but six extremely solid volumes would
have to be annihilated.

The close of VII. ii. and the whole of VIII. i. are occupied with
imbroglios of the most characteristic kind. There is a certain Anaxaris,
who has been instrumental in preventing Mandane from being, according to
her almost invariable custom, carried off from Cumae also. To whom,
though he is one of the numerous "unknowns" of the book, Cyrus rashly
confides not only the captainship of the Princess's guards, but various
and too many other things, especially when "Philip Devi