The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, by Sir Philip Sidney

The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, by Philip Sidney

THE COUNTESS OF PEMBROKE’S
ARCADIA

INTRODUCTION

In a broad survey of the early history of English prose fiction three periods mark themselves out with great distinctness. The later centuries of the middle ages were the age of romance, when both poet and proseman worked upon the same mass of legendary material, expanding and embellishing the current stories in precisely the same spirit, the difference between prose romance and metrical romance being simply one of mechanical form. When in the Elizabethan age the literature of tradition gave way to the literature of invention, a decisive step in advance was made; but the novel still retained all the essential features of its poetic ancestry. Then, with the invention of a genuine prose, in the succeeding epoch, came a revolution. Discarding the romantic spirit, as their predecessors had abandoned the romantic legends, the first modern novelists turned themselves to the portrayal and interpretation of actual life, and the history of realism began. Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia holds an important place in these three stages of gradual evolution, as the type and culmination of the middle period, the age of poetic invention; how important in the long history of the genesis, the successive transformations, and the final development of English fiction, can be realised only by going back right to the beginnings, when the earliest prose romances took their rise from the chansons de gestes.

In the exordium of his Apologie for Poetrie, Sidney himself lays stress on the priority of the poet in the history of literature. Modern research has found that this rule holds good in the literatures of many more races than Sidney was able to adduce as examples. From free imagination to realism, from mythology to science, from sensuous and passionate rhythms to cold, abstract prose—this is the natural line of progression. And the same course of development is repeated in the evolution of the various literary species. The first Hellenic {viii} philosophers wrote in hexameters; history began with epos, and went through the semi-poetic phase of Herodotus before it emerged in the form of abstract prose and the generalising method of science with Thucydides. Scientific and technical literature had its birth in poetry and mythology; and even when it became practical and experimental maintained for a while the fashions of poetry, and sought the inspiration of the muse. In the same way, the novel, whose evolution seems to have culminated in unpoetic days, must have its origins sought in far-off times when authors wrote instinctively in metre.

Narrative or dramatic poetry and the novel must always of course be very nearly related together. A poem and a novel, it might be said, are but two different sorts of fiction. But to make this statement literally true, the word fiction would have to be interpreted in two different senses. For the difference between poetry and prose is not simply one of style, but lies in the circumstance that the imagination of the poet, inspired with emotion and ideality, appeals directly to imagination, whilst prose addresses the understanding. The poet merely asks us to imagine; but the prose-writer has to reason and convince. Writers of such prose fiction as the Elizabethan novels, and the Greek and Latin novels that arose in the decadence of classical literature, did not realise that the mind of the reader is reached in essentially different ways by prose and poetry; that in the one case the imagination is working on a higher plane, and responding to another kind of stimulus. Both accordingly produced something that was really neither prose nor poetry, and both had slight influence on the subsequent development of the novel. It will be worth while a little later to compare the Elizabethan novel with this curious product of an earlier age of culture and decadence. For the novel of Sidney, Lyly, Lodge, and Greene, though it belongs to the Elizabethan era in time, was not a native growth of that age of great beginnings, but rather a final and unproductive efflorescence of the romantic literature that had its roots in times already ancient. Sidney the critic and interpreter of letters looked back, not forward. He did not discern the signs around him of the tremendous birth that was commencing, but would have been proud to be compared with {ix} Heliodorus and Longus, and with Sanazzaro and Montemayor, whom he acclaims as genuine poets, preaching with seductive eloquence throughout his Apologie the fallacious doctrine that poetry is the name for all imaginative literature.

The first English examples of fiction in prose were stories from the great chivalric cycles of Arthur, of Charlemagne, and of Troy and Alexander. Some of these were written in prose originally, but the majority were translations, paraphrases, or recensions of metrical narratives. Some were turned into verse again, and again in that form were the material for further prose recensions. And throughout these transformations the matter, the style, and the spirit of the stories underwent hardly any change. It was only now and then that the versifier gave a rein to imagination in his battles and pageants; or was hurried by the swing of the metre into bursts of lyricism, or a more dramatic curtness in the dialogue; or cut short the explication of motive and plot, which the prose-writer was inclined to elaborate. How well the prose sufficed to the minstrel converting it into his own idiom may be seen by comparing such a metrical romance as the Scots poem, Lancelot of the Laik, with the samples of the French prose story from which it was translated, in the edition by the Early English Text Society. There is very little poetical heightening except where the minstrel tacks on a prologue of his own composing; the rest is but the effect of the paraphraser’s occasional impulse to change and invent.[1] Certainly these {x} writers were not embarrassed by any preconceptions of a strict boundary line between prose and the language of poetry, and the uses for which either was especially ordained. The traditional themes were handled, in both verse and prose, in the same traditional manner, and were animated by the same spirit of romantic adventure.

A change of style is almost invariably the result of a change of thought and feeling; but no profound mental and moral revolution like that which underlay the romantic movement of the nineteenth century, was the occasion for turning the mediaeval romances into prose. When all literary compositions were intended for singing and recitation, they naturally took a metrical form; but when books were meant to be read in bower and cloister, it was left to the writer to choose his vehicle. Thus, while there were true poets like Chrestien de Troyes and Wolfram von Eschenbach among those working upon the material of legend, many arrayed themselves in the poetic vesture without having a spark of divine fire; and the style of many of these metrical narratives strikes one as too prosaic for the subject, especially if we base our expectations on Malory, to us the chief exemplar of mediaeval romance, whose prose, though not in the least resembling in structure that bastard thing, prose poetry, is thoroughly epical in its stark simplicity, its sensuous colour, and the haunting suggestion of beauty and ideality. It was not an age of poetry in the way this can be said of the early period of Greek literature, when philosophers, historians, and lawgivers spoke in metre because the muse was in them. Romance is the decadence of poetry; and while the traditional forms survived, the poetic impulse grew weaker and weaker.

By Caxton and his successors the prose romances of the age of chivalry were multiplied and circulated among wider audiences than even those who listened to the mediaeval jongleur: these were the first popular novels of the Tudor age, yet they were already getting out of date, inasmuch as they reflected the manners and the ideals of a bygone period. But there had arisen on the continent two forms of romance that represent another stage in the development of fiction; the Spanish chivalric romance typified in Amadis of Gaul, and the pastoral novel of Sanazzaro and Montemayor. The three great legendary cycles, no matter how wild and fabulous their later excursions, always claimed to be a reading of history; each writer was careful to state his authorities, real or fictitious; and though he added life and circumstance to his narrative, the substance was put forward and accepted as history. In Spain romance had begun exactly as in Britain with poetic chronicles of heroic periods, such as the story of the Cid, round which gathered in the process of time a vast accretion of anonymous legend. But in the Amadis, printed in 1508, but current in oral or manuscript versions for two centuries at least, Spain gave birth to a kind of romance in which such history even as that in the legendary chronicles had no place. Amadis himself, it is true, was connected with the Arthuriad by his lineage; but with this exception, the author or authors let both history and historical tradition go, and in the various knight-errantries of Amadis gave to their imaginative powers their full fling. In the beauty of its ladies, the size of its giants, the valour, constancy, and self-denial of its heroes, the Amadis eclipses all its rivals; and in the Palmerins and Esplandians that were the sequel, these exaggerations are carried to even more ridiculous lengths. The older romances had usually been localised in actual places and countries, though these were often idealised out of all likeness to reality; but Amadis and his successors met with their adventures and performed their feats of arms in a region created by the fancy of their authors. Spenser’s Fairy Land, and Sidney’s Arcadia were no doubt suggested by this romantic geography.

Pastoral romance had a classical origin, for the Eclogues of Baptista Mantuanus, pastoral dialogues satirising allegorically the social and moral vices of the fifteenth century in Italy {xii} were avowedly inspired by the bucolic poetry of his countryman Virgil. Longus also, one of the Greek novelists already alluded to, had in his Daphnis and Chloe depicted the life of pastoral simplicity. But if Petrarch, Boccaccio, and others whose works contained germs of the new movement are left out of account as of minor importance in this respect, it is accurate enough to say that the modern pastoral novel began its course with the Arcadia of Jacopo Sanazzaro, a Neapolitan whose aim it was to refresh the minds of his contemporaries, weary of a sophisticated and artificial life, with pictures of a simple existence in fields and woods, the felicities of truth and virtue, and the sentiment of a pure and refined love. Prose and verse are intermingled in his book, as they are in the only example of the style accessible to the modern reader in an English translation, the Galatea of Cervantes. Sanazzaro was surpassed in interest by his Portuguese imitator, Jorge de Montemayor, the author of Diana, who added a pathos and a touch of real life to the pastoral, making a deeper appeal to the imagination of his readers, and securing such a popularity in England, that his novel was translated in 1583 by Bartholomew Young. The pastoral novel and the Amadis cycle of romances were the two direct progenitors of Sidney’s Arcadia, in which the spirit of knightly heroism and the idyllic atmosphere of a sentimental Utopia are blended in fairly equal parts.

The pastoral, however, was only a digression in the slow advance of the English novel towards its goal; and though it furnished perhaps half the inspiration of Sidney’s romance, it does not bear upon the present theme, the significance of the Elizabethan novel as represented by the Arcadia in the evolution of English fiction. The pastoral romance, it should nevertheless be noted, is more closely allied to poetry than to prose fiction proper, not merely because it mingles verse with a flowery and emotional prose, but chiefly because it is an offspring of the free imagination and not of the study of real life. The pastoral impulse has always been something factitious and retrograde in the history of literature and art, something exactly contrary to the return to nature to which Wordsworth gave the strongest impetus, and which exercised such an enormous effect on the advance of realism.

The Elizabethan novel, the general characteristics of which are roughly summed up in the words “poetic invention,” came next to mediaeval romance in a natural order of succession. It did not bring fiction any nearer the type conditioned by the laws of expression in strict prose, of the eighteenth century pattern. In an age of poetry the novel had become more poetic in style and in attitude to life than it had ever been. The Arcadia and Euphues have less than the Morte d’Arthur of the real world of men and women. A superficial view, accordingly, might suggest that with a hybrid and unfruitful type of art like the poetic novel one line of development came to an end, especially as we see that Defoe, in the next age, makes an entirely new beginning, abjuring romance and free imagination, turning directly to actual experience for his material, and using a homespun style, as close as he could make it to the speech of everyday life. Yet the semi-poetic novel represents a definite stage of transition, and it does contain elements that were to be developed later. The masterpieces of Italian story-tellers had made their mark upon the Elizabethans, who acquired the art of constructing a plot, and giving their narratives a beginning, a middle, and an ending. They showed also a more conscious effort to portray individual character; and by Lyly the analysis of motive and feeling was carried to a point that seems to anticipate Richardson. More than this, they came a good step nearer to reality, although they failed so flagrantly to reproduce the atmosphere of the real. They chose their subjects from the sphere of human experience; and they rejected giants, fairies, and witchcraft, together with the

which were stock features of the romantic literature; although, on the other hand, they put wild improbabilities in the place of supernatural marvels, and revelled in coincidences and disguises almost as incredible as the Celtic magic of the trouvère.

Sidney the critic expounds in his Apologie for Poetry his view that the novel of his time and of all anterior times, together {xiv} indeed with all literature having an imaginative and idealistic tendency, was comprehended under his definition of poetry.

What his theory of poetry was may be gathered from his description of the poet, who,

This corresponds to Bacon’s famous account of the nature of poetry, in the Advancement of Learning:—

These definitions are too broad for poetry, and too narrow for imaginative literature in general, though that is what they aimed to define. It was as difficult for Sidney and Bacon as for Aristotle to propound a theory embracing literary forms that were not yet invented; and furthermore it is probable that had they witnessed the birth of naturalism in Defoe, or its ultimate developments in our own age, they would have denied to it the name of literature or art. But there is no place in such a definition for many works that neither Sidney nor Bacon would have hesitated to admit, the novels of George Eliot, for instance, or those of Fielding. Yet a modern explanation of poetry, that of Newman, would not exclude even such prose works as these. He says,

A stricter analysis, however, demands of poetry not only a distinctive mode of conceiving its subject, but a distinctive mode of utterance. If poetry is the fine art of words, and {xvi} its aim to give all the sensuous, emotional, and intellectual delight of which words are capable, it is clear that Sidney and Bacon gave full weight to only one side of the truth, and that they included far too much. The poetic novel, to which their definition applied so aptly, is a case in point, since it was a hybrid and transitional form, a thing that was just ceasing to be poetry, but had not yet become the new form of art to which it was the harbinger.

The Arcadia, and the same may be said of the Elizabethan novel generally, shows its near relationship to poetry in both ways, in its style and in the purely imaginative nature of the story, the characters, and the life depicted. In the introduction to Defoe’s Roxana and Moll Flanders, published in this series, I compared the opening of Defoe’s stories, Robinson Crusoe, for instance, so definite as to time and place, so particular in the mention of names and the exact circumstances in which the events occur, with the beginning of the Arcadia, which carries us at once away in imagination to a flowery meadow in a land of Arcady that has no existence save in the fancy of the poets and those under their spell. There is no effort to make the story credible, or the characters real, by attaching them with the bands of verisimilitude to the world of familiar things. Musidorus and Pyrocles, Pamela and Philoclea, Zelmane and Amphialus, are in no way studies from life, but embodiments of Sidney’s chivalrous energy and thirst for action, and of the craving for a life of pastoral simplicity and ideal love, strengthened by his enforced existence amidst the pomps and unrealities of a court. While he was living in retirement at Wilton, where the Arcadia was begun, he gave vent to this feeling in the following lines:—

How strenuous in his nature was the heroic energy that gave the chivalric strain to his romance, was shown pre-eminently in the closing scenes of his life, when he roused his uncle {xvii} Leicester out of his sloth, and sacrificed himself on the field to a sense of knightly punctilio. It has been said of him that his whole life was “a true poem, a composition, and pattern of the best and honourablest things”; and not only in his shepherd Philisides, but in all the idealisms of courage, knightly faith and honour, and self-denying affection, that illumine the pages of his Arcadia, and in their splendid deeds of valour and endurance, he poured out the riches of his own nature, as the poet puts all that is best in himself into his verse. His purpose in writing the Arcadia, according to the testimony of his old schoolfellow at Shrewsbury, Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, was moral and didactic; but “in all these creatures of his making his interest and scope was to turn the barren philosophic precepts into pregnant images of life,” that is, to energize them with poetry.

The prose naturally begotten of such a poetical conception of the novel is well illustrated in the following passage, one of those most charged with humanity and most free from extravagance.

In the Apologie for Poetry, Sidney condemned Euphuism, {xviii} Lyly’s new-fangled speech, which became fashionable in all cultivated circles immediately upon the publication of Euphues, or the Anatomie of Wit, in 1579; but his own affectations are equally alien from purity of style. Both were striving after a prose having a richness, a style of ornament, and an artistic structure, that would furnish some equivalent for the charms to ear and mind of metrical language. In this they were simply repeating the attempt of the late Greek and Latin novelists, whose style anticipated many of the mannerisms of Elizabethan prose, the false antitheses, the word-jingles, the artificial cadences, and alliteration. Phrases like, “Sine pretio pretiosae,” “Amores amare coerceas,” “Atra atria Proserpinae,” in the Golden Ass of Apuleius, are marvellously like the flowers of speech affected by Sidney and Lyly. The scholiasts used to arrange the prose of this author in iambic measures, and would no doubt have applied similar tests to Sidney’s. And the fondness for involved, musical periods, the love of sensuousness and splendour, are features common to both schools of writers. Here are two sentences from Apuleius showing precisely the same effort to maintain the glories of poetry, and the same cloying rhetoric that is the result in Sidney and his contemporaries:—

And in spite of Sidney’s strictures upon the conceits of {xix} Euphuism, there was not much to choose between Lyly and such extravagances as this:—

The fact is, there are bound to be these freaks and extravagances whilst a style is still in such an inchoate and experimental state as English prose was in from the time of Malory and Berners, and the other early architects of a style unfettered by metre, with whom, as Mr John Dover Wilson has shown in his work on John Lyly, the germs of Euphuism found their way into English long before Guevara was known in this country, although the tendency is nearly always attributed to his influence. The writers of this period could not evolve even a poetic prose without falling into these pitfalls, for the simple reason that they wrote a century before the principles of what may be called a normal prose style had been determined. Mr Watts-Dunton has pointed out that in the present age there is another kind of poetic prose in process of evolution, a prose “which above all other kinds holds in suspense the essential qualities of poetry.” Prose to be truly poetical, he argues, must move far away from the “tremendous perorations of De Quincey, or the sonorous and highly-coloured descriptions of Ruskin,” and must no doubt be something very different from what Sidney and other writers made of Elizabethan prose, noble as their achievement was.

Such a prose as this must be the very latest product of literary effort. Its difference from the poetic prose actually evolved in the transitional age with which we are dealing, is the difference between an art founded on long experience and many attempts and failures, and above all on a sound philosophy of aesthetic causes and effects, and the essays of {xx} men who were not yet clear as to the objects they ought to aim at. So uncertain was Sidney even as to the true genius of English poetry that he was one of the most ardent members of the “Areopagus,” who endeavoured to reform English poetry on Italian and classical principles, the results of which attempt may be appraised in the verses inserted in the Arcadia. The indispensable basis for a sound poetic prose, if such a thing is feasible, must be a satisfactory norm of unpoetic prose.

Sidney’s romance did not escape ridicule in his own time; Ben Johnson parodied Arcadianism in Every Man out of his Humour; Dekker poked fun at Arcadian and Euphuised gentlewomen in the Gul’s Horne-book; and the involved and careless construction of the story came in for mild satire in one of the earliest burlesques of chivalrous and pastoral romances, Sorel’s Berger Extravagant, which was translated by John Davies of Kidwelly in a book that may be remembered by its sub-title, the Anti-Romance. The criticism in the passage following is not particularly acute, but is cited because few readers of Sidney are likely to come across such a very rare work as this translation (1648).

… Thus Clarimond in his “Oration against Poetry, Fables, and Romances”; Philiris in his “Vindication” replies:—

Sorel’s Berger Extravagant appeared in 1628. Two French translations of the Arcadia had already been made, one by Baudoin in 1624, and a second by D. Geneviefve, Chappelain, the year following. The book was translated into German in 1629, by Valentinus Theocritus, whose translation was revised by Martin Opitz, and appeared again in 1643 and 1646.

It would be rash to assert that the Arcadia, not published until 1590, though circulated widely in manuscript during the preceding decade, had any influence on the pastorals of Greene and Lodge, who boasted their adherence to the linguistic fashions set in 1579 by Lyly’s Euphues. It is enough to observe that these and the Arcadia have many close resemblances which are proofs of a common ancestry. Robert Greene’s Pandosto (1588), the original of Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale, his Menaphon (1589), and Philomela (1592); and Lodge’s Rosalynde: Euphues’ golden legacie (1590), whence As you like it was derived, have the Arcadian scenes and the atmosphere of fairy-land, combined with the same strain of chivalrous adventure, and the same complicated love-plots as Sidney’s romance. I venture to quote from Professor Courthope’s History of English Poetry a passage emphasising the strong feminine interest which was such a prominent feature in Lyly, Lodge, and Greene, as well as in Sidney.

The popularity of the book, rivalling that of Euphues, is illustrated by the number of editions, of which a list will be given later. Sidney found writers eager to continue the story, and many imitators. The argument of John Day’s Ile of Guls (1606) was “a little string or rivolet drawne from the full streme of the right worthy gentleman, Sir Phillip Sydney’s well knowne Archadea.” Shirley dramatised many episodes in his Pastorall called the Arcadia (1640); the story of the dispossessed king of Paphlagonia and his son is probably the germ of Shakespeare’s episode of Gloucester and his sons in King Lear, and Mr C. Crawford has found traces of copying in the Duchess of Malfi and other plays of Webster. The author of the Emblemes, Francis Quarles, made a long poem out of the story of Argalus and Parthenia (1622); and other writers linked their compositions to the popularity and prestige of the Arcadia by using Sidney’s name as their advertisement, like the author of Sir Philip Sydney’s Ourania (1606), a philosophical poem dedicated to the Countess of Pembroke, and the Lady Mary Wroath, a niece of Sidney, who produced a slavish imitation in The Countess of Montgomerie’s Urania {xxiii} (1621), and made great play with her pedigree on the title-page. Excerpts and adaptations were published right down to the late seventeenth century.

