l" turns up once
more, and, seeing the lovers in apparent harmony, claims the fulfilment
of Cyrus's rash promise to fight him before marrying. This gets wind in
a way, and watch is kept on Cyrus by his friends; but he, thinking of
the parlous state of his mistress if both her principal lovers were
killed--for Prince Mazare is, so to speak, out of the running, while the
King of Pontus is still lying _perdu_ somewhere--entrusts the secret to
Anaxaris, and begs him to take care of her. Now Anaxaris--as is so
usual--is not Anaxaris at all, but Aryante, Prince of the Massagetae and
actually brother of the redoubtable Queen Thomyris; and he also has
fallen a victim to Mandane's fascinations, which appear to be
irresistible, though they are, mercifully perhaps, rather taken for
granted than made evident to the reader. One would certainly rather have
one Doralise or Martesie than twenty Mandanes. However, again in the now
expected manner, the fight does not immediately come off. For "Philip
Devil," in his usual headlong violence, has provoked another duel with
the Assyrian Prince Intaphernes,[183] and has been badly worsted and
wounded by his foe, who is unhurt. This puts everything off, and for a
long time the main story drops again (except as far as the struggles of
Anaxaris between honour and love are depicted), first to a great deal of
miscellaneous talk about the quarrel of King and Prince, and then to a
regular _Histoire_ of the King, Intaphernes, Atergatis, Princess
Istrine, and the Princess of Bithynia, Spithridates's sister and
daughter of a very robustious and rather usurping King Arsamones, who is
a deadly enemy of Cyrus. The dead Queen Nitocris, and the passion for
her of a certain Gadates, Intaphernes's father, and also sometimes, if
not always, called a "Prince," come in here. The story again introduces
the luckless Spithridates himself, who is first, owing to his likeness
to Cyrus, persecuted by Thomyris, and then imprisoned by his father
Arsamones because he will not give up Araminta and marry Istrine, whom
Nitocris had wanted to marry her own son Philidaspes--a good instance of
the extraordinary complications and contrarieties in which the book
indulges, and of which, if Dickens had been a more "literary" person, he
might have thought when he made the unfortunate Augustus Moddle observe
that "everybody appears to be somebody else's." Finally, the volume ends
with an account of the leisurely progress of Mandane an