ever, is as treacherous and cruel as she is beautiful; and
part of her reason for seeming milder is that more of her troops may
turn up and seize him.

On another occasion, owing to false generalship and disorderly advance
on the part of the King of Hyrcania, Cyrus is in no small danger, but he
"makes good," though at a disastrous expense, and with still greater
dangers to meet. Thomyris's youthful son (for young and beautiful widow
as she is, she has been an early married wife and a mother),
Spargapises, just of military age, is captured in battle, suffers from
his captors' ignorance what has been called "the indelible insult of
bonds," and though almost instantly released as soon as he is known,
stabs himself as disgraced. His body is sent to his mother with all
sorts of honours, apologies, and regrets, but she, partly out of natural
feeling, partly from her excited state, and partly because her mind is
poisoned by false insinuations, sends, after transports of maternal and
other rage, a message to Cyrus to the effect that if he does not put
himself unreservedly in her hands, she will send him back Mandane dead,
in the coffin of Spargapises. And so the last double-volume but one ends
with a suitable "fourth act" curtain, as we may perhaps call it.

The last of all, X. i. and ii., exhibits, in a remarkable degree, the
general defects and the particular merits and promise of this curious
and (it cannot be too often repeated) epoch-making book. In the latter
respect more especially it shows the "laborious orient ivory sphere in
sphere" fashion in which the endless and, it may sometimes seem, aimless
episodes, and digressions, and insets are worked into the general theme.
The defects will hardly startle, though they may still annoy, any one
who has worked through the whole. But if another wickedly contented
himself with a sketch of the story up to this point, and thought to make
up by reading this Part of two volumes carefully, he would probably feel
these defects very strongly indeed. We--we corrupt moderns--do expect a
quickening up for the run-in. The usual beginning may seem to the
non-experts to promise this, or at least to give hopes of it; for though
there is a vast deal of talking--with Anacharsis as a go-between and
Gelonide (a good confidante), endeavouring to soften Thomyris, one can
but expect it--the situation itself is at once difficult and exciting.
The position of Aryante in particular is really novel-dram