The first edition of the Arcadia was published in 1590, four years after the author’s death. He did not finish the book, which had been begun for the amusement of his sister, the Countess of Pembroke, while he was in exile from the court and living at Wilton House, the seat of the Pembrokes. It was Sidney’s dying request that the manuscript should be destroyed, and the dedicatory epistle to his sister expresses how little he valued the book as a literary performance:—

The Arcadia was entered in the Register of the Stationer’s Company in 1588, by William Ponsonbie, the publisher of Spenser’s Fairie Queene; and the first edition saw the light in a thick quarto in 1590. A photo-lithographic reproduction of this handsome first edition was published in 1891 by Dr Oskar Sommer, to whose scholarly bibliographical introduction I am indebted for the following list of the various editions. The fourth and fifth books, and a portion of the third book (57 pages), were added in the second edition, in 1593, a folio, by the same publisher. Beyond this, there are few variations in the text of the two editions. The third edition (1598), also by Ponsonbie, comprised Sidney’s Sonnets, Astrophel and Stella, and the Defence of Poesie; and these works were again included in the fourth edition (misdescribed as the third) by Robert Waldegrave, at Edinburgh, in 1599.[2] Mathew Lownes’ edition (1605), the fifth (miscalled the fourth), is almost a facsimile reprint of the third; but in the next edition, described on the title-page as the fourth (1613), we get some new “additions,” but of small importance compared with those in the seventh (described in the title as the fifth), published in 1621 at Dublin, which included a “Supplement of a defect in the third part {xxiv} of this History, by Sir W. Alexander,” which had been printed separately at Dublin the same year. In the present edition his supplement begins on page 428 and ends on page 451, where Sir William’s apologie for the liberty taken is duly quoted. Sir William Alexander of Menstrie, afterwards Earl of Stirling, was a poet and dramatist, and a statesman of genius, who died in 1610. He was a friend of Drummond of Hawthornden. The Dictionary of National Biography states wrongly that he published this continuation of the third book of the Arcadia in 1613, the date of the so-called fourth edition, certain copies of which have extracts from this work inserted. The first London edition, to which Sir William Alexander’s supplement was added, was the eighth, published in 1623; but it is doubtful whether the additional matter was really printed as a part of the volume, or added from the 1621 edition, or some other of which there is no trace, to the only copy of this issue known to Dr Sommer. The pagination, at any rate, is in a confused state pointing to this.

The sixth book of the Arcadia by Richard Beling (see infra p. 631), first published at Dublin, in 1624, was added to the ninth edition, miscalled the sixth, in 1627. It is not mentioned on the title, but before this new supplement another title-page is inserted, running as follows, “A Sixth Booke to the Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia: written by R. B. of Lincolnes Inne Esquire. (Sat, si bene; si male, nimium.) London, printed by H. L. and R. Y. 1628,” thus dating a year later than the title-page proper. After Beling’s continuation come the Sonnets, the Defence of Poesie, Astrophel, etc. This edition was reprinted in exact conformity, except that the new title-page mentions the work of Beling, in 1629; and the five other seventeenth-century editions, appearing in 1633, 1638, 1655, 1662, and 1674, corresponded exactly in all textual respects but the title-page, except that in the twelfth, described as the ninth, edition (1638), an alternative supplement to a defect in the third book is introduced by Mr Ja. Johnstone, “Scoto-Brit,” and in addition to this the 1655 edition contained the forty-eight couplets entitled “A Remedie for Loue,” and an alphabetical table, or clavis, forming an index to the stories in the Arcadia.

Dr Sommer mentions only one edition in the eighteenth {xxv} century, one in three volumes containing also the poetical works and the Defence of Poesy, and described as the fourteenth edition, although fifteen previous editions have now been enumerated. The title of the first volume is dated 1725, but the other two volumes bear that of the preceding year, the preliminary matter of the first not having, apparently, been completed in 1724. This was a London edition, and Dr Sommer was not aware of another seventeenth century edition, printed at Dublin in 1739, which was a reproduction of this one: it bears the imprint, “Dublin: printed by S. Powell, for T. Moore, at Erasmus’s Head in Dame Street, Bookseller, MDCCXXXIX”; and a copy has been used in preparing the present edition.

The only edition of the Arcadia in the nineteenth century, with the exception of the photographic reproduction of the first edition by Dr Sommer, was published by Sampson Low, Son, and Marston, in 1867, and was preceded by an introductory essay by Hain Friswell, the author of The Gentle Life, who says:—

In the edition now offered to the student of Elizabethan literature an opposite method has been adopted. Rather than run any risk of omitting anything that is Sidney’s, it has been thought advisable to give the whole Arcadia, excrescences and all, especially as the additions of those who were fellow-spirits and admirers, and belonged to the same great epoch, cannot be without their interest to readers in the present age, who may, at any rate, skip the contributions of Alexander and Beling if they are so minded. The example of Hain Friswell has been followed, however, so far as the modernisation of the spelling and punctuation is concerned. “A Continuation of Sir P. Sidney’s Arcadia written by a young Gentlewoman” (Mrs A. W. Weames), and published at London, in 1651, and James Johnstone’s “Supplement to a defect in the Third Book,” which is merely an alternative to Alexander’s, are not included.

There was a modernised edition of the Arcadia published in 1725, under the title, “Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, Moderniz’d by Mrs Stanley, London, Printed in the Year MDCCXXV”; and there were extracts from the book, like the abstract entitled, “The Famous History of Heroick Acts or the Honour of Chivalry,” London, 1701; and two versions of the episode of Argalus and Parthenia, the first, “The Unfortunate Lovers: the History of Argalus and Parthenia” (fourth edition, 1715), and “The History of Argalus and Parthenia. Being A Choice Flower Gathered out of Sir Philip Sidney’s Rare Garden,” c. 1770 and 1780. Dr Grosart included all the poems occurring in the Arcadia in his edition of “The Complete Poems of Sir Philip Sidney,” in three volumes, in 1877. Students of our old texts owe an immense debt to Dr Sommer for the pains and industry lavished on his sumptuous facsimile editions of Caxton’s Malory and Sidney’s Arcadia, in both of which the comparison of all the extant readings has been carried out with microscopic thoroughness, and done once for all.

THE LIFE OF
Sir PHILIP SIDNEY, Kt.

This Marcellus of the English nation, Sir Philip Sidney, the short-lived ornament of his noble family, hath deserved, and, without dispute or envy, enjoyed, the most exalted praises of his own, and of succeeding ages. The poets of his time, especially Spenser, reverenced him, not only as a patron, but a master; and he was almost the only person in any age, I will not except Mecaenas, that could teach the best rules of poetry, and most freely reward the performances of poets. He was a man of a sweet nature, of excellent behaviour, of much, and, withal, of well-digested learning, so that rarely wit, courage, breeding, and other additional accomplishments of conversation, have met in so high a degree in any single person.[3]

Sir Henry Sidney, his father, was a man of excellent natural wit, large heart, sweet conversation; and such a governor as sought not to make an end of the state in himself, but to plant his own ends in the prosperity of his country. Witness his sound establishments, both in Wales and Ireland, where his memory is worthily grateful unto this day.

On the other side, his mother, as she was a woman, by descent, of great nobility (the Lady Mary, eldest daughter of John Dudley, Duke of Northumberland), so was she by nature of a large ingenious spirit.[4] He was born at Penshurst, in the county of Kent, on the 29th day of November, in the year 1554, and had his Christian name given him by his {xxviii} father, from King Philip, then lately married to Queen Mary. While he was very young, he was sent to Christ Church College in Oxford to be improved in all sorts of learning; where continuing till he was about seventeen years of age under the tuition of Dr Tho. Thornton, canon of that house, he was, in June 1572, sent to travel; for on the 24th of August following, when the massacre fell out at Paris, he was then there, and at that time, as I conceive, he, with other Englishmen, did fly to the house of the ambassador from the Queen of England.[5] Thence he went through Lorraine, and by Strasburg and Heidelburg to Frankfort, in September or October following, where he settles, is entertained agent for the Duke of Saxony, and an underhand minister for his own king. Lodged he was in Wechel’s house, the printer of Frankfort.[6] Here he was accompanied by the famous Hubert Languet; and in the next spring, 1573, Languet removed to Vienna, where our author met him again, and stayed with him till September, when he went into Hungary and those parts. Thence he journeyed into Italy, where he continued all the winter following, and most of the summer, 1574, and then he returned into Germany with Languet; and the next spring he returned by Frankfort, Heidelburg, and Antwerp, home into England, about May 1575.

In the year 1576 he was sent by the Queen to Rodolph, the Emperor, to condole the death of Maximilian, and also to other princes of Germany; at which time he caused this inscription to be written under his arms, which he then hung up in all places where he lodged:—

The next year, 1577, in his return, he saw that gallant Prince Don John de Austria, Viceroy of the low countries for the King of Spain, and William, Prince of Orange; by the former of which, though at first he was lightly esteemed {xxix} upon the account of his youth, yet, after some discourse, he found himself so stricken with him that the beholders wondered to see what tribute that brave and high-minded prince paid to his worth, giving more honour and respect to him, in his private capacity, than to the ambassadors of mighty princes.

In the year 1579 he, though neither magistrate nor counsellor, did show himself, for several weighty reasons, opposite to the Queen’s matching with the Duke of Anjou, which he very pithily expressed by a due address of his humble reasons to her, as may be fully seen in a book called “Cabala” (Part III., p. 201). The said address was written at the desire of some great personage—his Uncle Robert, I suppose, Earl of Leicester, upon which a great quarrel happened between him and Edward Vere, Earl of Oxford. This, as I conceive, might occasion his retirement from Court next summer, 1580, wherein, perhaps, he wrote that pleasant romance called “Arcadia.”[7]

In 1581 the treaty of marriage was renewed, and our author, Sidney, with Fulke Greville,[8] were two of the tilters at the entertainment of the French Ambassador; and at the departure of the Duke of Anjou from England, in February of the same year, he attended him to Antwerp.[9]

On the 8th of January 1582 he, with Perigrine Bertie, received the honour of knighthood from the Queen, and in the beginning of 1585 he designed an expedition with Sir Francis Drake into America, but being hindered by the Queen (in whose opinion he was so highly prized that she thought the Court deficient without him) he was, in October following, made Governor of Flushing—about that time delivered to the Queen for one of the cautionary towns—and General of the Horse. In both which places of great trust his carriage testified to the world his wisdom and valour, with addition of honour to his country by them; and especially the more, when in July 1586 he surprised Axil, and preserved the lives and honour of the English army at the enterprise of Gravelin: so that whereas (through the fame of his high {xxx} deserts) he was then, or rather before, in election for the Crown of Poland, the Queen of England refused to further his advancement, not out of emulation, but out of fear to lose the jewel of her times. What can be said more? He was a statesman, soldier, and scholar—a complete master of matter and language, as his immortal pen shows. His pen and his sword have rendered him famous enough: he died by the one, and by the other he will ever live as having been hitherto highly extolled for it by the pens of princes. This is the happiness of art, that although the sword doth achieve the honour, yet the arts do record it, and no pen hath made it better known than his own in that book called “Arcadia.” Certain it is, he was a noble and matchless gentleman, and it may be justly said, without hyperbole or fiction, as it was of Cato Uticensis, that “he seemed to be born to that only which he went about.” His written works are these:—

The Countess of Pembroke’s “Arcadia,”[10] which being the most celebrated romance that was ever written, was consecrated to his noble, virtuous, and learned sister Mary, the wife of Henry, Earl of Pembroke, who, having lived to a very fair age, died in her house in Aldersgate Street, in London, the 25th of September 1621, whereupon her body was buried in the cathedral church of Salisbury, among the graves of the Pembrochian family. This “Arcadia,” though then, and since, it was, and is, taken into the hands of all ingenious men, and said by one living at, or near, the time when first published, to be “a book most famous for rich conceits and splendour of courtly expressions.” This work was first printed in the year 1613 in quarto; it hath been translated into French, Dutch, and other languages in 1624.

Besides Astrophel and Stella,[11] A Remedy for Love, The Defence of Poesy,[12] Sonnets, etc., Sir Philip also turned the Psalms of David into English verse, which are in manuscript in the library of the Earl of Pembroke at Wilton, curiously bound in a crimson velvet cover, left thereunto by his sister Mary, Countess of Pembroke.[13]

The following dialogue, composed by our author, was spoken between two shepherds in a pastoral entertainment before several gentlemen and ladies at the seat of the noble family above mentioned.

In the year 1586,[14] when that unfortunate stand was made against the Spaniards before Zutphen, the 22nd of September, while he was getting upon the third horse, having had two slain under him before, he was wounded with a musket shot out of the trenches, which broke the bone of his thigh. The horse he rode upon was rather furiously choleric than bravely proud, and so forced him to forsake the field, but not his back, as the noblest and fittest bier to carry a martial commander to his grave. In which sad progress, passing along by the rest of the army, where his uncle,[15] the general, was, and, being thirsty with excess of bleeding, he called for drink, which was presently brought him; but, as he was putting the bottle to his mouth, he saw a poor soldier carried along, who had eaten his last at the same feast, ghastly casting up his eyes at the bottle, which Sir Philip perceiving, took it from his head before he drank, and delivered it to the poor man, with these words: “Thy necessity is yet greater than mine.” And when he had pledged this poor soldier, he was presently carried to Arnheim, where the principal surgeons of the camp attended for him. When they began to dress his wounds, he, both by way of charge and advice, told them that, while his strength was yet entire, his body free from fever, and his mind able to endure, they might freely use their art, cut, and search to the bottom; but if they should neglect their art, and renew torments in the declination of nature, their ignorance, or overtenderness, would prove a kind of tyranny to their friend, and, {xxxiii} consequently, a blemish to their reverend science. With love and care well mixed they began the cure, and continued it some sixteen days, with such confidence of his recovery as the joy of their hearts overflowed their discretion, and made them spread the intelligence of it to the Queen, and all his noble friends here in England, where it was received, not as private, but public good news.

At the same time Count Hollock was under the care of a most excellent surgeon for a wound in his throat by a musket shot, yet did he neglect his own extremity to save his friend, and to that end had sent him to Sir Philip. This surgeon, notwithstanding, out of love to his master, returning one day to dress his wound, the Count cheerfully asked him how Sir Philip did? and he answered, with a heavy countenance, that he was not well. At these words the worthy prince, as having more sense of his friend’s wound than his own, cries out: “Away, villain! never see my face again, till thou bring better news of that man’s recovery, for whose redemption many such as I were happily lost.”

Now, after the sixteenth day was passed, and the very shoulder-bones of this delicate patient worn through his skin with constant and obedient posturing of his body to the surgeon’s art, he, judiciously observing the pangs his wound stang him with by fits, together with many other symptoms of decay, few or none of recovery, began rather to submit his body to these artists than any farther to believe in them. He called the ministers unto him, who were all excellent men, of divers nations, and before them made such a confession of Christian faith as no book, but the heart, can truly and feelingly deliver. Then, calling for his will, and settling his worldly affairs, the last scene of this tragedy was the parting between the two brothers: the weaker showing infinite strength in suppressing sorrow, and the stronger, infinite weakness in expressing of it. And to stop the natural torrent of affection in both, Sir Philip took his leave, with these admonishing words: “Love my memory, cherish my friends; their faith to me may assure you they are honest. But, above all, govern your will and affections by the will and word of your Creator; in me, beholding the end of this world, with all her vanities.” And with this farewell, desired the company to lead him away.

After his death, which happened on the 16th of October, the states of Zealand became suitors to her majesty and his noble friends, that they might have the honour of burying his body at the public expense of their government.[16] This was not permitted; for soon after his body was brought to Flushing, and, being embarked with great solemnity on the 1st of November, landed at Tower Wharf on the 6th day of the same month. Thence it was conveyed to the Minories without Aldgate, where it lay in state for some time, till his magnificent funeral in St Paul’s Cathedral, the 16th of February following, which, as many princes have not exceeded in the solemnity, so few have equalled in the sorrow for his loss. He was buried near to that place which his father-in-law, Sir Francis Walsingham, had designed (as I have heard) to be entombed in, without any monument or inscription. King James honoured him with an epitaph of his composition, and the Muses, both of Oxford and Cambridge, lamenting much for his loss, composed verses to his memory. Besides, several private persons did also exercise their fancies upon this occasion; for, so general was the lamentation, that it was accounted a sin for any gentleman of quality, for many months after, to appear at court or city in any light or gaudy apparel.

No monument hath since been erected over him, whereof this reason is assigned, that “He is his own monument, whose memory is eternised in his writings, and who was born into the world to show unto our age a sample of ancient virtues.”[17]

He left behind him a daughter named Elizabeth, who was born in 1585. She married Roger Mannours, Earl of Rutland, but died without issue.[18]

I confess it is commonly reported that Sir Philip,[19] some hours before his death, enjoined a near friend to consign these his works to the flames, whereby posterity had been deprived of much pleasure and profit accruing thereby. What promise his friend returned herein is uncertain; but if he broke his word to be faithful to the public good, posterity will absolve him, without doing any penance, for being guilty of such a {xxxv} meritorious offence, wherewith he hath obliged so many ages. Hear the excellent epigrammatist, Owen, hereon:—

As the ancient Egyptians presented secrets under their mystical hieroglyphics, so that an easy figure was exhibited to the eye, and a higher notion tendered under it to the judgment, so all the “Arcadia” is a continual grove of morality, shadowing moral and politic results under the plain and easy emblems of lovers, so that the reader may be deceived, but not hurt thereby, when surprised on a sudden to more knowledge than he expected.

I will not here endeavour to offer the reader a key to unfold what persons were intended under the fictitious denominations: herein must men shoot at the wild rovers of their own conjectures. And many have forged keys of their own fancies, all pretended to be the right, though unlike one to another. But, besides, it is an injury to impose guesses for truths on any belief; such applications, rather made than meant, are not without reflections on families, as may justly give distaste. I dare confidently aver that the wards of this lock are grown so rusty with time that a modern key will scarce unlock it, seeing in above a hundred years many criticisms of time, place, and person, wherein the life and lustre of this story did consist, are utterly lost, and unknown in our age.

TESTIMONIES CONCERNING THE
AUTHOR

Gulielmus Camdenus de Praelio inter Anglos et Hispanos prope Zutphaniam in Geldriâ.

“Ex Anglis pauci desiderati; sed qui instar plurimorum, Sidneius, equo perfosso dum alterum ascendit, glande femur trajectus,[20] vicesimo quinto post die, magno sui desiderio bonis relicto, in flore aetatis exspiravit, vix quatuor menses patri superstes. Cui Leicestrius avunculus in Angliam reversus, exequias, magno apparatu, et militari ritu, in Templo Sti. Pauli Londini solvit, Jacobus Rex Scotorum epitaphio parentavit: utraque Academia lacrymas consecravit, et Novum Oxoniae Collegium elegantissimum[21] Peplum contexuit. Haec et ampliora viri virtus, ingenium splendidissimum, eruditio politissima, moresque suavissimi meruerunt.”

“Being a scholar at Oxford at fourteen years of age, and three years standing upon a wrong-conceived opinion touching my sufficiency, I was then called to dispute extempore with the matchless Sir Philip Sidney, in presence of the Earls of Leicester and Warwick, and divers other great personages.”[22]

“Arcadia in Greece is a country whose fitness for pasturage {xxxvii} and grazing hath made it the subject of many worthy and witty discourses, especially that of Sir Philip Sidney, of whom I cannot but make honourable mention. A book, which, besides its excellent language, rare contrivances, and delectable stories, hath in it all the strains of poesy, comprehendeth the universal art of speaking, and, to them who can discern, and will observe, affordeth notable rules for demeanour, both private and public.”

“His romance was but policy played with Machiavel in jest, and state maxims sweetened to a courtier’s palate. He writ men as exactly as he studied them; and discerned humours in the court with the same deep insight he described them in his book. All were pleased with his ‘Arcadia’ but himself, whose years advanced him so much beyond himself as his parts did beyond others. He condemned his ‘Arcadia,’ in his more retired judgment, to the fire, which wise men think will continue to the last conflagration. It was he whom Queen Elizabeth called her Philip,[23] the Prince of Orange his master, and whose friendship my Lord Brooks was so proud of that he would have no other epitaph on his grave than this:—

“The true spirit or vein of ancient poetry, under the name of romance, seems to shine most in Sir Philip Sidney, whom I esteem both the greatest poet and the noblest genius of any that have left writings behind them, and published in ours, or any other modern language. A person born capable, not only of forming the greatest ideas, but of leaving the noblest examples, if the length of his life had been equal to the excellence of his wit and his virtues.”

