her original was a handmaid to Corinna, is of unblemished morality,
flirted with certainly by Ovid, but really a German princess, Ismenia,
in disguise, and beloved by, betrothed to, and in the end united with no
less a compatriot than Arminius. This union gives also an illustration
of the ingenious fashion in which these writers reconcile and yet omit.
La Calprenede, as we have seen, does not give Arminius's wife her usual
name of Thusnelda, but, to obviate a complaint from readers who have
heard of Varus, he invents a protest on "Herman sla lerman" part against
that general, who has trepanned him into captivity and gladiatorship,
and makes him warn Augustus that he will be true to the Romans _unless_
Varus is sent into his country.[201]

[Sidenote: The book generally.]

This episode is, in many ways, so curious and characteristic, that it
seemed worth while to dwell on it for a little; but the account itself
must have shown how impossible it is to repeat the process of general
abstract. There are, I think, in the book (which took twelve years to
publish and fills as many volumes in French, while the English
translation is an immense folio of nearly a thousand pages in double
column, also entitled _Hymen's Praeludia_[202]) fewer separate
_Histoires_, though there are a good many, than in the _Cyrus_, but the
intertwined love-plots are almost more complicated. For instance, the
Herod-and-Mariamne tragedy is brought in with a strictly "proper" lover,
Tiridates, whom Salome uses to provoke Herod's patience, and who has, at
the very opening of the book, proved himself both a natural philosopher
of no mean order by seeing a fire at sea, and "judging with much
likelihood that it comes from a ship," and a brave fellow by rescuing
from the billows no less a person than the above-mentioned Queen
Candace. From her, however, he exacts immediate, and, as some moderns
might think, excessive, payment by making her listen to his own
_Histoire_.

Not the least attractive part of _Cleopatre_ to some people will be that
very "Phebus," or amatory conceit, which made the next ages scorn it.
When one of the numerous "unknowns" of both sexes (in this case a girl)
is discovered (rather prettily) lying on a river bank and playing with
the surface of the water, "the earth which sustained this fair body
seemed to produce new grass to receive her more agreeably"--a phrase
which would have shocked good Bishop Vida many years before, as much as