“My lord,—Your illustrious forefathers and, indeed, all your eminent relations, have always been of the first-rate nobility, patrons of wit and arms, magnificently brave, true old stampt Britons, and ever foremost in the race of glory. Not to unravel half your honourable records, I challenge all the men of fame to show an equal to the immortal Sidney, even when so many contemporary worthies flourished. I mean Sir Philip, true rival of your honour; one that could match your spirit; so most extravagantly great that he refused to be a king. He was at once a Caesar and a Virgil, the leading soldier, and the foremost poet. All after this must fail: I have paid just veneration to his name, and, methinks, the spirit of Shakespear pushed the commendation.”

[SIDNEY’S DEDICATION]

Here now have you (most dear, and most worthy to be most dear lady!) this idle work of mine, which, I fear, like the spider’s web, will be thought fitter to be swept away, than worn to any other purpose. For my part, in very truth (as the cruel fathers among the Greeks were wont to do to the babes they would not foster), I could well find in my heart to cast out, in some desert of forgetfulness, this child, which I am loth to father. But you desired me to do it, and your desire to my heart is an absolute commandment. Now, it is done only for you, only to you: if you keep it to yourself, or commend it to such friends who will weigh errors in the balance of goodwill, I hope, for the father’s sake, it will be pardoned, perchance, made much of, though in itself it have deformities. For indeed, for severer eyes it is not, being but a trifle, and that triflingly handled. Your dear self can best witness the manner, being done in loose sheets of paper, most of it in your presence; the rest by sheets sent unto you, as fast as they were done. In sum, a young head, not so well stayed as I would it were, and shall be when God will, having many fancies begotten in it, if it had not been in some way delivered, would have grown a monster, and more sorry might I be that they came in, than that they gat out. But this chief safety shall be the not walking abroad; and his chief protection, the bearing the livery of your name, which, if much {xl} goodwill do not deceive me, is worthy to be a sanctuary for a greater offender. This say I, because I know thy virtue so, and this say I, because it may be ever so, or, to say better, because it will be ever so. Read it, then, at your idle times, and the follies your good judgment will find in it blame not, but laugh at. And so, looking for no better stuff than as in a haberdasher’s shop, glasses, or feathers, you will continue to love the writer, who doth exceedingly love you, and most heartily prays you may long live to be a principal ornament to the family of the Sidneys. Your loving brother,

ARCADIA
BOOK I

It was in the time that the earth begins to put on her new apparel against the approach of her lover, and that the sun, running a most even course, becomes an indifferent arbiter between the night and the day, when the hopeless shepherd Strephon was come to the sands, which lie against the island of Cithera; where viewing the place with a heavy kind of delight, and sometimes casting his eyes to the isleward, he called his friendly rival the pastor Claius unto him; and setting first down in his darkened countenance a doleful copy of what he would speak, “O my Claius,” said he, “hither we are now come to pay the rent, for which we are so called unto by over-busy remembrance, remembrance, restless remembrance, which claims not only this duty of us, but for it will have us forget ourselves. I pray you, when we were amid our flock, and that of other shepherds some were running after their sheep, strayed beyond their bounds; some delighting their eyes with seeing them nibble upon the short and sweet grass; some medicining their sick ewes; some setting a bell for an ensign of a sheepish squadron; some with more leisure inventing new games of exercising their bodies, and sporting their wits; did remembrance grant us any holiday, either for pastime or devotion, nay either for necessary food, or natural rest, but that still it forced our thoughts to work upon this place, where we last (alas! that the word last should so long last) did graze our eyes upon her ever-flourishing beauty, did it not still cry within us? ‘Ah, you base-minded wretches!—are your thoughts so deeply bemired in the trade of ordinary worldings, as for respect of gain some paltry wool may yield you, to let so much time pass without knowing perfectly her estate, especially in so troublesome a season; to leave that shore unsaluted from whence you may see to the island where she dwelleth; to leave those steps unkissed wherein Urania printed the farewell of all beauty?’

“Well, then, remembrance commanded, we obeyed, and here we find that as our remembrance came ever clothed unto us in the form of this place, so this place gives new heat to the fever of our languishing remembrance. Yonder, my Claius, Urania lighted; the very horse, methought, bewailed to be so disburdened: and as for thee, poor Claius, when thou wentest to help her down, I saw reverence and desire so divide thee, that thou didst at one instant both blush and quake, and instead of bearing her wert ready to fall down thyself. There she sat, vouchsafing my cloak (then most gorgeous) under her: at yonder rising of the ground she turned herself, looking back towards her wonted abode, and because of her parting, bearing much sorrow in her eyes, the lightsomeness whereof had yet so natural a cheerfulness that it made even sorrow seem to smile; at that turning she spake to us all, opening the cherry of her lips, and Lord how greedily mine ears did feed upon the sweet words she uttered! And here she laid her hand over thine eyes, when she saw the tears springing in them, as if she would conceal them from other, and yet herself feel some of thy sorrow. But woe is me, yonder, yonder, did she put her foot into the boat, at that instant, as it were, dividing her heavenly beauty between the earth and the sea. But when she was embarked, did you not mark how the winds whistled and the seas danced for joy, how the sails did swell with pride, and all because they had Urania? O Urania, blessed be thou Urania, the sweetest fairness, and fairest sweetness!”

With that word his voice brake so with sobbing, that he could say no further; and Claius thus answered:

“Alas my Strephon,” said he, “what needs this score to reckon up only our losses? What doubt is there, but that the sight of this place doth call our thoughts to appear at the court of affection, held by that racking steward remembrance? As well may sheep forget to fear when they spy wolves, as we can miss such fancies when we see any place made happy by her treading. Who can choose that saw her, but think where she stayed, where she walked, where she turned, where she spoke? But what is all this? truly no more, but as this place served us to think of those things, so those things serve as places to call to memory more excellent matters. No, no, let us think with consideration, and consider with acknowledging, and acknowledge with admiration, and admire with love, and love with joy in the midst of all woes. Let us in such sort think, I say, that our poor eyes were so enriched as to behold and our low hearts so exalted as to love a maid who is such, that as the greatest thing the world can shew is her beauty, so the least thing that may be praised in her is her beauty. Certainly as her eye-lids are more pleasant to behold than two {3} white kids climbing up a fair tree, and browsing on its tenderest branches, and yet are nothing comparing to the day-shining stars contained in them; and as her breath is more sweet than a gentle south-west wind, which comes creeping over flowery fields and shadowed waters in the extreme heat of summer; and yet is nothing, compared to the honey-flowing speech that breath doth carry: no more all that our eyes can see of her (though when they have seen her, what else they shall ever see is but dry stubble after clover-grass) is to be matched with the flock of unspeakable virtues laid up delightfully in that best-builded fold. But indeed, as we can better consider the sun’s beauty by marking how he gilds these waters and mountains than by looking upon his own face, too glorious for our weak eyes: so it may be our conceits (not able to bear her sun-staining excellency) will better weigh it by her works upon some meaner subject employed. And alas, who can better witness that than we, whose experience is grounded upon feeling? Hath not the only love of her made us (being silly ignorant shepherds) raise up our thoughts above the ordinary level of the world, so that great clerks do not disdain our conference? Hath not the desire to seem worthy in her eyes made us, when others were sleeping, to sit viewing the course of the heavens; when others were running at Base[1], to run over learned writings; when others mark their sheep, we to mark ourselves? Hath not she thrown reason upon our desires, and, as it were, given eyes unto Cupid? Hath in any but in her love-fellowship maintained friendship between rivals, and beauty taught the beholders chastity?”

He was going on with his praises, but Strephon bade him stay and look: and so they both perceived a thing which floated, drawing nearer and nearer to the bank; but rather by the favourable working of the sea than by any self-industry. They doubted a while what it should be till it was cast up even hard before them, at which time they fully saw that it was a man. Whereupon running for pity’s sake unto him, they found his hands (as it should appear, constanter friends to his life than his memory) fast gripping upon the edge of a square small coffer which lay all under his breast: else in himself no show of life, so that the board seemed to be but a bier to carry him to land to his sepulchre. So drew they up a young man of goodly shape, and well-pleasing favour, that one would think death had in him a lovely countenance; and that, though he were naked, nakedness was to him an apparel. That sight increased their compassion, and their compassion called up their care; so that lifting his feet above his head, making a great deal of salt water come out of his mouth, {4} they laid him upon some of their garments, and fell to rub and chafe him, till they brought him to recover both breath, the servant, and warmth, the companion, of living. At length opening his eyes, he gave a great groan (a doleful note, but a pleasant ditty, for by that they found not only life but strength of life in him). They therefore continued on their charitable office until, his spirits being well returned, he—without so much as thanking them for their pains—gat up, and looking round about to the uttermost limits of sight, and crying upon the name of Pyrocles, nor seeing nor hearing cause of comfort, “What,” said he, “and shall Musidorus live after Pyrocles’s destruction?”

Therewithal he offered wilfully to cast himself again into the sea: a strange sight to the shepherds, to whom it seemed that before being in appearance dead, had yet saved his life, and now coming to his life, should be a cause to procure his death; but they ran unto him, and pulling him back (then too feeble for them) by force stickled that unnatural fray.

“I pray you,” said he, “honest men, what such right have you in me, as not to suffer me to do with myself what I list, and what policy have you to bestow a benefit where it is counted an injury?”

They hearing him speak in Greek (which was their natural language) became the more tender-hearted towards him, and considering by his calling and looking that the loss of some dear friend was great cause of his sorrow, told him, they were poor men that were bound, by course of humanity, to prevent so great a mischief; and that they wished him, if opinion of some body’s perishing bred such desperate anguish in him, that he should be comforted by his own proof, who had lately escaped as apparent danger as any might be.

“No, no,” said he, “it is not for me to attend so high a blissfulness: but since you take care of me, I pray you find means that some barque may be provided, that will go out of the haven that if it be possible we may find the body, far, far too precious food for fishes: and for that hire I have within this casket of value sufficient to content them.”

Claius presently went to a fisherman, and having agreed with him, and provided some apparel for the naked stranger, he embarked, and the shepherds with him: and were no sooner gone beyond the mouth of the haven, but that some way into the sea they might discern, as it were, a stain of the water’s colour, and by times some sparks and smoke mounting thereout. But the young man no sooner saw it, but that beating his breast he cried that there was the beginning of his ruin, entreating them to bend their course as near unto it as they could; telling, how that smoke was but a small relique of a great fire which had driven both him and {5} his friend rather to commit themselves to the cold mercy of the sea than to abide the hot cruelty of the fire; and that therefore, though they both had abandoned the ship, that he was (if any were) in that course to be met withal. They steered therefore as near thitherward as they could: but when they came so near that their eyes were full masters of the object, they saw a sight full of piteous strangeness: a ship, or rather the carcase of the ship, or rather some few bones of the carcase hulling there, part broken, part burned, part drowned: death having used more than one dart to that destruction. About it floated great store of very rich things and many chests which might promise no less. And amidst the precious things were a number of dead bodies, which likewise did not only testify both elements’ violence, but that the chief violence was grown of human inhumanity: for their bodies were full of grisly wounds, and their blood had (as it were) filled the wrinkles of the sea’s visage; which it seemed the sea would not wash away, that it might witness that it is not always its fault when we do condemn its cruelty. In sum, a defeat where the conquered kept both field and spoil: a shipwreck without storm or ill-footing: and a waste of fire in the midst of the water.

But a little way off they saw the mast, whose proud height now lay along; like a widow having lost her mate of whom she held her honour: but upon the mast they saw a young man (at least if he were a man) bearing show of about eighteen years of age, who sat (as on horse-back) having nothing upon him but his shirt, which being wrought with blue silk and gold had a kind of resemblance to the sea: on which the sun (then near his western home) did shoot some of his beams. His hair (which the young men of Greece used to wear very long) was stirred up and down with the wind, which seemed to have a sport to play with it, as the sea had to kiss his feet; himself full of admirable beauty, set forth by the strangeness both of his seat and gesture. For, holding his head up full of unmoved majesty he held a sword aloft with his fair arm, which often he waved about his crown, as though he would threaten the world in that extremity. But the fishermen, when they came so near him that it was time to throw out a rope by which hold they might draw him, their simplicity bred such amazement, and their amazement such superstition that (assuredly thinking it was some God begotten between Neptune and Venus that had made all this terrible slaughter), as they went under sail by him, held up their hands and made their prayers. Which when Musidorus saw, though he were almost as much ravished with joy as they with astonishment, he leaped to the mariner, and took the cord out of his hand, and (saying, “Dost thou live, and art thou well,” who answered, “Thou canst tell best, {6} since most of my well-being stands in thee,”) threw it out, but already the ship was passed beyond Pyrocles: and therefore Musidorus could do no more but persuade the mariners to cast about again, assuring them that he was but a man, although of most divine excellencies, and promising great rewards for their pains.

And now they were already come upon the stays; when one of the sailors descried a galley which came with sails and oars directly in the chase of them; and straight perceived it was a well-known pirate who hunted not only for goods but for bodies of men, which he employed either to be his galley-slaves or to sell at the best market. Which when the matter understood, he commanded forthwith to set on all the canvas he could and fly homeward, leaving in that fort poor Pyrocles so near to be rescued. But what did not Musidorus say, what did he not offer to persuade them to venture to fight; but fear standing at the gates of their ears, put back all persuasions: so that he had nothing whatever to accompany Pyrocles but his eyes, nought to succour him but his wishes. Therefore praying for him, and casting a long look that way, he saw the galley leave the pursuit of them and turn to take up the spoils of the other wreck: and lastly he might well see them lift up the young man; and “alas,” said he to himself, “dear Pyrocles, shall that body of thine be enchained, shall those victorious hands of thine be commanded to base offices, shall virtue become a slave to those that be slaves to viciousness, alas, better had it been thou hadst ended nobly thy noble days: what death is so evil as unworthy servitude?”

But that opinion soon ceased when he saw the galley setting upon another ship, which held long and strong fight with her: for then he began afresh to fear the life of his friend, and to wish well to the pirates whom before he hated, lest in their ruin he might perish. But the fishermen made such speed into the haven, that they absented his eyes from beholding the issue: where being entered, he could not procure neither them, or any other as then, to put themselves into the sea: so that being so full of sorrow for being unable to do anything as void of counsel how to do anything, besides that sickness grew something upon him, the honest shepherds Strephon and Claius (who being themselves true friends did the more perfectly judge the justness of his sorrow) advise him that he should mitigate somewhat of his woe, since he had gotten an amendment in fortune, being come from assured persuasion of his death to have no cause to despair of his life: as one that had lamented the death of his sheep should after know they were but strayed would receive pleasure, though readily he knew not where to find them.

“Now, Sir,” said they, “thus for ourselves it is; we are in profession but shepherds, and in this country of Laconia little better than strangers, and therefore neither in skill nor ability of power greatly to stead you. But what we can present unto you is this: Arcadia, of which country we are, is but a little way hence; and even upon the next confines there dwelleth a gentleman, by name Kalander, who vouchsafest much favour unto us: a man who for his hospitality is so much haunted that no news stir but comes to his ears; for his upright dealings so beloved of his neighbours, that he hath many ever ready to do him their uttermost service; and by the great goodwill our prince bears him may soon obtain the use of his name and credit, which hath a principal sway, not only in his own Arcadia, but in all these countries of Peloponnesus: and (which is worth all) all these things give him not so much power, as his nature gives him will to benefit: so that it seems no music is so sweet to his ears as deserved thanks. To him we will bring you, and there you may recover again your health, without which you cannot be able to make any diligent search for your friend; and therefore you must labour for it. Besides, we are sure the comfort of courtesy and ease of wise counsel shall not be wanting.”

Musidorus (who, besides he was merely unacquainted in the country, had his wits astonished with sorrow) gave easy consent to that from which he saw no reason to disagree: and therefore (defraying the mariners with a ring bestowed upon them) they took their journey together through Laconia; Claius and Strephon by course carrying his chest for him, Musidorus only bearing in his countenance evident marks of a sorrowful mind, supported with a weak body; which they perceiving, and knowing that the violence of sorrow is not, at the first, to be striven withal (being like a mighty beast, sooner tamed with following than overthrown by withstanding), they gave way unto it, for that day and the next; never troubling him, either with asking questions or finding fault with his melancholy; but rather fitting to his dolour, dolorous discourses of their own and other folks’ misfortunes. Which speeches, though they had not a lively entrance to his senses shut up in sorrow, yet like one half asleep he took hold of much of the matter spoken unto him, for that a man may say, ere sorrow was aware, they made his thoughts bear away something else beside his own sorrow, which wrought so in him, that at length he grew content to mark their speeches, then to marvel at such wit in shepherds, after to like their company, and lastly to vouchsafe conference: so that the third day after, in the time that the morning did strew roses and violets in the heavenly floor against the coming of the sun, the nightingales (striving one with the other {8} which could in most dainty variety recount their wrong-caused sorrow) made them put off their sleep, and rising from under a tree (which that night had been their pavilion) they went on their journey, which by and by welcomed Musidorus’s eyes (wearied with the wasted soil of Laconia) with delightful prospects.

There were hills which garnished their proud heights with stately trees; humble valleys whose base estate seemed comforted with the refreshing of silver rivers; meadows, enamelled with all sorts of eye-pleasing flowers; thickets, which, being lined with most pleasant shade, were witnessed so too by the cheerful disposition of many well-tuned birds; each pasture stored with sheep feeding with sober security, while the pretty lambs with bleating oratory craved the dams’ comfort; here a shepherd’s boy piping, as though he should never be old; there a young shepherdess knitting, and withal singing, and it seemed that her voice comforted her hands to work and her hands kept time to her voice-music. As for the houses of the country (for many houses came under their eye) they were all scattered, no two being one by the other, and yet not so far off as that it barred mutual succour: a show, as it were, of an accompanable solitariness and of a civil wildness. “I pray you,” said Musidorus, then first unsealing his long silent lips: “what countries be these we pass through, which are so divers in show, the one wanting no store, the other having no store but of want?”

“The country,” answered Claius, “where you were cast ashore and now are passed through is Laconia, not so poor by the barrenness of the soil (though in itself not passing fertile) as by a civil war, which being these two years within the bowels of that estate, between the gentlemen and the peasants (by them named Helots), hath in this fort as it were disfigured the face of nature, and made it so unhospitable as now you have found it: the towns neither of the one side nor the other willingly opening their gates to strangers, nor strangers willingly entering for fear of being mistaken.

“But this country where now you set your foot is Arcadia: and even hard by is the house of Kalander, whither we lead you. This country being thus decked with peace and (the child of peace) good husbandry, these houses you see so scattered are of men, as we two are, that live upon the commodity of their sheep; and therefore in the division of the Arcadian estate are termed shepherds: a happy people, wanting little, because they desire not much.”

“What cause then,” said Musidorus, “made you venture to leave this sweet life, and put yourself in yonder unpleasant and dangerous realm?” “Guarded with poverty,” answered Strephon, “and {9} guided with love.” “But now,” said Claius, “since it hath pleased you to ask anything of us, whose baseness is such as the very knowledge is darkness, give us leave to know something of you, and of the young man you so much lament, that at least we may be the better instructed to inform Kalander, and he the better know how to proportion his entertainment.”

Musidorus, according to the agreement between Pyrocles and him to alter their names answered that he called himself Palladius and his friend Daiphantus; “but till I have him again,” said he, “I am indeed nothing, and therefore my story is of nothing; his entertainment (since so good a man he is) cannot be so low as I account my estate; and in sum, the sum of all his courtesy may be to help me by some means to seek my friend.”

They perceived he was not willing to open himself further, and therefore without further questioning brought him to the house; about which they might see (with fit consideration both of the air, the prospect, and the nature of the ground) all such necessary additions to a great house as might well show Kalander knew that provision is the foundation of hospitality and thrift the fuel of magnificence. The house itself was built of fair and strong stone, not affecting so much any extraordinary kind of fineness as an honourable representing of a firm stateliness. The lights, doors and stairs rather directed to the use of the guest than to the eye of the artificer; and yet as the one chiefly heeded, so the other not neglected; each place handsome without curiosity, and homely without loathsomeness; not so dainty as not to be trod on, nor yet slubbered up with good fellowship; all more lasting than beautiful, but that the consideration of the exceeding lastingness made the eye believe it was exceeding beautiful. The servants not so many in number as cleanly in apparel and serviceable in behaviour, testifying even in their countenances that their master took as well care to be served as of them that did serve. One of them was forthwith ready to welcome the shepherds as men whom though they were poor their master greatly favoured; and understanding by them that the young man with them was to be much accounted of, for that they had seen tokens of more than common greatness, howsoever now eclipsed with fortune, he ran to his master, who came presently forth, and pleasantly welcoming the shepherds, but especially applying him to Musidorus, Strephon privately told him all what he knew of him, and particularly that he found this stranger was loth to be known.

“No,” said Kalander speaking aloud, “I am no herald to inquire of men’s pedigrees; it sufficeth me if I know their virtues; which (if this young man’s face be not a false witness) do better apparel his mind, than you have done his body.” While he was thus {10} speaking, there came a boy in show like a merchant’s prentice, who, taking Strephon by the sleeve delivered him a letter, written jointly both to him and Claius, from Urania, which they no sooner had read but that with short leave taking of Kalander (who quickly guessed and smiled at the matter) and once again (though hastily) recommending the young man unto him, they went away, leaving Musidorus even loth to part with them, for the good conversation he had had of them and obligation he accounted himself tied in unto them: and therefore, they delivering his chest unto him, he opened it, and would have presented them with two very rich jewels, but they absolutely refused them, telling him that they were more than enough rewarded in the knowing of him, and without hearkening unto a reply (like men whose hearts disdained all desires but one) gat speedily away, as if the letter had brought wings to make them fly. But by that sight Kalander soon judged that his guest was of no mean calling; and therefore the more respectfully entertaining him, Musidorus found his sickness (which the fight, the sea and late travel had laid upon him) grow greatly, so that, fearing some sudden accident, he delivered the chest to Kalander, which was full of most precious stones gorgeously and cunningly set in divers manners, desiring him he would keep those trifles, and if he died, he would bestow so much of it as was needful, to find out and redeem a young man, naming himself Daiphantus, as then in the hands of Laconian pirates.

But Kalander seeing him faint more and more, with careful speed conveyed him to the most commodious lodging in his house, where being possessed with an extreme burning fever he continued some while with no great hope of life; but youth at length got the victory of sickness, so that in six weeks the excellency of his returned beauty was a credible ambassador of his health, to the great joy of Kalander, who, as in his time he had by certain friends of his that dwelt near the sea in Messenia set forth a ship and a galley to seek and succour Daiphantus, so at home did he omit nothing which he thought might either profit or gratify Palladius.

For, having found in him (besides his bodily gifts beyond the degree of admiration) by daily discourses, which he delighted himself to have with him, a mind of most excellent composition, a piercing wit, quite void of ostentation, high erected thought seated in a heart of courtesy, an eloquence as sweet in the uttering as slow to come to the uttering, a behaviour so noble as gave a majesty to adversity; and all in a man whose age could not be above one and twenty years; the good old man was even enamoured with a fatherly love towards him, or rather became his servant by the bonds such virtue laid upon him; once, he acknowledged himself so to be by the badge of diligent attendance.

But Palladius having gotten his health, and only staying there to be in place where he might hear answer of the ships set forth, Kalander one afternoon led him abroad to a well-arrayed ground he had behind his house, which he thought to show him before his going as the place himself more than in any other delighted in. The backside of the house was neither field, garden nor orchard; or rather it was both field, garden and orchard: for as soon as the descending of the stairs had delivered them down, they came into a place cunningly set with trees of the most taste-pleasing fruits: but scarcely they had taken that into their consideration but that they were suddenly stept into a delicate green; of each side of the green a thicket, and behind the thickets again new beds of flowers, which being under the trees the trees were to them a pavilion, and they to the trees a mosaical floor, so that it seemed that Art therein would needs be delightful, by counterfeiting his enemy Error and making order in confusion.

In the midst of all the place was a fair pond whose shaking crystal was a perfect mirror to all the other beauties, so that it bare show of two gardens; one in deed, the other in shadows. And in one of the thickets was a fine fountain made thus: a naked Venus of white marble, wherein the graver had used such cunning that the natural blue veins of the marble were framed in fit places to set forth the beautiful veins of her body. At her breast she had her babe Aeneas, who seemed, having begun to suck, to leave that to look upon her fair eyes, which smiled at the babe’s folly, meanwhile the breast running.

Hard by was a house of pleasure built for a summer-retiring place; whither Kalander leading him he found a square room full of delightful pictures made by the most excellent workmen of Greece. There was Diana when Actaeon saw her bathing; in whose cheeks the painter had set such a colour as was mixed between shame and disdain, and one of her foolish nymphs, who weeping, and withal lowering, one might see the workman meant to set forth tears of anger. In another table was Atalanta, the posture of whose limbs was so lively expressed, that if the eyes were only judges, as they be the only seers, one would have sworn the very picture had run. Besides many more, as of Helena, Omphale, Iole: but in none of them all beauty seemed to speak so much as in a large table, which contained a comely old man, with a lady of middle-age, but of excellent beauty, and more excellent would have been deemed, but that there stood between a young maid, whose wonderfulness took away all beauty from her, but that which it might seem she gave her back again by her very shadow. And such difference (being known that it did indeed counterfeit a person living) was there between her and all the other, though {12} goddesses, that it seemed the skill of the painter bestowed nothing on the other new beauty, but that the beauty of her bestowed new skill on the painter. Though he thought inquisitiveness an uncomely guest he could not choose but ask who she was, that bearing show of one being indeed could with natural gifts go beyond the reach of invention. Kalander answered, that it was made by Philoclea, the younger daughter of his prince, who also with his wife were contained in that table: the painter meaning to represent the present condition of the young lady, who stood watched by an over-curious eye of her parents; and that he would also have drawn her eldest sister, esteemed her match for beauty, in her shepherdish attire, but that rude clown her guardian would not suffer it; neither durst he ask leave of the prince, for fear of suspicion. Palladius perceived that the matter was wrapped up in some secrecy, and therefore would, for modesty, demand no further; but yet his countenance could not but with dumb eloquence desire it. Which Kalander perceiving, “Well,” said he, “my dear guest, I know your mind, and I will satisfy it: neither will I do it like a niggardly answerer, going no further than the bounds of the question; but I will discover unto you as well that wherein my knowledge is common with others as that which by extraordinary means is delivered unto me; knowing so much in you (though not long acquainted) that I shall find your ears faithful treasurers.” So then sitting down in two chairs, and sometimes casting his eye to the picture, he thus spake:

“This country Arcadia among all the provinces of Greece, hath ever been had in singular reputation; partly for the sweetness of the air and other natural benefits, but principally for the well-tempered minds of the people who (finding that the shining title of glory, so much affected by other nations, doth indeed help little to the happiness of life) are the only people which, as by their justice and providence give neither cause nor hope to their neighbours to annoy, so are they not stirred with false praise to trouble others’ quiet, thinking it a small reward for the wasting of their own lives in ravening, that their posterity should long after say they had done so. Even the Muses seem to approve their good determination by choosing this country for their chief repairing place, and by bestowing their perfections so largely here that the very shepherds have their fancies lifted to so high conceits that the learned of other nations are content both to borrow their names and imitate their cunning.

“Here dwelleth and reigneth this prince (whose picture you see) by name Basilius; a prince of sufficient skill to govern so quiet a country, where the good minds of the former princes had set down good laws, and the well-bringing up of the people doth serve as a {13} most sure bond to hold them. But to be plain with you, he excels in nothing so much as the zealous love of his people, wherein he doth not only pass all his own foregoers but, as I think, all the princes living. Whereof the cause is, that though he exceed not in the virtues which get admiration, as depth of wisdom, height of courage, and largeness of magnificence, yet is he notable in those which stir affection, as truth of word, meekness, courtesy, mercifulness, and liberality.

“He, being already well stricken in years, married a young princess, named Gynecia, daughter to the king of Cyprus, of notable beauty, as by her picture you see: a woman of great wit, and in truth of more princely virtues than her husband; of most unspotted chastity; but of so working a mind and so vehement spirits that a man may say, it was happy she took a good course for otherwise it would have been terrible.

“Of these two are brought into the world two daughters, so beyond measure excellent in all the gifts allotted to reasonable creatures that we may think they were born to show that nature is no stepmother to that sex, how much soever some men (sharp-witted only in evil speaking) have sought to disgrace them. The elder is named Pamela; by many men not deemed inferior to her sister: for my part, when I marked them both, methought there was (if at least such perfections may receive the word of more) more sweetness in Philoclea but more majesty in Pamela: methought love played in Philoclea’s eyes, and threatened in Pamela’s; methought Philoclea’s beauty only persuaded, but so persuaded as all hearts must yield; Pamela’s beauty used violence, and such violence as no heart could resist. And it seems that such proportion is between their minds: Philoclea so bashful, as though her excellencies had stolen into her before she was aware; so humble, that she will put all pride out of countenance; in sum, such proceeding as will stir hope but teach hope good manners. Pamela of high thoughts who avoids not pride with not knowing her excellencies, but by making that one of her excellencies to be void of pride; her mother’s wisdom, greatness, nobility, but (if I can guess aright) knit with a more constant temper. Now then, our Basilius being so publicly happy as to be a prince, and so happy in that happiness as to be a beloved prince; and so in his private estate blessed as to have so excellent a wife and so over-excellent children, hath of late taken a course which yet makes him more spoken of than all these blessings. For having made a journey to Delphos, and safely returned, within short space, he brake up his court, and retired himself, his wife and children, into a certain forest hereby which he called his desert; wherein (besides an house appointed for stables and lodgings for certain {14} persons of mean calling who do all household services) he hath builded two fine lodges: in the one of them himself remains with his younger daughter Philoclea (which was the cause they three were matched together in this picture) without having any other creature living in that lodge with him.

“Which though it be strange, yet not strange as the course he hath taken with the princess Pamela whom he hath placed in the other lodge: but how think you accompanied? Truly with none other but one Dametas, the most arrant doltish clown that I think ever was without the privilege of a bauble, with his wife Miso and daughter Mopsa, in whom no wit can devise anything wherein they may pleasure her but to exercise her patience and to serve for a foil of her perfections. This loutish clown is such that you never saw so ill-favoured a vizor; his behaviour such that he is beyond the degree of ridiculous; and for his apparel, even as I would with him: Miso his wife so handsome a beldam, that only her face and her splay-foot have made her accused for a witch; only one good point she hath, that she observes decorum, having a forward mind in a wretched body. Between these two personages (who never agreed in any humour, but in disagreeing) is issued forth mistress Mopsa, a fit woman to participate of both their perfections: but because a pleasant fellow of my acquaintance set forth her praises in verse, I will only repeat them, and spare mine own tongue, since she goes for a woman. The verses are these, which I have so often caused to be sung, that I have them without book.

“Now truly having made these descriptions unto you, methinks you should imagine that I rather feign some pleasant device than recount a truth that a prince (not banished from his own wits) could possibly make so unworthy a choice. But truly (dear guest) {15} so it is that princes (whose doings have been often smoothed with good success) think nothing so absurd, which they cannot make honourable. The beginning of his credit was by the prince’s straying out of the way, one time he hunted, where meeting this fellow, and asking him the way; and so falling into other questions, he found some of his answers (as a dog sure, if he could speak, had wit enough to describe his kennel) not unsensible, and all uttered with such rudeness, which he interpreted plainness (though there be great difference between them) that Basilius, conceiving a sudden delight, took him to his court, with apparent show of his good opinion: where the flattering courtier had no sooner taken the prince’s mind, but that there were straight reasons to confirm the prince’s doing, and shadows of virtues found for Dametas. His silence grew wit, his bluntness integrity, his beastly ignorance virtuous simplicity, and the prince (according to the nature of great persons, in love with what he had done himself) fancied that his weakness with his presence would much be mended. And so like a creature of his own making, he liked him more and more; and thus having first given him the office of principal herdsman; lastly, since he took this strange determination, he hath in a manner put the life of himself and his children into his hands. Which authority (like too great a sail for so small a boat) doth so oversway poor Dametas, that, if before he was a good fool in a chamber, he might be allowed it now in a comedy, so as I doubt me (I fear me indeed) my master will in the end (with his cost) find that his office is not to make men, but to use men as men are, no more than a horse will be taught to hunt, or an ass to manage. But in sooth I am afraid I have given your ears too great a surfeit with gross discourses of that heavy piece of flesh. But the zealous grief I conceive to see so great an error in my lord hath made me bestow more words than I confess so base a subject deserveth.

“Thus much now that I have told you is nothing more than in effect any Arcadian knows. But what moved him to this strange solitariness hath been imparted (as I think) but to one person living. Myself can conjecture, and indeed more than conjecture by this accident that I will tell you: I have an only son, by name Clitophon, who is now absent, preparing for his own marriage, which I mean shortly shall be here celebrated. This son of mine (while the prince kept his court) was of his bed-chamber: now since the breaking up of thereof returned home, and showed me (among other things he had gathered) the copy which he had taken of a letter: which when the prince had read, he had laid in a window, presuming nobody durst look in his writings: but my son not only took a time to read it, but to copy it. In truth I {16} blamed Clitophon for the curiosity which made him break his duty in such a kind, whereby kings’ secrets are subject to be revealed, but since it was done, I was content to take so much profit as to know it. Now here is the letter that I ever since, for my good liking, have carried about me: which before I read unto you, I must tell you from whom it came. It is a nobleman of his country, named Philanax, appointed by the prince regent, in this time of his retiring, and most worthy so to be: for, there lives no man whose excellent wit more simply embraceth integrity, beside his unfeigned love to his master, wherein never yet any could make question, saving whether he loved Basilius, or the prince better: a rare temper, while most men either servilely yield to all appetites, or with an obstinate austerity looking to that they fancied good, in effect neglect the prince’s person. This then being the man, whom of all other (and most worthy) the prince chiefly loves, it should seem (for more than the letter I have not to guess by) that the prince upon his return from Delphos (Philanax then lying sick) had written unto him his determination, rising (as evidently appears) upon some oracle he had there received: whereunto he wrote this answer:

“By the contents of this letter you may perceive, that the cause of all hath been the vanity which possesseth many who (making a perpetual mansion of this poor baiting-place of man’s life) are desirous to know the certainty of things to come, wherein there is nothing so certain as our continual uncertainty. But what in particular points the oracle was, in faith I know not, neither (as you may see by one place of Philanax’s letter) he himself distinctly knew. But this experience shews us that Basilius’s judgment, corrupted with a prince’s fortune, hath rather heard than followed the wise (as I take it) counsel of Philanax. For having left the stern of his government with much amazement to the people, among whom many strange bruits are received for current, with some appearance of danger in respect of the valiant Amphialus his nephew, and much envying the ambitious number of the nobility against Philanax, to see Philanax so advanced, though (to speak simply) he deserve more than as many of us as there be in Arcadia: the prince himself hath hidden his head, in such sort as I told you, not sticking plainly to confess that he means not (while he breathes) that his daughters shall have any husband, but keep them thus solitary with him: where he gives no other body leave to visit him at any time but a certain priest, who being excellent in poetry, he makes him write out such things as he best likes, he being no less delightful in conversation than needful for devotion, and about twenty specified shepherds, in whom (some for eclogues) he taketh greater recreation.

“And now you know as much as myself: wherein if I have held you over-long, lay hardly the fault upon my old age, which in the very disposition of it is talkative, whether it be (said he smiling) that nature loves to exercise that part most, which is least decayed, and that is our tongue, or, that knowledge being the only thing whereof we poor old men can brag, we cannot make it known but by utterance: or, that mankind by all means seeking to eternize himself so much the more, as he is near his end, doth it not only by the children that come of him, but by speeches and writings recommended to the memory of hearers and readers. And yet thus much I will say for myself, that I have not laid these matters either so openly or largely to any as to yourself: so {19} much (if I much fail not) do I see in you which makes me both love and trust you.”

“Never may he be old,” answered Palladius, “that doth not reverence that age, whose heaviness, if it weigh down the frail and fleshly balance, it as much lifts up the noble and spiritual part; and well might you have alleged another reason, that their wisdom makes them willing to profit others. And that have I received of you, never to be forgotten, but with ungratefulness. But among many strange conceits you told me, which have shewed effects in your prince, truly even the last, that he should conceive such pleasure in shepherds’ discourses would not seem the least unto me, saving that you told me at the first that this country is notable in those wits, and that indeed myself having been brought not only to this place, but to my life by Strephon and Claius in their conference found wits as might better become such shepherds as Homer speaks of, that be governors of people, than such senators who hold their council in a sheep-cote.”

“For them two (said Kalander), especially Claius, they are beyond the rest by so much as learning commonly doth add to nature: for, having neglected their wealth in respect of their knowledge, they have not so much impaired the meaner, as they bettered the better. Which all notwithstanding, it is a sport to hear how they impute to love which hath indued their thoughts (say they) with such a strength. But certainly all the people of this country, from high to low, are given to those sports of the wit, so as you would wonder to hear how soon even children will begin to versify. Once, ordinary it is amongst the meanest sort, to make songs and dialogues in metre, either love whetting their brain, or long peace having begun it, example and emulation amending it. Not so much, but the clown Dametas will stumble sometimes upon some songs that might become a better brain: but no sort of people are so excellent in that kind as the pastors, for their living standing but upon the looking to their beasts, they have ease, the nurse of poetry. Neither are our shepherds such as (I hear) they be in other countries, but they are the very owners of the sheep, to which either themselves look, or their children give daily attendance. And then truly, it would delight you under some tree, or by some river’s side (when two or three of them meet together) to hear their rural muse, how prettily it will deliver out, sometimes joys, sometimes lamentations, sometimes challengings one of the other, sometimes under hidden forms, uttering such matters as otherwise they durst not deal with. Then have they most commonly one who judgeth the prize to the best doer, of which they are no less glad than great princes are of triumphs: and his part is to set down in writing all that is said, save that it may be {20} his pen with more leisure doth polish the rudeness of an unthought-on song. Now the choice of all (as you may well think) either for goodness of voice, or pleasantness of wit, the prince hath: among whom also there are two or three strangers, who, inward melancholies having made weary of the world’s eyes, have come to spend their lives among the country people of Arcadia, and their conversation being well approved, the prince vouchsafeth them his presence, and not only by looking on, but by great courtesy and liberality animates the shepherds the more exquisitely to labour for his good liking. So that there is no cause to blame the prince for sometimes hearing them; the blame-worthiness is, that to hear them, he rather goes to solitariness than makes them come to company. Neither do I accuse my master for advancing a country-man, Dametas is, since God forbid, but where worthiness is as truly it is among divers of that fellowship, any outward lowness should hinder the highest rising; but that he would needs make election of one, the baseness of whose mind is such, that it sinks a thousand degrees lower than the basest body could carry the most base fortune: which although it might be answered for the prince, that it is rather a trust he hath in his simple plainness than any great advancement, but being chief herdman; yet all honest hearts feel that the trust of their lord goes beyond all advancement. But I am ever too long upon him, when he crosseth the way of my speech, and by the shadow of yonder tower I see it is a fitter time with our supper to pay the duties we owe to our stomachs, than to break the air with my idle discourses: and more wit I might have learned of Homer (whom even now you mentioned) who never entertained either guests or hosts with long speeches, till the mouth of hunger be thoroughly stopped.” So withal he rose, leading Palladius through the garden again to the parlour where they used to sup; Palladius assuring him that he had already been more fed to his liking than he could be by the skilfullest trencher-men of Media.

But being come to the supping-place, one of Kalander’s servants rounded in his ear, at which (his colour changing) he retired himself into his chamber, commanding his men diligently to wait upon Palladius, and to excuse his absence with some necessary business he had presently to dispatch: which they accordingly did, for some few days forcing themselves to let no change appear: but, though they framed their countenances never so cunningly, Palladius perceived there was some ill-pleasing accident fallen out. Whereupon, being again set alone at supper, he called to the steward, and desired him to tell him the matter of his sudden alteration: who, after some trifling excuses, in the end confessed unto him that his master had received news that his {21} son before the day of his near marriage, chanced to be at a battle which was to be fought between the gentlemen of Lacedaemon and the Helots: who, winning the victory, he was there made prisoner going to deliver a friend of his taken prisoner by the Helots; that the poor young gentlemen had offered great ransom for his life; but that the hate those peasants conceived against all gentlemen was such that every hour he was to look for nothing but some cruel death, which hitherto had only been delayed by the captain’s vehement dealing for him, who seemed to have a heart of more manly pity than the rest. Which loss had stricken the old gentleman with such sorrow, that, as if abundance of tears did not seem sufficiently to witness it, he was alone retired, tearing his beard and hair, and cursing his old age, that had not made his grave to stop his ears from such advertisements: but that his faithful servants had written in his name to all his friends, followers, and tenants (Philanax the governor refusing to deal in it as a private cause, but yet giving leave to seek their best redress, so as they wronged not the state of Lacedaemon) of whom there were now gathered upon the frontiers good forces, that he was sure would spend their lives by any way to redeem or revenge Clitophon. “Now Sir,” said he, “this is my master’s nature, though his grief be such, as to live is a grief unto him, and that even his reason is darkened with sorrow; yet the laws of hospitality (long and holily observed by him) gave still such a sway to his proceeding that he will no way suffer the stranger lodged under his roof to receive (as it were) any infection of his anguish, especially you, towards whom I know not whether his love or admiration be greater.” But Palladius could scarce hear out his tale with patience, so was his heart torn in pieces with compassion of the case, liking of Kalander’s noble behaviour, kindness for his respect to him-ward, and desire to find some remedy, besides the image of his dearest friend Daiphantus, whom he judged to suffer either alike or worse fortune. Therefore rising from the board, he desired the steward to tell him particularly the ground and event of this accident, because by knowledge of many circumstances, there might perhaps some way of help be opened. Whereunto the steward easily in this sort condescended.

“My Lord,” said he, “when our good king Basilius, with better success than expectation, took to wife (even in his more than decaying years) the fair young princess Gynecia, there came with her a young lord, cousin-german to herself, named Argalus, led hither partly with the love and honour of his noble kinswoman, partly with the humour of youth, which ever thinks that good, whose goodness he sees not. And in this court he received so good increase of knowledge, that after some years spent, he so {22} manifested a most virtuous mind in all his actions, that Arcadia gloried such a plant was transported unto them, being a gentleman indeed most rarely accomplished, excellently learned, but without all vain glory: friendly without factiousness; valiant, so as for my part I think the earth hath no man that hath done more heroical acts than he; howsoever now of late the fame flies of the two princes of Thessalia and Macedon, and hath long done of our noble prince Amphialus, who indeed in our parts is only accounted likely to match him: but I say for my part, I think no man, for valour of mind, and ability of body, to be preferred, if equalled to Argalus; and yet so valiant, as he never durst do anybody injury: in behaviour, some will say, ever sad, surely sober, and somewhat given to musing, but never uncourteous; his word ever led by his thought, and always followed by his deed; rather liberal than magnificent, though the one wanted not, and the other had ever good choice of the receiver; in sum (for I perceive I shall easily take a great draught of his praises, whom both I and all this country love so well) such a man was (and I hope is) Argalus, as hardly the nicest eye can find a spot in, if the over-vehement constancy of yet spotless affection may not in hard-wrested constructions be counted a spot: which in this manner began that work in him, which hath made both him, and itself in him, over all this country famous. My master’s son Clitophon (whose loss gives the cause to this discourse, and yet gives me cause to begin with Argalus, since his loss proceeds from Argalus) being a young gentleman as of great birth (being our king’s sister’s son) so truly of good nature and one that can see good and love it, haunted more the company of this worthy Argalus, than of any other; so as if there were not a friendship (which is so rare, as it is to be doubted whether it be a thing indeed, or but a word) at least there was such a liking and friendliness as hath brought forth the effects which you shall hear. About two years since, it so fell out that he brought him to a great lady’s house, sister to my master, who had with her her only daughter, the fair Parthenia, fair indeed (fame, I think, itself not daring to call any fairer, if it be not Helena, queen of Corinth, and the two incomparable sisters of Arcadia) and that which made her fairness much the fairer was, that it was but a fair ambassador of a most fair mind; full of wit, and a wit which delighted more to judge itself than to shew itself: her speech being as rare, as precious; her silence without fullness; her modesty without affectation; her shamefacedness without ignorance: in sum, one that to praise well, one must first set down with himself what it is to be excellent: for so she is.

“I think you think that these perfections meeting could not choose but find one another, and delight in what they found; for likeness {23} of manners is likely in reason to draw liking with affection; men’s actions do not always cross with reason: to be short, it did so indeed. They loved, although for a while the fire thereof (hope’s wings being cut off) were blown by the bellows of despair upon this occasion.

“There had been a good while before, and so continued, a suitor to this same lady, a great noble man, though of Laconia, yet near neighbour to Parthenia’s mother, named Demagoras; a man mighty in riches and power, and proud thereof, stubbornly stout, loving nobody but himself, and, for his own delight’s sake, Parthenia: and pursuing vehemently his desire, his riches had so gilded over all his other imperfections that the old lady (though contrary to my lord her brother’s mind) had given her consent; and using a mother’s authority upon her fair daughter had made her yield thereunto, not because she liked her choice, but because her obedient mind had not yet taken upon it to make choice. And the day of their assurance drew near, when my young lord Clitophon brought this noble Argalus, perchance principally to see so rare a sight, as Parthenia by all well-judging eyes was judged.

“But though few days were before the time of assurance appointed, yet love, that saw he had a great journey to make in short time, hasted so himself that before her word could tie her to Demagoras, her heart hath vowed her to Argalus with so grateful a receipt in mutual affection that if she desired above all things to have Argalus, Argalus feared nothing but to miss Parthenia. And now Parthenia had learned both liking and misliking, loving and loathing, and out of passion began to take the authority of judgment; insomuch that when the time came that Demagoras (full of proud joy) thought to receive the gift of herself; she, with words of resolute refusal (though with tears showing she was sorry she must refuse) assured her mother she would first be bedded in her grave than wedded to Demagoras. The change was no more strange than unpleasant to the mother who being determinately (lest I should say of a great lady, wilfully) bent to marry her to Demagoras, tried all ways, which a witty and hard-hearted mother could use upon so humble a daughter in whom the only resisting power was love. But the more she assaulted, the more she taught Parthenia to defend; and the more Parthenia defended, the more she made her mother obstinate in the assault: who at length finding that Argalus standing between them, was it that most eclipsed her affection from shining upon Demagoras, she sought all means how to remove him, so much the more as he manifested himself an unremovable suitor to her daughter: first by employing him in as many dangerous enterprises as ever the evil step-mother {24} Juno recommended to the famous Hercules: but the more his virtue was tried, the more pure it grew, while all the things she did to overthrow him, did set him up upon the height of honour; enough to have moved her heart, especially to a man every way so worthy as Argalus; but the struggling against all reason, because she would have her will, and shew her authority in matching her with Demagoras, the more virtuous Argalus was the more she hated him, thinking herself conquered in his conquests, and therefore, still employing him in more and more dangerous attempts: in the meanwhile she used all extremities possible upon her fair daughter to make her give over herself to her direction. But it was hard to judge whether he in doing, or she in suffering, shewed greater constancy of affection: for, as to Argalus the world sooner wanted occasions than he valour to go through them: so to Parthenia malice sooner ceased than her unchanged patience. Lastly, by treasons Demagoras and she would have made away with Argalus, but he with providence and courage so passed over all that the mother took such a spiteful grief at it that her heart brake withal, and she died.

“But then Demagoras assuring himself that now Parthenia was her own she would never be his, and receiving as much by her own determinate answer, not more desiring his own happiness, than envying Argalus, whom he saw with narrow eyes, even ready to enjoy the perfection of his desires, strengthening his conceit with all the mischievous counsels which disdained love and envious pride could give unto him, the wicked wretch (taking a time that Argalus was gone to his country to fetch some of his principal friends to honour the marriage, which Parthenia had most joyfully consented unto) the wicked Demagoras, I say, desiring to speak with her, with unmerciful force (her weak arms in vain resisting) rubbed all over her face a most horrible poison: the effect whereof was such, that never leper looked more ugly than she did: which done, having his men and horses ready, departed away in spite of her servants, as ready to revenge as could be, in such an unexpected mischief. But the abominableness of this fact being come to my L. Kalander, he made such means, both by our king’s intercession and his own, that by the king and senate of Lacedaemon, Demagoras was, upon pain of death, banished the country: who hating the punishment, where he should have hated the fault, joined himself, with all the power he could make, unto the Helots, lately in rebellion against that state: and they (glad to have a man of such authority among them) made him their general, and under him have committed divers the most outrageous villanies that a base multitude (full of desperate revenge) can imagine.

“But within a while after this pitiful fact committed upon Parthenia, Argalus returned (poor Gentleman!) having her fair image in his heart, and already promising his eyes the uttermost of his felicity when they (nobody else daring to tell it him) were the first messengers to themselves of their own misfortune. I mean not to move passion with telling you the grief of both, when he knew her, for at first he did not; nor at first knowledge could possibly have virtue’s aid so ready, as not even weakly to lament the loss of such a jewel, so much the more, as that skilful men in that art assured it was unrecoverable: but within a while, truth of love (which still held the first face in his memory) a virtuous constancy, and even a delight to be constant, faith given, and inward worthiness shining through the foulest mists, took so full hold of the noble Argalus, that not only in such comfort which witty arguments may bestow upon adversity, but even with the most abundant kindness that an eye-ravished lover can express, he laboured both to drive the extremity of sorrow from her, and to hasten the celebration of their marriage: whereunto he unfeignedly shewed himself no less cheerfully earnest than if she had never been disinherited of that goodly portion which nature had so liberally bequeathed unto her; and for that cause deferred his intended revenge upon Demagoras, because he might continually be in her presence, shewing more humble serviceableness and joy to content her than ever before.

“But as he gave this rare example, not to be hoped for of any other, but of another Argalus, so of the other side, she took as strange a course in affection: for where she desired to enjoy him more than to live yet did she overthrow both her own desire and his, and in no sort would yield to marry him: with a strange encounter of love’s affects and effects; that he by an affection sprung from excessive beauty should delight in horrible foulness; and she of a vehement desire to have him should kindly build a resolution never to have him; for truth it is, that so in heart she loved him, as she could not find in her heart he should be tied to what was unworthy of his presence.

“Truly, Sir, a very good orator might have a fair field to use eloquence in, if he did but only repeat the lamentable, and truly affectionate speeches, while he conjured her by remembrance of her affection, and true oaths of his own affection, not to make him so unhappy, as to think he had not only lost her face, but her heart; that her face, when it was fairest, had been but a marshal to lodge the love of her in his mind, which now was so well placed that it needed no further help of any outward harbinger; beseeching her, even with tears, to know that his love was not so superficial as to go no further than the skin, which yet now to him was most {26} fair since it was hers: how could he be so ungrateful as to love her the less for that which she had only received for his sake; that he never beheld it, but therein he saw the loveliness of her love towards him; protesting unto her that he would never take joy of his life if he might not enjoy her, for whom principally he was glad he had life. But (as I heard by one that overheard them) she (wringing him by the hand) made no other answer but this. ‘My Lord,’ said she, ‘God knows I love you; if I were princess of the whole world, and had, withal, all the blessings that ever the world brought forth, I should not make delay to lay myself and them under your feet; or if I had continued but as I was, though (I must confess) far unworthy of you, yet would I (with too great a joy for my heart now to think of) have accepted your vouchsafing me to be yours, and with faith and obedience would have supplied all other defects. But first let me be much more miserable than I am ere I match Argalus to such a Parthenia. Live happy, dear Argalus, I give you full liberty, and I beseech you to take it; and I assure you I shall rejoice (whatsoever become of me) to see you so coupled, as may be fit both for your honour and satisfaction.’ With that she burst out crying and weeping, not able longer to control herself from blaming her fortune, and wishing her own death.

“But Argalus, with a most heavy heart still pursuing his desire, she fixed of mind to avoid further intreaty, and to fly all company which (even of him) grew unpleasant unto her, one night she stole away: but whither as yet it is unknown or indeed what is become of her.

“Argalus sought her long, and in many places; at length (despairing to find her, and the more he despaired, the more enraged) weary of his life, but first determining to be revenged of Demagoras, he went alone disguised into the chief town held by the Helots, where coming into his presence, guarded about by many of his soldiers, he could delay his fury no longer for a fitter time, but setting upon him, in despite of a great many that helped him, gave him divers mortal wounds, and himself (no question) had been there presently murdered, but that Demagoras himself desired he might be kept alive: perchance with intention to feed his own eyes with some cruel execution to be laid upon him; but death came sooner than he looked for; yet having had leisure to appoint his successor, a young man, not long before delivered out of the prison of the king of Lacedaemon, where he should have suffered death for having slain the king’s nephew, but him he named, who at that time was absent, making inroads upon the Lacedaemonians; but being returned, the rest of the Helots, for the great liking they conceived of that young man, {27} especially because they had none among themselves to whom the others would yield, were content to follow Demagoras’s appointment. And well hath it succeeded with them, he having since done things beyond the hope of the youngest heads; of whom I speak the rather, because he hath hitherto preserved Argalus alive, under pretence to have him publicly, and with exquisite torments executed after the end of these wars, of which they hope for a soon and prosperous issue.

“And he hath likewise hitherto kept my young lord Clitophon alive, who (to redeem his friend) went with certain other noble men of Laconia, and forces gathered by them, to besiege this young and new successor: but he issuing out (to the wonder of all men) defeated the Laconians, slew many of the noblemen, and took Clitophon prisoner, whom with much ado he keepeth alive, the Helots being villainously cruel; but he tempereth them so, sometimes by following their humour, sometimes by striving with it, that hitherto he hath saved both their lives, but in different estates; Argalus being kept in a close and hard prison, Clitophon at some liberty. And now, Sir, though (to say the truth) we can promise ourselves little of their safeties while they are in the Helots’ hands, I have delivered all I understand touching the loss of my lord’s son, and the cause thereof: which though it was not necessary to Clitophon’s case, to be so particularly told, yet the strangeness of it made me think it would not be unpleasant unto you.”

Palladius thanked him greatly for it, being even passionately delighted with hearing so strange an accident of a knight so famous over the world as Argalus, with whom he had himself a long desire to meet: so had fame poured a noble emulation in him towards him.

But then (well bethinking himself) he called for armour, desiring them to provide him of horse and guide, and armed all saving the head, he went up to Kalander, whom he found lying upon the ground, having ever since banished both sleep and food as enemies to the mourning, which passion persuaded him was reasonable. But Palladius raised him up, saying unto him: “No more, no more of this, my L. Kalander; let us labour to find, before we lament the loss: you know myself miss one, who though he be not my son, I would disdain the favour of life after him: but while there is a hope left, let not the weakness of sorrow make the strength of it languish: take comfort, and good success will follow.” And with those words, comfort seemed to lighten in his eyes, and in his face and gesture was painted victory. Once, Kalander’s spirits were so revived withal, that (receiving some sustenance, and taking a little rest) he armed himself and those {28} few of his servants he had left unsent, and so himself guided Palladius to the place upon the frontiers, where already there were assembled between three and four thousand men, all well disposed (for Kalander’s sake) to abide any peril: but like men disused with a long peace, more determinate to do than skilful how to do: lusty bodies, and braver armours; with such courage as rather grew of despising their enemies, whom they knew not, than of any confidence for anything which in themselves they knew: but neither cunning use of their weapons, nor art showed in their marching or encamping. Which Palladius soon perceiving, he desired to understand (as much as could be delivered unto him) the estate of the Helots.

And he was answered by a man well acquainted with the affairs of Laconia, that they were a kind of people who, having been of old freemen and possessioners, the Lacedaemonians had conquered them, and laid not only tribute, but bondage upon them, which they had long borne, till of late the Lacedaemonians, through greediness growing more heavy than they could bear, and through contempt growing less careful how to make them bear, they had with a general consent (rather springing by the generalness of the cause than of any artificial practice) set themselves in arms, and whetting their courage with revenge, and grounding their resolution upon despair, they had proceeded with unlooked-for success, having already taken divers towns and castles, with the slaughter of many of the gentry: for whom no sex nor age could be accepted for an excuse. And that although at the first they had fought rather with beastly fury than any soldiery discipline, practice had now made them comparable to the best of the Lacedaemonians, and more of late than ever; by reason, first of Demagoras, a great lord, who had made himself of their party, and since his death, of another captain they had gotten, who had brought up their ignorance, and brought down their fury to such a mean of good government, and withal led them so valorously that (besides the time wherein Clitophon was taken) they had the better in some other great conflicts: in such wise that the estate of Lacedaemon had sent unto them, offering peace with most reasonable and honourable conditions. Palladius having gotten this general knowledge of the party against whom, as he had already of the party for whom he was to fight, he went to Kalander, and told him plainly that by plain force there was small appearance of helping Clitophon; but some device was to be taken in hand, wherein no less discretion than valour was to be used.

Whereupon, the counsel of the chief men was called, and at last this way Palladius (who by some experience, but especially by {29} reading histories, was acquainted with stratagems) invented, and was by all the rest approved, that all the men there should dress themselves like the poorest sort of the people in Arcadia, having no banners, but bloody shirts hanged upon long staves, with some bad bag-pipes instead of drum and fife: their armour they should, as well as might be, cover, or at least make them look so rustily and ill-favouredly as might well become such wearers, and this the whole number should do, saving two hundred of the best chosen gentlemen for courage and strength, whereof Palladius himself would be one, who should have their arms chained, and be put in carts like prisoners. This being performed according to the agreement, they marched on towards the town of Cardamila where Clitophon was captive; and being come two hours before sunset within view of the walls, the Helots already descrying their number, and beginning to sound the alarm, they sent a cunning fellow (so much the cunninger as that he could mask it under rudeness) who with such a kind of rhetoric as weeded out all flowers of rhetoric, delivered unto the Helots assembled together, that they were country-people of Arcadia, no less oppressed by their lords, and no less desirous of liberty than they, and therefore had put themselves in the field, and had already (besides a great number slain) taken nine or ten score gentlemen prisoners, whom they had there well and fast chained. Now because they had no strong retiring place in Arcadia, and were not yet of number enough to keep the field against the prince’s forces, they were come to them for succour; knowing that daily more and more of their quality would flock unto them, but that in the meantime, lest their prince should pursue them, or the Lacedaemonian king and nobility (for the likeness of the cause) fall upon them, they desired that if there were not room enough for them in the town, that yet they might encamp under the walls, and for surety have their prisoners (who were such men as were able to make their peace) kept within the town.

The Helots made but a short consultation, being glad that their contagion had spread itself into Arcadia, and making account that if the peace did not fall out between them and their king, that it was the best way to set fire in all the parts of Greece; besides their greediness to have so many gentlemen in their hands, in whose ransoms they already meant to have a share; to which haste of concluding, two things well helped; the one, that their captain, with the wisest of them, was at that time absent about confirming or breaking the peace with the state of Lacedaemon: the second, that over-many good fortunes began to breed a proud recklessness[2] in them; therefore sending to view the camp, and {30} finding that by their speech they were Arcadians, with whom they had had no war, never suspecting a private man’s credit could have gathered such a force, and that all other tokens witnessed them to be of the lowest calling (besides the chains upon the gentlemen) they granted not only leave for the prisoners, but for some others of the company, and to all, that they might harbour under the walls. So opened they the gates, and received in the carts, which being done, and Palladius seeing fit time, he gave the sign, and shaking off their chains (which were made with such art, that though they seemed most strong and fast, he that wore them might easily loose them) drew their swords hidden in the carts, and so setting upon the ward, made them to fly either from the place, or from their bodies, and so give entry to all the force of the Arcadians before the Helots could make any head to resist them.

But the Helots, being men hardened against dangers, gathered (as well as they could) together in the market-place, and thence would have given a shrewd welcome to the Arcadians, but that Palladius (blaming those that were slow, heartening them that were forward, but especially with his own example leading them) made such an impression into the squadron of the Helots that at first the great body of them beginning to shake and stagger, at length every particular body recommended the protection of his life to his feet. Then Kalander cried to go to the prison where he thought his son was; but Palladius wished him (first scouring the streets) to house all the Helots, and make themselves masters of the gates.

But ere that could be accomplished, the Helots had gotten new heart, and with divers sorts of shot from corners of streets and house-windows, galled them; which courage was come unto them by the return of their captain; who, though he brought not many with him (having dispersed most of his companies to other of his holds) yet meeting a great number running out of the gate, not yet possessed by the Arcadians, he made them turn face, and with banners displayed, his trumpet giveth the loudest testimony he could of his return; which once heard, the rest of the Helots, which were otherwise scattered, bent thitherward with a new life of resolution, as if their captain had been a root, out of which (as into branches) their courage had sprung. Then began the fight to grow most sharp, and the encounters of more cruel obstinacy: the Arcadians fighting to keep what they had won; the Helots to recover what they had lost; the Arcadians as in an unknown place, having no succour but in their hands; the Helots as in their own place, fighting for their lives, wives, and children. There was victory and courage against revenge and despair: safety of both besides being no otherwise to be gotten, but by destruction.

At length, the left wing of the Arcadians began to lose ground; which Palladius feeling, he straight thrust himself with his choice band against the throng that oppressed them with such an overflowing of valour that the captain of the Helots (whose eyes soon judged of that wherewith themselves were governed) saw that he alone was worth all the rest of the Arcadians: which he so wondered at, that it was hard to say whether he more liked his doings, or misliked the effects of his doings: but determining that upon that cast the game lay, and disdaining to fight with any other, fought only to join with him: which mind was no less in Palladius, having easily marked that he was the first mover of all the other hands. And so their thoughts meeting in one point, they consented (though not agreed) to try each other’s fortune: and so drawing themselves to be the uttermost of the one side, they began a combat, which was so much inferior to the battle in noise and number, as it was surpassing it in bravery of fighting, and, as it were, delightful terribleness. Their courage was guided with skill, and their skill was armed with courage; neither did their hardiness darken their wit, nor their wit cool their hardiness: both valiant, as men despising death, both confident, as unwonted to be overcome: yet doubtful by their present feeling, and respectful by what they had already seen. Their feet steady, their hands diligent, their eyes watchful, and their hearts resolute. The parts either not armed, or weakly armed, were well known, and according to the knowledge should have been sharply visited, but that the answer was as quick as the objections. Yet some lightning, the smart bred rage, and the rage bred smart again: till both sides beginning to wax faint, and rather desirous to die accompanied, than hopeful to live victorious, the captain of the Helots with a blow, whose violence grew of fury, not of strength, or of strength proceeding of fury, struck Palladius upon the side of the head, that he reeled astonished: and withal the helmet fell off, he remaining bare-headed, but other of the Arcadians were ready to shield him from any harm might rise of that nakedness.

But little needed it, for his chief enemy, instead of pursuing that advantage, kneeled down, offering to deliver the pommel of his sword, in token of yielding; withal speaking aloud unto him, that he thought it more liberty to be his prisoner, than any other’s general. Palladius standing upon himself, and misdoubting some craft, and the Helots that were next their captain, wavering between looking for some stratagem, or fearing treason; “What,” said the captain, “hath Palladius forgotten the voice of Daiphantus?”

By that watch-word Palladius knew that it was his only friend Pyrocles, whom he had lost upon the sea, and therefore both most full of wonder so to be met, if they had not been fuller of joy than {32} wonder, caused the retreat to be sounded, Diaphantus by authority, and Palladius by persuasion, to which helped well the little advantage that was of either side: and that of the Helots’ party, their captain’s behaviour had made as many amazed as saw or heard of it: and of the Arcadian side the good old Kalander, striving more than his old age could achieve, was newly taken prisoner. But indeed the chief parter of the fray was the night, which with her black arms pulled their malicious sights one from the other. But he that took Kalander, meant nothing less than to save him, but only so long, as the captain might learn the enemies’ secrets, towards whom he led the old gentleman, when he caused the retreat to be sounded; looking for no other delivery from that captivity, but by the painful taking away of all pain: when whom should he see next to the captain (with good tokens how valiantly he had fought that day against the Arcadians) but his son Clitophon? But now the captain had caused all the principal Helots to be assembled, as well to deliberate what they had to do, as to receive a message from the Arcadians, among whom Palladius’s virtue (besides the love Kalander bare him) having gotten principal authority, he had persuaded them to seek rather by parley to recover the father and the son, than by the sword; since the goodness of the captain assured him that way to speed, and his value (wherewith he was of old acquainted) made him think any other way dangerous. This therefore was done in orderly manner, giving them to understand that as they came but to deliver Clitophon, so offering to leave the footing they already had in the town, to go away without any further hurt, so that they might have the father and the son without ransom delivered. Which conditions being heard and conceived by the Helots, Diaphantus persuaded them without delay to accept them. “For first,” said he, “since the strife is within our own home, if you lose, you lose all that in this life can be dear unto you: if you win, it will be a bloody victory with no profit, but the flattering in ourselves that same bad humour of revenge. Besides, it is like to stir Arcadia upon us, which now, by using these persons well, may be brought to some amity. Lastly, but especially, lest the king and nobility of Laconia (with whom now we have made a perfect peace) should hope by occasion of this quarrel to join the Arcadians with them, and so break off the profitable agreement already concluded: in sum, as in all deliberations (weighing the profit of the good success with the harm of the evil success) you shall find this way most safe and honourable.”

The Helots, as much moved by his authority, as persuaded by his reasons, were content therewith. Whereupon Palladius took order that the Arcadians should presently march out of town, {33} taking with them their prisoners, while the night with mutual diffidence might keep them quiet, and ere day came, they might be well on their way, and so avoid those accidents which in late enemies, a look, a word, or a particular man’s quarrel might engender. This being on both sides concluded on, Kalander and Clitophon, who now with infinite joy did know each other, came to kiss the hands and feet of Daiphantus: Clitophon telling his father how Daiphantus, not without danger to himself, had preserved him from the furious malice of the Helots: and even that day going to conclude the peace (lest in his absence he might receive some hurt) he had taken him in his company, and given him armour, upon promise he should take the part of the Helots; which he had in this fight performed, little knowing that it was against his own father; “But,” said Clitophon, “here is he, who as a father, hath now begotten me, and, as a god, hath saved me from many deaths which already laid hold on me,” which Kalander with tears of joy acknowledged, besides his own deliverance, only his benefit. But Daiphantus, who loved doing well for itself and not for thanks, broke off those ceremonies, desiring to know how Palladius, for so he called Musidorus, was come into that company, and what his present estate was; whereof receiving a brief declaration of Kalander, he sent him word by Clitophon that he should not as now come unto him, because he held himself not so sure a master of the Helots’ minds that he would adventure him in their power, who was so well known with an unfriendly acquaintance; but that he desired him to return with Kalander, whither also he within few days, having dispatched himself of the Helots, would repair. Kalander would needs kiss his hand again for that promise, protesting he would esteem his house more blessed than a temple of the gods, if it had once received him. And then desiring pardon for Argalus, Diaphantus assured them that he would die but he would bring him (though till then kept in close prison, indeed for his safety, the Helots being so animated against him as else he could not have lived) and so taking their leave of him, Kalander, Clitophon, Palladius, and the rest of the Arcadians swearing that they would no further in any sort molest the Helots, they straightway marched out of the town, carrying both their dead and wounded bodies with them; and by morning were already within the limits of Arcadia.

The Helots of the other side shutting their gates, gave themselves to bury their dead, to cure their wounds, and rest their wearied bodies; till (the next day bestowing the cheerful use of the light upon them) Daiphantus, making a general convocation spake unto them in this manner: “We are first,” said he, “to thank the gods, that (further than we had either cause to hope, {34} or reason to imagine) have delivered us out of this gulf of danger, wherein we were already swallowed. For all being lost (had they not directed my return so just as they did), it had been too late to recover that, which being had, we could not keep. And had I not happened to know one of the principal men among them, by which means the truce began between us, you may easily conceive what little reason we have to think but that either by some supply out of Arcadia, or from the nobility of this country, (who would have made fruits of wisdom grow out of this occasion) we should have had our power turned to ruin, our pride to repentance and sorrow. But now, the storm as it fell, so it ceased: and the error committed, in retaining Clitophon more hardly than his age or quarrel deserved, becomes a sharply learned experience, to use, in other times, more moderation.

“Now have I to deliver unto you the conclusion between the kings with the nobility of Lacedaemon and you; which is in all points as ourselves desired: as well for that you would have granted, as for the assurance of what is granted. The towns and forts you presently have, are still left unto you, to be kept either with, or without garrison, so as you alter not the laws of the country, and pay such duties as the rest of the Laconians do; yourselves are made, by public decree, freemen, and so capable both to give and receive voice in election of magistrates. The distinction of names between Helots and Lacedaemonians to be quite taken away, and all indifferently to enjoy both names and privileges of Laconians. Your children to be brought up with theirs in the Spartan discipline: and so you (framing yourselves to be good members of that estate) to be hereafter fellows and no longer servants.

“Which conditions you see, carry in themselves no more contention than assurance; for this is not a peace which is made with them; but this a piece by which you are made of them. Lastly a forgetfulness decreed of all what is past, they showing themselves glad to have so valiant men as you are joined with them, so that you are to take minds of peace, since the cause of war is finished; and as you hated them before like oppressors, so now to love them as brothers; to take care of their estate, because it is yours; and to labour by virtuous doing, that posterity may not repent your joining. But now one article only they stood upon, which in the end I with your commissioners have agreed unto that I should no more tarry here, mistaking perchance my humour, and thinking me as seditious as I am young; or else it is the king Amiclas procuring, in respect that it was my ill hap to kill his nephew Eurileon, but howsoever it be, I have condescended.” “But so will not we,” cried almost the whole assembly, counselling one {35} another rather to try the uttermost event than lose him by whom they had been victorious. But he as well with general orations as particular dealing with the men of most credit, made them see how necessary it was to prefer such an opportunity before a vain affection; but could not prevail till openly he sware that he would (if at any time the Lacedaemonians brake this treaty) come back again, and be their captain.

So, then, after a few days, setting them in perfect order, he took his leave of them, whose eyes bade him farewell with tears, and mouths with kissing the places where he stepped, and after making temples unto him, as to a demi-god, thinking it beyond the degree of humanity to have a wit so far over-going his age, and such dreadful terror proceed from so excellent beauty. But he for his sake obtained free pardon for Argalus, whom also (upon oath never to bear arms against the Helots) he delivered; and taking only with him certain principal jewels of his own, he would have parted alone with Argalus (whose countenance well showed, while Parthenia was lost, he counted not himself delivered, but that the whole multitude would needs guard him into Arcadia, where again leaving them all to lament his departure, he by enquiry got to the well-known house of Kalander. There was he received with loving joy of Kalander, with joyful love of Palladius, with humble, though doleful, demeanour of Argalus (whom specially both he and Palladius regarded with grateful serviceableness of Clitophon) and honourable admiration of all. For being now well viewed to have no hair on the face, to witness him a man, who had done acts beyond the degree of a man, and to look with a certain almost bashful kind of modesty, as if he feared the eyes of men, who was unmoved by the sight of the most horrible countenances of death; and as if nature had mistaken her work to have a Mars’s heart in a Cupid’s body: all that beheld him (and all that might behold him, did behold him) made their eyes quick messengers to their mind, that there they had seen the uttermost that in mankind might be seen. The like wonder Palladius had before stirred, but that Diaphantus, as younger and newer come, had gotten now the advantage in the moist and fickle impression of eye-sight. But while all men, saving poor Argalus, made the joy of their eyes speak for their hearts towards Daiphantus; fortune (that belike was bid to that banquet, and meant to play the good-fellow) brought a pleasant adventure among them. It was that as they had newly dined, there came in to Kalander a messenger, that brought him word, a young noble lady, near kinswoman to the fair Helen, queen of Corinth, was come thither, and desired to be lodged in his house. Kalander (most glad of such an occasion) went out, and all his other worthy guests with {36} him, saving only Argalus, who remained in his chamber, desirous that this company were once broken up, that he might go in his solitary quest after Parthenia. But when they met this lady, Kalander straight thought he saw his niece Parthenia, and was about in such familiar sort to have spoken unto her, but she, in grave and honourable manner, giving him to understand that he was mistaken; he, half ashamed, excused himself with the exceeding likeness was between them, though indeed it seemed that this lady was of the more pure and dainty complexion, she said, it might very well be, having been many times taken one for another. But as soon as she was brought into the house, before she would rest her, she desired to speak with Argalus publicly, who she heard was in the house. Argalus came hastily, and as hastily thought as Kalander had done, with sudden change of to sorrow. But she, when she had stayed her thoughts with telling them her name and quality, in this sort spake unto him. “My Lord Argalus,” said she, “being of late left in the court of queen Helen of Corinth, as chief in her absence, she being upon some occasion gone thence, there came unto me the lady Parthenia, so disfigured, as I think Greece hath nothing so ugly to behold. For my part, it was many days, before, with vehement oaths, and some good proofs, she could make me think that she was Parthenia. Yet at last finding certainly it was she, and greatly pitying her misfortune, so much the more as that all men had even told me, as now you do, of the great likeness between us, I took the best care I could of her, and of her understood the whole tragical history of her undeserved adventure: and therewithal of that most noble constancy in you my lord Argalus, which whosoever loves not, shows himself to be a hater of virtue, and unworthy to live in the society of mankind. But no outward cherishing could salve the inward sore of her mind; but a few days since she died; before her death earnestly desiring, and persuading me to think of no husband but of you, as of the only man in the world worthy to be loved. Withal she gave me this ring to deliver you, desiring you, and by the authority of love commanding you that the affection you bare her, you should turn to me; assuring you, that nothing can please her soul more than to see you and me matched together. Now my lord, though this office be not, perchance, suitable to my estate nor sex, who should rather look to be desired; yet, an extraordinary desert requires an extraordinary proceeding, and therefore I am come, with faithful love built upon your worthiness, to offer myself, and to beseech you to accept the offer: and if these noble gentlemen present will say it is great folly, let them withal say, it is great love.” And then she stayed, earnestly attending Argalus’s answer; who, first {37} making most hearty sighs, doing such obsequies as he could to Parthenia, thus answered her.

“Madame,” said he, “infinitely am I bound to you, for this no more rare than noble courtesy; but much bound for the goodness I perceive you showed to the lady Parthenia (with that the tears ran down his eyes, but he followed on) and as much as so unfortunate a man, fit to be the spectacle of misery, can do you a service; determine you have made a purchase of a slave, while I live, never to fail you. But this great matter you propose unto me, wherein I am not so blind as not to see what happiness it should be unto me, excellent lady, know that if my heart were mine to give, you before all others should have it; but Parthenia’s it is, though dead: there I began, there I end all matter of affection: I hope I shall not long tarry after her, with whose beauty if I only had been in love, I should be so with you, who have the same beauty; but it was Parthenia’s self I loved, and love, which no likeness can make one, no commandment dissolve, no foulness defile, nor no death finish.” “And shall I receive,” said she, “such disgrace as to be refused?” “Noble lady,” said he, “let not that hard word be used; who know your exceeding worthiness far beyond my desert? but it is only happiness I refuse, since of the only happiness I could and can desire, I am refused.”

He had scarce spoken those words, when she ran to him and embracing him, “Why then Argalus,” said she, “take thy Parthenia:” and Parthenia it was indeed. But because sorrow forbade him too soon to believe, she told him the truth, with all circumstances: how being parted alone, meaning to die in some solitary place, as she happened to make her complaint, the queen Helen of Corinth (who likewise felt her part of miseries) being then walking alone in that lovely place, heard her, and never left, till she had known the whole discourse. Which the noble queen greatly pitying, she sent to her a physician of hers, the most excellent man in the world, in hope he could help her: which in such sort as they saw he had performed, and the taking with her one of the queen’s servants, thought yet to make this trial, whether he would quickly forget his true Parthenia, or no. Her speech was confirmed by the Corinthian gentlemen, who before had kept her counsel, and Argalus easily persuaded to what more than ten thousand years of life he desired: and Kalander would needs have the marriage celebrated in his house, principally the longer to hold his dear guest, towards whom he was now, besides his own habits of hospitality, carried with love and duty: and therefore omitted no service that his wit could invent and power minister.

But no way he saw he could so much pleasure them as by {38} leaving the two friends alone, who being shrunk aside to the banqueting-house, where the pictures were; there Palladius recounted unto him, that after they had both abandoned the burning ship (and either of them taking something under him, the better to support him to the shore) he knew not how, but either with over-labouring in the fight, and sudden cold, or the too much receiving of salt-water, he was past himself: but yet holding fast, as the nature of dying men is to do, the chest that was under him, he was cast on the sands, where he was taken up by a couple of shepherds, and by them brought to life again, and kept from drowning himself, when he despaired of his safety. How after having failed to take him into the fisher-boat, he had by the shepherds’ persuasion come to this gentleman’s house; where being dangerously sick, he had yielded to seek the recovery of health, only for that he might the sooner go seek the delivery of Pyrocles; to which purpose Kalander by some friends of his in Messenia, had already set a ship or two abroad, when this accident of Clitophon’s taking had so blessedly procured their meeting. Then did he set forth unto him the noble entertainment and careful cherishing of Kalander towards him, and so upon occasion of the pictures present, delivered with the frankness of a friend’s tongue, as near as could be, word by word what Kalander had told him touching the strange story, with all the particularities belonging, of Arcadia; which did in many sorts so delight Pyrocles to hear, that he would needs have much of it again repeated, and was not contented till Kalander himself had answered him divers questions.

But first at Musidorus’s request, though in brief manner, his mind much running upon the strange story of Arcadia, he did declare by what course of adventures he was come to make up their mutual happiness in meeting. “When, cousin,” said he, “we had stripped ourselves, and were both leaped into the sea, and swam a little towards the shore, I found, by reason of some wounds I had, that I should not be able to get the land, and therefore returned back again to the mast of the ship, where you found me, assuring myself, that if you came alive to shore, you would seek me; if you were lost, as I thought it as good to perish as to live, so that place as good to perish in as another. There I found my sword among some of the shrouds, wishing, I must confess, if I died, to be found with that in my hand, and withal waving it about my head, that sailors by might have the better glimpse of me. There you missing me, I was taken up by pirates, who putting me under board prisoner, presently set upon another ship and maintaining a long fight, in the end put them all to the sword. Amongst whom I might hear them greatly praise one young man, who fought most valiantly, who (as love is careful, and misfortune {39} subject to doubtfulness) I thought certainly to be you. And so holding you as dead, from that time to the time I saw you, in truth I sought nothing more than a noble end, which perchance made me more hardy than otherwise I would have been. Trial whereof came within two days after; for the kings of Lacedaemon having set out some galleys under the charge of one of their nephews, to scour the sea of the pirates, they met with us, where our captain wanting men, was driven to arm some of his prisoners, with promise of liberty for well fighting: among whom I was one; and being boarded by the admiral, it was my fortune to kill Eurileon the king’s nephew: but in the end they prevailed, and we were all taken prisoners, I not caring much what became of me (only keeping the name of Daiphantus, according to the resolution you know is between us:) but being laid in the jail of Tenaria, with special hate to me for the death of Eurileon, the popular sort of that town conspired with the Helots, and so by night opened them the gates; where entering and killing all of the genteel and rich faction, for honesty-sake brake open all prisons, and so delivered me: and I, moved with gratefulness, and encouraged with carelessness of life, so behaved myself in some conflicts they had within few days, that they barbarously thinking unsensible wonders of me, as they heard I was hated of the king of Lacedaemon, their chief captain being slain, as you know, by the noble Argalus (who helped thereunto by his persuasion) having borne a great affection unto me, and to avoid the dangerous emulation which grew among the chief, who should have the place, and also affected, as rather to have a stranger than a competitor, they elected me (God wot little proud of that dignity;) restoring unto me such things of mine as being taken first by the pirates, and then by the Lacedaemonians, they had gotten in the sack of the town. Now being in it, so good was my success with many victories, that I made a peace for them, to their own liking, the very day that you delivered Clitophon, whom I, with much ado, had preserved. And in my peace the king Amiclas of Lacedaemon would needs have me banished, and deprived of the dignity, whereunto I was exalted: which (and you may see how much you are bound to me) for your sake I was content to suffer, a new hope rising in me, that you were not dead: and so meaning to travel over the world to seek you; and now here, my dear Musidorus! you have me.” And with that, embracing and kissing each other, they called Kalander, of whom Daiphantus desired to hear the full story, which before he had recounted to Palladius, and to see the letter of Philanax, which he read and well marked.

But within some days after, the marriage between Argalus and the fair Parthenia being to be celebrated, Daiphantus and Palladius, {40} selling some of their jewels, furnished themselves of very fair apparel, meaning to do honour to their loving host, who, as much for their sakes as for the marriage, set forth each thing in most gorgeous manner. But all the cost bestowed did not so much enrich, nor all the fine decking so much beautify, nor all the dainty devices so much delight, as the fairness of Parthenia, the pearl of all the maids of Mantinea, who as she went to the temple to be married, her eyes themselves seemed a temple, wherein love and beauty were married. Her lips, though they were kept close with modest silence, yet with a pretty kind of natural swelling, they seemed to invite the guests that looked on them; her cheeks blushing, and withal, when she was spoken unto, a little smiling, were like roses when their leaves are with a little breath stirred; her hair being laid at the full length down her back, bare she was, if the voward failed, yet that would conquer. Daiphantus marking her, “O Jupiter! (quoth he speaking to Palladius) how happens it, that beauty is only confined to Arcadia?” But Palladius not greatly attending his speech, some days were continued in the solemnizing the marriage, with all conceits that might deliver delight to men’s fancies.

But such a change was grown in Daiphantus that (as if cheerfulness had been tediousness, and good entertainment were turned to discourtesy) he would ever get himself alone, though almost when he was in company, he was alone, so little attention he gave to any that spake unto him: even the colour and figure of his face began to receive some alteration, which he shewed little to heed: but every morning early going abroad, either to the garden, or to some woods towards the desert, it seemed his only comfort was to be without a comforter. But long it could not be hid from Palladius, whom true love made ready to mark, and long knowledge able to mark; and therefore being now grown weary of his abode in Arcadia, having informed himself fully of the strength and riches of the country, of the nature of the people, and manner of their laws; and seeing the court could not be visited, prohibited to all men, but to certain shepherdish people, he greatly desired a speedy return to his own country, after the many mazes of fortune he had trodden. But perceiving this great alteration in his friend, he thought first to break with him thereof, and then to hasten his return; whereto he found him but smally inclined: whereupon one day taking him alone with certain graces and countenances, as if he were disputing with the trees, began in this manner to say unto him.

“A mind well trained and long exercised in virtue, my sweet and worthy cousin doth not easily change any course it once undertakes, but upon well-grounded and well-weighed causes; for {41} being witness to itself of its own inward good, it finds nothing without it of so high a price for which it should be altered. Even the very countenance and behaviour of such a man doth shew forth images of the same constancy, by maintaining a right harmony betwixt it and the inward good, in yielding itself suitable to the virtuous resolution of the mind. This speech I direct to you, noble friend Pyrocles, the excellency of whose mind and well chosen course in virtue, if I do not sufficiently know, having seen such rare demonstrations of it, it is my weakness, and not your unworthiness: but as indeed I know it, and knowing it, most dearly love both it and him that hath it, so must I needs say that since our late coming into this country, I have marked in you, I will not say an alteration, but a relenting truly, and a slacking of the main career you had so notably begun and almost performed, and that in such sort, as I cannot find sufficient reason in my great love toward you how to allow it: for (to leave off other secreter arguments which my acquaintance with you makes me easily find) this in effect to any man may be manifest, that whereas you were wont in all places you came to give yourself vehemently to the knowledge of those things which might better your mind, to seek the familiarity of excellent men in learning and soldiery, and lastly, to put all these things in practice, both by continual wise proceeding, and worthy enterprises as occasion fell for them; you now leave all these things undone: you let your mind fall asleep: beside your countenance troubled, which surely comes not of virtue; for virtue, like the clear heaven, is without clouds: and lastly, you subject yourself to solitariness, the sly enemy that doth most separate a man from well doing.”

Pyrocles’s mind was all this while so fixed upon another devotion, that he no more attentively marked his friend’s discourse than the child that hath leave to play marks the last part of his lesson; or the diligent pilot in a dangerous tempest doth attend the unskilful words of a passenger: yet the very sound having imprinted the general points of his speech in his heart, pierced with any mislike of so dearly an esteemed friend, and desirous by degrees to bring him to a gentler consideration of him, with a shame-faced look (witnessing he rather could not help, than did not know his fault) answered him to this purpose: “Excellent Musidorus! in the praise you gave me in the beginning of your speech, I easily acknowledge the force of your good will unto me; for neither could you have thought so well of me, if extremity of love had not made your judgment partial, nor could you have loved me so entirely if you had not been apt to make so great, though undeserved, judgments of me; and even so much I say to those imperfections to which, though I have ever through weakness been {42} subject, yet you by the daily mending of your mind have of late been able to look into them, which before you could not discern; so that the change you speak of falls not out by my impairing, but by your bettering. And yet under the leave of your better judgment, I must needs say thus much (my dear cousin!) that I find not myself wholly to be condemned because I do not with continual vehemency follow those knowledges, which you call the bettering of my mind; for both the mind itself must, like other things, sometimes be unbent, or else it will be either weakened, or broken, and these knowledges, as they are of good use, so are they not all the mind may stretch itself unto: who knows whether I feed not my mind with higher thoughts? Truly, as I know not all the particularities, so yet I see the bounds of all these knowledges: but the workings of the mind I find much more infinite than can be led unto by the eye, or imagined by any that distract their thoughts without themselves. And in such contemplation, or, as I think, more excellent, I enjoy my solitariness, and my solitariness perchance is the nurse of these contemplations. Eagles we see fly alone, and they are but sheep which always herd together; condemn not therefore my mind sometimes to enjoy itself; nor blame not the taking of such times as serve most fit for it. And alas, dear Musidorus! if I be sad who knows better than you the just causes I have of sadness?” And here Pyrocles suddenly stopped, like a man unsatisfied in himself, though his wit might well have served to have satisfied another. And so looking with a countenance as though he desired he should know his mind without hearing him speak, and yet desirous to speak, to breathe out some part of his inward evil, sending again new blood to his face, he continued his speech in this manner: “And lord, dear cousin,” said he, “doth not the pleasantness of this place carry in itself sufficient reward for any time lost in it? do you not see how all things conspire together to make this country a heavenly dwelling? do you not see the grass, how in colour they excel the emeralds, every one striving to pass his fellow, and yet they are all kept of an equal height? and see you not the rest of these beautiful flowers, each of which would require a man’s wit to know, and his life to express? do not these stately trees seem to maintain their flourishing old age with the only happiness of their seat, being clothed with a continual spring, because no beauty here should ever fade? doth not the air breathe health, which the birds, delightful both to ear and eye, do daily solemnize with the sweet consent of their voices? is not every echo thereof a perfect music? And these fresh and delightful brooks how slowly they slide away, as loth to leave the company of so many things united in perfection? and with how sweet a murmur they lament their forced {43} departure? certainly, certainly, cousin, it must needs be that some goddess inhabiteth this region, who is the soul of this soil: for neither is any less than a goddess worthy to be shrined in such a heap of pleasures, nor any less than a goddess could have made it so perfect a plot of the celestial dwellings.” And so ended with a deep sigh, ruefully[3] casting his eyes upon Musidorus, as more desirous of pity than pleading. But Musidorus had all this while held his look fixed upon Pyrocles’s countenance; and with no less loving attention marked how his words proceeded from him: but in both these he perceived such strange diversities, that they rather increased new doubts than gave him ground to settle any judgment: for besides his eyes sometimes even great with tears, the oft changing of his colour, with a kind of shaking unsteadiness over all his body, he might see in his countenance some great determination mixed with fear; and might perceive in him store of thoughts, rather stirred than digested; his words interrupted continually with sighs, which served as a burden to each sentence, and the tenour of his speech, though of his wanted phrase, not knit together to one constant end, but rather dissolved in itself, as the vehemency of the inward passion prevailed: which made Musidorus frame his answer nearest to that humour, which should soonest put out the secret. For having in the beginning of Pyrocles’s speech, which defended his solitariness, framed in his mind a reply against it in the praise of honourable action, in showing that such a kind of contemplation is but a glorious title to idleness; that in action a man did not only better himself, but benefit others; that the gods would not have delivered a soul into the body which had arms and legs, only instruments of doing, but that it were intended the mind should employ them, and that the mind should best know his own good or evil by practice; which knowledge was the only way to increase the one, and correct the other; besides many other arguments, which the plentifulness of the matter yielded to the sharpness of his wit. When he found Pyrocles leave that, and fall into such an affected praising of the place, he left it likewise, and joined with him therein: because he found him in that humour utter more store of passion; and even thus kindly embracing him, he said, “Your words are such, noble cousin, so sweetly and strongly handled in the praise of solitariness, as they would make me likewise yield myself up into it, but that the same words make me know it is more pleasant to enjoy the company of him that can speak such words than by such words to be persuaded to follow solitariness. And even so do I give you leave, sweet Pyrocles, ever to defend solitariness, so long as to defend it, you ever keep company. But I marvel at the excessive {44} praises you give to this country; in truth it is not unpleasant, but yet if you would return into Macedon you should either see many heavens, or find this no more than earthly. And even Tempe in my Thessalia (where you and I, to my great happiness, were brought up together) is nothing inferior unto it. But I think you will make me see that the vigour of your wit can show itself in any subject: or else you feed sometimes your solitariness with the conceits of the poets, whose liberal pens can as easily travel over mountains as molehills, and so like well-disposed men, set up everything to the highest note; especially, when they put such words in the mouths of one of these fantastical, mind-infected people, that children and musicians call ‘Lovers.’” This word “Lover,” did no less pierce poor Pyrocles, than the right tune of music toucheth him that is sick of the Tarantula.[4] There was not one part of his body that did not feel a sudden motion, while his heart with panting seemed to dance to the sound of that word; yet after some pause (lifting up his eyes a little from the ground, and yet not daring to place them in the eyes of Musidorus) armed with the very countenance of the poor prisoner at the bar, whose answer is nothing but guilty: with much ado he brought forth this question. “And alas,” said he, “dear cousin, what if I be not so much the poet (the freedom of whose pen can exercise itself in any thing) as even that miserable subject of his cunning whereof you speak?” “Now the eternal gods forbid,” mainly cried out Musidorus, “that ever my ear should be poisoned with so evil news of you. O let me never know that any base affection should get any lordship in your thoughts.” But as he was speaking more, Kalander came and brake off their discourse with inviting them to the hunting of a goodly stag, which being harboured in a wood thereby, he hoped would make them good sport, and drive away some part of Daiphantus’s melancholy. They condescended, and so going to their lodgings, furnished themselves as liked them, Diaphantus writing a few words which he sealed in a letter against their return.

Then went they together abroad, the good Kalander entertaining them with pleasant discoursing, how well he loved the sport of hunting when he was a young man, how much, in the comparison thereof, he disdained all chamber-delights, that the fun (how great a journey soever he had to make) could never prevent him with earliness, nor the moon, with her sober countenance, dissuade him from watching till midnight for the deer feeding. “O,” said he, “you will never live to my age, without you keep yourselves in breath with exercise, and in heart with joyfulness. Too much {45} thinking doth consume the spirits, and oft it falls out that while one thinks too much of his doing, he leaves to do the effect of his thinking.” Then spared he not to remember how much Arcadia was changed since his youth: activity and good fellowship being nothing in the price it was then held in; but, according to the nature of the old growing world, still worse and worse. Then would he tell them stories of such gallants as he had known: and so with pleasant company beguiled the time’s haste, and shortened the way’s length, till they came to the side of the wood, where the hounds were in couples staying their coming, but with a whining accent craving liberty, many of them in colour and marks so resembling, that it shewed they were of one kind. The huntsmen handsomely attired in their green liveries as though they were children of summer, with staves in their hands to beat the guiltless earth when the hounds were at a fault, and with horns about their necks to sound an alarm upon a silly fugitive: the hounds were straight uncoupled, and ere long the stag thought it better to trust to the nimbleness of his feet than to the slender fortification of his lodging: but even his feet betrayed him, for howsoever they went, they themselves uttered themselves to the scent of their enemies, who one taking it of another, and sometimes believing the wind’s advertisement, sometimes the view of their faithful counsellors, the huntsmen, with open mouths then denounced war, when the war was already begun; their cry being composed of so well-sorted mouths, that any man would perceive therein some kind of proportion, but the skilful woodmen did find a music. Then delight, and variety of opinion, drew the horsemen sundry ways, yet cheering their hounds with voice and horn, kept still, as it were, together. The wood seemed to conspire with them against his own citizens, dispersing their noise through all his quarters, and even the nymph Echo left to bewail the loss of Narcissus, and become a hunter. But the stag was in the end so hotly pursued that, leaving his flight, he was driven to make courage of despair, and so, turning his head, made the hounds, with change of speech, to testify that he was at a bay, as if from hot pursuit of their enemy, they were suddenly come to a parley.

But Kalander, by his skill of coasting the country, was amongst the first that came into the besieged deer; whom when some of the younger sort would have killed with their swords, he would not suffer, but with a cross-bow sent a death to the poor beast, who with tears showed the unkindness he took of man’s cruelty.

But by the time that the whole company was assembled, and that the stag had bestowed himself liberally among them that had killed him, Daiphantus was missed, for whom Palladius carefully inquiring, no news could be given him, but by one that said he {46} thought he was returned home; for that he marked him in the chief of the hunting, take a byway which might lead to Kalander’s house. That answer for the time satisfying, and they having performed all duties, as well for the stag’s funeral as the hounds’ triumph, they returned; some talking of the fatness of the deer’s body; some of the fairness of his head; some of the hounds’ cunning; some of their speed, and some of their cry; till coming home, about the time that the candles begin to inherit the sun’s office, they found Daiphantus was not to be found. Whereat Palladius greatly marvelling, and a day or two passing, while neither search nor inquiry could help him to knowledge, at last he lighted upon the letter which Pyrocles had written before he went a-hunting, and left in his study among other of his writings: The letter was directed to Palladius himself, and contained these words:

This was all, and this Palladius read twice or thrice over. “Ah,” said he, “Pyrocles what means this alteration? what have I deserved of thee to be thus banished of thy counsels? Heretofore I have accused the sea, condemned the pirates, and hated my evil fortune that deprived me of thee; but now thyself is the sea which drowns my comfort; thyself is the pirate that robs thyself from me; thy own will becomes thy evil fortune.” Then turned he his thoughts to all forms of guesses that might light upon the purpose and course of Pyrocles, for he was not so sure by his words that it was love, as he was doubtful where the love was. One time he thought some beauty in Laconia had laid hold of his eyes; another time he feared that it might be Parthenia’s excellency which had broken the bands of all former resolution; but the more he thought the more he knew not what to think, armies of objections rising against any accepted opinion.

Then as careful he was what to do himself: at length determined never to leave seeking him till his search should be either by meeting accomplished, or by death ended. Therefore (for all the unkindness bearing tender respect that his friend’s secret determination should be kept from any suspicion in others) he went to Kalander, and told him that he had received a message from his friend, by which he understood he was gone back again into Laconia about some matters greatly importing the poor men, whose protection he had undertaken, and that it was in any sort {47} fit for him to follow him, but in such private wise, as not to be known, and that therefore he would as then bid him farewell; arming himself in a black armour, as either a badge, or prognostication of his mind, and taking only with him a good store of money and a few choice jewels, leaving the greatest number of them, and most of his apparel with Kalander, which he did partly to give the more cause to Kalander to expect their return, and so to be the less curiously inquisitive after them—and partly to leave those honourable thanks unto him for his charge and kindness, which he knew he would not other way receive. The good old man having neither reason to dissuade nor hope to persuade, received the things with mind of a keeper, not of an owner; but, before he went, desired he might have the happiness fully to know what they were, which, he said, he had ever till then delayed, fearing to be importune: but now he would not be so much an enemy to his desires as any longer to imprison them in silence. Palladius told him that the matter was not so secret but that so worthy a friend deserved the knowledge, and should have it as soon as he might speak with his friend, without whose consent (because their promise bound him otherwise) he could not reveal it; but bade him hold for most assured that if they lived but a while he should find that they which bore the names of Diaphantus and Palladius would give him and his cause to think his noble courtesy well employed. Kalander would press him no further, but desiring that he might have leave to go, or at least to send his son and servants with him: Palladius brake off all ceremonies by telling him his case stood so that his greatest favour should be in making least ado of his parting. Wherewith Kalander knowing it to be more cumber than courtesy to strive, abstained from further urging him, but not from hearty mourning the loss of so sweet a conversation.

Only Clitophon by vehement importunity obtained to go with him to come again to Diaphantus, whom he named and accounted his lord. And in such private guise departed Palladius, though having a companion to talk withal, yet talking much more with unkindness. And first they went to Mantinea; whereof because Parthenia was, he suspected there might be some cause of his abode. But, finding there no news of him, he went to Tegea, Ripa, Enispae, Stimphalus, and Phineus, famous for the poisonous Stygian water, and through all the rest of Arcadia, making their eyes, their ears, and their tongues serve almost for nothing but that inquiry. But they could know nothing but that in none of those places he was known. And so went they, making one place succeed to another in like uncertainty to their search, many times encountering strange adventures worthy to be registered in the rolls of fame: but this may not be omitted. As they passed {48} in a pleasant valley (on either side of which high hills lifted up their beetle-brows, as if they would overlook the pleasantness of their under-prospect) they were by the daintiness of the place, and the weariness of themselves, invited to light from their horses, and pulled off their bits that they might something refresh their mouths upon the grass (which plentifully grew, brought up under the care of those well-shading trees), they themselves laid them down hard by the murmuring music of certain waters which spouted out of the side of the hills, and in the bottom of the valley made of many springs a pretty brook, like a commonwealth of many families; but when they had a while hearkened to the persuasion of sleep, they rose and walked onward in that shady place till Clitophon espied a piece of armour, and not far off another piece; and so the sight of one piece teaching him to look for more, he at length found all, with head-piece and shield, by the device whereof he straight knew it to be the armour of his cousin, the noble Amphialus. Whereupon (fearing some inconvenience happened unto him) he told both his doubt and cause of doubt to Palladius, who, considering thereof, thought best to make no longer stay, but to follow on, lest perchance some violence were offered to so worthy a knight, whom the fame of the world seemed to set in balance with any knight living. Yet with a sudden conceit, having long borne great honour to the name of Amphialus, Palladius thought best to take that armour, thinking thereby to learn by them that should know that armour some news of Amphialus, and yet not hinder him in the search of Diaphantus too. So he, by the help of Clitophon, quickly put on that armour, whereof there was no one piece wanting, though hacked in some places, betraying some fighting not long since passed. It was something too great, but yet served well enough. And so, getting on their horses, they travelled but a little way when in the opening of the mouth of the valley into a fair field they met with a coach drawn with four milk-white horses, furnished all in black with a black-a-moor boy upon every horse, they all apparelled in white, the coach itself very richly furnished in black and white. But before they could come so near as to discern what was within, there came running upon them above a dozen horsemen, who cried to them to yield themselves prisoners or else they should die. But Palladius, not accustomed to grant over the possession of himself upon so unjust titles, with sword drawn gave them so rude an answer that divers of them never had breath to reply again: for, being well backed by Clitophon, and having an excellent horse under him, when he was overpressed by some he avoided them, and ere the other thought of it, punished in him his fellow’s faults, and so either with cunning or with force, or rather with a cunning {49} force, left none of them either living or able to make his life serve to others’ hurt. Which being done, he approached the coach, assuring the black boys they should have no hurt, who were else ready to have run away; and looking in the coach, he found in the one end a lady of great beauty, and such a beauty as showed forth the beams both of wisdom and good nature, but all as much darkened as might be, with sorrow. In the other, two ladies (who by their demeanour showed well they were but her servants) holding before them a picture in which was a goodly gentleman whom he knew not, painted, having in their faces a certain waiting sorrow, their eyes being infected with their mistress’s weeping. But the chief lady having not so much as once heard the noise of this conflict (so had sorrow closed up all the entries of her mind, and love tied her senses to that beloved picture), now the shadow of him falling upon the picture made her cast up her eye, and seeing the armour which too well she knew, thinking him to be Amphialus, the lord of her desires (blood coming more freely into her cheeks, as though it would be bold, and yet there growing new again pale for fear) with a pitiful look, like one unjustly condemned. “My Lord Amphialus,” said she, “you have enough punished me; it is time for cruelty to leave you, and evil fortune me; if not, I pray you (and to grant my prayer fitter time nor place you cannot have) accomplish the one even now, and finish the other.” With that, sorrow impatient to be slowly uttered in her often staying speeches, poured itself so fast into tears, that Palladius could not hold her longer in error, but pulling off his helmet, “Madam,” said he, “I perceive you mistake me; I am a stranger in these parts, set upon without any cause given by me by some of your servants, whom, because I have in my just defence evil intreated, I came to make my excuse to you, whom seeing such as I do, I find greater cause why I should crave pardon of you.” When she saw his face and heard his speech she looked out of the coach, and seeing her men, some slain, some lying under their dead horses and striving to get from under them, without making more account of the matter; “Truly,” said she, “they are well served that durst lift up their arms against that armour. But, Sir Knight,” said she, “I pray you tell me, how came you by this armour? for if it be by the death of him that owned it, then have I more to say unto you.” Palladius assured her it was not so, telling her the true manner how he found it. “It is like enough,” said she, “for that agrees with the manner he hath lately used. But I beseech you, Sir,” said she, “since your prowess hath bereft me of my company, let it yet so far heal the wounds itself hath given as to guard me to the next town.” “How great soever my business be, fair lady,” said he, “it shall willingly yield to so noble a cause: {50} but first, even by the favour you bear to the lord of this noble armour, I conjure you to tell me the story of your fortune herein, lest, hereafter, when the image of so excellent a lady in so strange a plight come before mine eyes, I condemn myself of want of consideration in not having demanded thus much. Neither ask I it without protestation that wherein my sword and faith may avail you they shall bind themselves to your service.” “Your conjuration, fair knight,” said she, “is too strong for my poor spirit to disobey, and that shall make me (without any other hope, my ruin being but by one unrelievable) to grant your will herein, and to say the truth, a strange niceness were it in me to refrain that from the ears of a person representing so much worthiness, which I am glad even to rocks and woods to utter. Know you then that my name is Helen, queen by birth, and hitherto possessed of the fair city and territory of Corinth. I can say no more of myself but that I am beloved of my people, and may justly say beloved, since they are content to bear with my absence and folly. But I being left by my father’s death, and accepted by my people in the highest degree that country could receive; as soon, or rather, before that my age was ripe for it, my court quickly swarmed full of suitors: some, perchance, loving my estate, others my person; but once, I know all of them, however my possessions were in their heart, my beauty, such as it is, was in their mouths, many strangers of princely and noble blood, and all of mine own country, to whom either birth or virtue gave courage to avow so high a desire.

“Among the rest, or rather, before the rest, was the lord Philoxenus, son and heir to the virtuous nobleman, Timotheus, which Timotheus was a man both in power, riches, parentage, and, which passed all these, goodness; and, which followed all these, love of the people, beyond any of the great men of my country. Now, this son of his, I must say truly, not unworthy of such a father, bending himself by all means of serviceableness to me, and setting forth of himself to win my favour, won thus far of me that in truth I less misliked him than any of the rest, which, in some proportion, my countenance delivered unto him. Though, I must confess, it was a very false ambassador if it delivered at all any affection whereof my heart was utterly void, I as then esteeming myself born to rule, and thinking foul scorn willingly to submit myself to be ruled.

“But while Philoxenus in good sort pursued my favour, and perchance nourished himself with overmuch hope, because he found I did in some sort acknowledge his virtue; one time among the rest he brought with him a dear friend of his.” With that she looked upon the picture before her, and straight sighed, and straight tears flowed, as if the idol of duty ought to be honoured with such oblations; and then her speech stayed the tale, having {51} brought her to that look, but that look having quite put her out of her tale.

But Palladius greatly pitying so sweet a sorrow in a lady, whom by fame he had already known and honoured, besought for her promise sake to put silence so long unto her moaning till she had recounted the rest of this story. “Why,” said she, “this is the picture of Amphialus: what need I say more unto you? What ear is so barbarous but hath heard of Amphialus? Who follows deeds of arms, but everywhere finds monuments of Amphialus? Who is courteous, noble, liberal, but he hath the example before his eyes of Amphialus? Where are all heroical parts but in Amphialus? O Amphialus, I would thou wert not so excellent, or I would I thought thee not so excellent, and yet would I not that I would so.” With that she wept again; till he again soliciting the conclusion of her story: “Then you must,” said she, “know the story of Amphialus, for his will is my life, his life my history: and indeed in what can I better employ my lips than in speaking of Amphialus.

“This knight, then, whose figure you see, but whose mind can be painted by nothing but by their true shape of virtue, is brother’s son to Basilius, King of Arcadia, and in his childhood esteemed his heir, till Basilius, in his old years, marrying a young and fair lady, had of her those two daughters, so famous for their perfection in beauty, which put by their young cousin from that expectation. Whereupon his mother (a woman of an haughty heart, being daughter to the King of Argos) either disdaining or fearing that her son should live under the power of Basilius, sent him to that lord Timotheus (between whom and her dead husband there had passed straight bands of mutual hospitality) to be brought up in company with his son Philoxenus.

“A happy resolution for Amphialus, whose excellent nature was by this means trained on with as good education as any prince’s son in the world could have, which otherwise it is thought his mother, far unworthy of such a son, would not have given him: the good Timotheus no less loving him than his own son. Well, they grew in years, and shortly occasions fell aptly to try Amphialus, and all occasions were but steps for him to climb fame by. Nothing was so hard but his valour overcame; which yet still he so guided with true virtue that although no man was in our parts spoken of but he for his manhood, yet, as though therein he excelled himself, he was commonly called the courteous Amphialus. An endless thing it were for me to tell how many adventures, terrible to be spoken of, he achieved, what monsters, what giants, what conquests of countries, sometimes using policy, sometimes force, but always virtue well followed, and but followed by {52} Philoxenus, between whom and him so fast a friendship by education was knit that at last Philoxenus having no greater matter to employ his friendship in than to win me, therein desired, and had his uttermost furtherance: to that purpose brought he him to my court, where truly I may justly witness with him that what his wit could conceive (and his wit can conceive as far as the limits of reason stretch) was all directed to the setting forward the suit of his friend Philoxenus: mine ears could hear nothing from him but touching the worthiness of Philoxenus, and of the great happiness it would be unto me to have such a husband; with many arguments, which God knows I cannot well remember, because I did not much believe. For why should I use many circumstances to come to that where already I am, and ever while I live must continue? in few words, while he pleaded for another, he won me for himself: if at least,” with that she sighed, “he would account it a winning, for his fame had so framed the way to my mind that his presence, so full of beauty, sweetness and noble conversation, had entered there before he vouchsafed to call for the keys. O lord, how did my soul hang at his lips while he spake! O when he in feeling manner would describe the love of his friend, how well, thought I, doth love between those lips! when he would with daintiest eloquence stir pity in me toward Philoxenus, ‘Why sure,’ said I to myself, ‘Helen, be not afraid, this heart cannot want pity:’ and when he would extol the deeds of Philoxenus, who indeed had but waited of him therein, alas, thought I, good Philoxenus, how evil doth it become thy name to be subscribed to his letter? what should I say? nay, what should I not say (noble knight! who am not ashamed, nay am delighted, thus to express my own passions?

“Days passed, his eagerness for his friend never decreased, my affection to him ever increased. At length, in way of ordinary courtesy, I obtained of him, who suspected no such matter, this his picture, the only Amphialus, I fear, that I shall ever enjoy; and grown bolder, or madder, or bold with madness, I discovered my affection unto him. But lord, I shall never forget how anger and courtesy at one instant appeared in his eyes when he heard that motion; how with his blush he taught me shame. In sum, he left nothing unassayed which might disgrace himself to grace his friend, in sweet terms making me receive a most resolute refusal of himself. But when he found that his presence did far more persuade for himself than his speech could do for his friend, he left my court, hoping that forgetfulness, which commonly waits upon absence, would make room for his friend, to whom he would not utter thus much, I think, for a kind fear not to grieve him, or perchance, though he cares little for me, of a certain honourable {53} gratefulness, not yet to discover so much of my secrets: but, as it should seem, meant to travel into far countries, until his friend’s affection either ceased or prevailed. But within a while, Philoxenus came to see how onward the fruits were of his friend’s labour, when (as in truth I cared not much how he took it) he found me sitting, beholding this picture, I know not with how affectionate countenance, but I am sure with a most affectionate mind. I straight found jealousy and disdain took hold of him, and yet the froward pain of mine own heart made me so delight to punish him whom I esteemed to be the chiefest let in my way; that when he with humble gesture, and vehement speeches sued for my favour, I told him that I would hear him more willingly if he would speak for Amphialus as well as Amphialus had done for him: he never answered me, but pale and quaking, went straight away; and straight my heart misgave me some evil success: and yet, though I had authority enough to have stayed him (as in these fatal things it falls out that the high-working powers make second causes unwittingly accessory to their determinations) I did no further, but sent a footman of mine (whose faithfulness to me I well knew) from place to place to follow him and bring me word of his proceedings, which (alas!) have brought forth that which I fear I must ever rue.

“For he had travelled scarce a day’s journey out of my country, but that, not far from this place, he overtook Amphialus, who, by succouring a distressed lady, had been here stayed, and by and by called him to fight with him, protesting that one of them two should die. You may easily judge how strange it was to Amphialus, whose heart could accuse itself of no fault but too much affection toward him, which he, refusing to fight with him, would fain have made Philoxenus understand, but, as my servant since told me, the more Amphialus went back, the more he followed, calling him traitor and coward, yet never telling the cause of this strange alteration. ‘Ah Philoxenus,’ said Amphialus, ‘I know I am no traitor, and thou well knowest I am no coward: but I pray thee content thyself with this much, and let this satisfy thee that I love thee, since I bear thus much of thee.’ But he, leaving words, drew his sword and gave Amphialus a great blow or two, which, but for the goodness of his armour, would have slain him: and yet so far did Amphialus contain himself, stepping aside, and saying to him, ‘Well, Philoxenus, and thus much villainy am I content to put up, not any longer for thy sake (whom I have no cause to love since thou dost injure me, and wilt not tell me the cause) but for thy virtuous father’s sake to whom I am so much bound, I pray thee go away, and conquer thy own passions and thou shalt make me soon yield to be thy servant.’ But he would not attend to his {54} words, but still struck so fiercely at Amphialus that in the end (nature prevailing above determination) he was fain to defend himself, and withal so to offend him that by an unlucky blow the poor Philoxenus fell dead at his feet, having had time only to speak some few words, whereby Amphialus knew it was for my sake: which when Amphialus saw, he forthwith gave such tokens of true-felt sorrow that, as my servant said, no imagination could conceive greater woe. But that by and by an unhappy occasion made Amphialus pass himself in sorrow: for Philoxenus was but newly dead, when there comes to the same place the aged and virtuous Timotheus; who (having heard of his son’s sudden and passionate manner of parting from my court) had followed him as speedily as he could, but alas not so speedily but that he found him dead before he could overtake him. Though my heart be nothing but a stage of tragedies, yet, I must confess, it is even unable to bear the miserable representation thereof, knowing Amphialus and Timotheus as I have done. Alas, what sorrow, what amazement, what shame was in Amphialus when he saw his dear foster-father find him the killer of his only son? In my heart, I know he wished mountains had lain upon him to keep him from that meeting. As for Timotheus, sorrow for his son, and, I think principally, unkindness of Amphialus so devoured his vital spirits that, able to say no more, but ‘Amphialus, Amphialus, have I?’ he sank to the earth, and presently died.

“But not my tongue, though daily used to complaints, no, nor if my heart, which is nothing but sorrow, were turned to tongues, durst it undertake to show the unspeakableness of his grief. But, because this serves to make you know my fortune, he threw away his armour, even this which you have now upon you, which at the first sight I vainly hoped he had put on again; and then, as ashamed of the light, he ran into the thickest of the woods, lamenting, and even crying out so pitifully that my servant, though of a fortune not used to much tenderness, could not refrain weeping when he told it me. He once overtook him; but Amphialus drawing his sword, which was the only part of his arms, God knows to what purpose, he carried about him, threatened to kill him if he followed him, and withal bade him deliver this bitter message, that he well enough found I was the cause of all this mischief, and that if I were a man, he would go over the world to kill me, but bade me assure myself that of all creatures in the world he most hated me. Ah, Sir knight, whose ears I think by this time are tired with the rugged ways of these misfortunes, now weigh my case, if at least you know what love is. For this cause have I left my country, putting in hazard how my people will in time deal by me, adventuring what perils or dishonours might {55} ensue, only to follow him who proclaimeth hate against me, and to bring my neck unto him, if that may redeem my trespass, and assuage his fury. And now, Sir,” said she, “you have your request, I pray you take pains to guide me to the next town, that there I may gather such of my company again as your valour hath left me.”

Palladius willingly condescended, but ere they began to go, there came Clitophon who, having been something hurt by one of them, had pursued him a good way: at length overtaking him, and ready to kill him, understood they were servants to the fair queen Helen, and that the cause of this enterprise was for nothing but to make Amphialus prisoner, whom they knew their mistress sought; for she concealed her sorrow, nor cause of her sorrow from nobody. But Clitophon, very sorry for this accident, came back to comfort the queen, helping such as were hurt in the best sort that he could, and framing friendly constructions of this rashly undertaken enmity, when in comes another, till that time unseen, all armed, with his beaver down, who first looking round about upon the company, as soon as he espied Palladius, he drew his sword, and making no other prologue, let fly at him. But Palladius, sorry for so much harm as had already happened, fought rather to retire and ward, thinking he might be someone that belonged to the fair queen, whose case in his heart he pitied. Which Clitophon seeing, stepped between them, asking the new-come knight the cause of this quarrel, who answered him, that he would kill that thief who had stolen away his master’s armour, if he did not restore it. With that Palladius looked upon him and saw that he of the other side had Palladius’s own armour upon him. “Truly,” said Palladius “if I have stolen this armour, you did not buy that; but you shall not fight with me upon such a quarrel; you shall have this armour willingly, which I did only put on to do honour to the owner.” But Clitophon straight knew by his words and voice that it was Ismenus, the faithful and diligent page of Amphialus; and, therefore, telling him that he was Clitophon, and willing him to acknowledge his error to the other, who deserved all honour, the young gentleman pulled off his head-piece, and, lighting, went to kiss Palladius’s hands, desiring him to pardon his folly, caused by extreme grief, which easily might bring forth anger. “Sweet gentleman,” said Palladius, “you shall only make me this amends, that you shall carry this your lord’s armour from me to him, and tell him from an unknown knight, who admires his worthiness, that he cannot cast a greater mist over his glory than by being so unkind to so excellent a princess as this queen is.” Ismenus promised he would as soon as he durst find his master: and with that went to do his duty to the queen, whom in all these encounters {56} astonishment made hardy: but as soon as she saw Ismenus, looking to her picture, “Ismenus,” said she, “here is my lord, where is yours? or come you to bring me some sentence of death from him? if it be so, welcome be it. I pray you speak, and speak quickly.” “Alas! Madam,” said Ismenus, “I have lost my lord;” with that tears came into his eyes, “for as soon as the unhappy combat was concluded, with the death both of father and son, my master, casting off his armour, went his way, forbidding me upon pain of death to follow him. Yet divers days I followed his steps, till lastly I found him, having newly met with an excellent spaniel belonging to his dead companion Philoxenus. The dog straight fawned on my master, for old knowledge, but never was there thing more pitiful than to hear my master blame the dog for loving his master’s murderer, renewing afresh his complaints with the dumb counsellor, as if they might comfort one another in their miseries. But my lord having espied me, rose up in such rage that in truth I feared he would kill me: yet as then he said only, if I would not displease him, I should not come near him till he sent for me: too hard a commandment for me to disobey: I yielded, leaving him only waited on by his dog, and as I think seeking out the most solitary places that this or any other country can grant him: and I, returning where I had left his armour, found another instead thereof, and (disdaining I must confess that any should bear the armour of the best knight living) armed myself therein to play the fool, as even now I did.” “Fair Ismenus,” said the queen, “a fitter messenger could hardly be to unfold my tragedy, I see the end, I see my end.”

With that, sobbing, she desired to be conducted to the next town, where Palladius left her to be waited on by Clitophon, at Palladius’s earnest entreaty, who desired alone to take that melancholy course of seeking his friend; and therefore changing armour again with Ismenus, who went withal to a castle belonging to his master, he continued his quest for his friend Daiphantus.

So directed he his course to Laconia, as well among the Helots, as Spartans: there indeed he found his fame flourishing, his monuments engraved in marble, and yet more durably in men’s memories; but the universal lamenting his absented presence, assured him of his present absence. Thence into the Elean province, to see whether at the Olympian games there celebrated he might in such concourse bless his eyes with so desired an encounter: but that huge and sportful assembly grew to him a tedious loneliness, esteeming nobody found, since Diaphantus was lost. Afterwards he passeth through Achaia and Sicyonia, to the Corinthians, proud of their two seas, to learn whether by the straight of that Isthmus it were possible to know of his passage. {57} But finding every place more dumb than other to his demands, and remembering that it was late-taken love which had wrought this new course, he returned again, after two months travel in vain, to make a fresh search in Arcadia; so much the more as then first he bethought himself of the picture of Philoclea, which resembling her he had once loved, might perhaps awake again that sleeping passion. And having already passed over the greatest part of Arcadia, one day coming under the side of the pleasant mountain Maenalus, his horse, nothing guilty of his inquisitiveness, with flat tiring taught him, that discreet stays make speedy journeys: and therefore lighting down, and unbridling his horse, he himself went to repose himself in a little wood he saw thereby. Where lying under the protection of a shady tree, with intention to make forgetting sleep comfort a sorrowful memory, he saw a sight which persuaded and obtained of his eyes that they would abide yet a while open. It was the appearing of a lady, who because she walked with her side toward him, he could not perfectly see her face, but so much he might see of her, that was a surety for the rest, that all was excellent.

Well might he perceive the hanging of her hair in fairest quantity, in locks some curled, and some as it were forgotten, with such a careless care, and an art so hiding art, that she seemed she would lay them for a pattern, whether nature simply, or nature helped by cunning, be the more excellent: the rest whereof was drawn into a coronet of gold richly set with pearl, and so joined all over with gold wires and covered with feathers of divers colours that it was not unlike to an helmet, such a glittering show it bare, and so bravely it was held up from the head. Upon her body she wore a doublet of sky-coloured satin, covered with plates of gold, and, as it were, nailed with precious stones, that in it she might seem armed; the nether part of her garment was full of stuff, and cut after such a fashion that though the length of it reached to the ankles, yet in her going one might sometimes discern the small of her leg, which with the foot was dressed in a short pair of crimson velvet buskins, in some places open, as the ancient manner was, to show the fairness of the skin. Over all this she wore a certain mantle, made in such manner, that coming under her right arm and covering most of that side, it had no fastening on the left side, but only upon the top of her shoulder, where the two ends met, and were closed together with a very rich jewel: the device whereof, as he after saw, was this: a Hercules made in little form, but set with a distaff in his hand, as he once was by Omphale’s commandment, with a word in Greek, but thus to be interpreted, “Never more valiant.” On the same side on her thigh she wore a sword, which as it witnessed her to be an Amazon, {58} or one following that profession, so it seemed but a needless weapon, since her other forces were without withstanding. But this lady walked out-right till he might see her enter into a fine close arbour: it was of trees, whose branches so lovingly interlaced one the other that it could resist the strongest violence of eye-sight, but she went into it by a door she opened, which moved him, as warily as he could, to follow her; and by and by he might hear her sing this song, with a voice no less beautiful to his ears than her goodliness was full of harmony to his eyes:

This ditty gave him some suspicion, but the voice gave him almost assurance who the singer was. And therefore boldly thrusting open the door and entering into the arbour, he perceived indeed that it was Pyrocles thus disguised; wherewith not receiving so much joy to have found him as grief so to have found him, amazedly looking upon him (as Apollo is painted when he saw Daphne suddenly turned into a laurel) he was not able to bring forth a word. So that Pyrocles, (who had as much shame as Musidorus had sorrow) rising to him, would have formed a substantial excuse, but his insinuation being of blushing, and his division of sighs, his whole oration stood upon a short narration what was the cause of this metamorphosis. But by that time Musidorus had gathered his spirits together, and yet casting a ghastful countenance upon him, as if he would conjure some strange spirit, he thus spake unto him:

“And is it possible that this is Pyrocles, the only young prince in the world formed by nature, and framed by education to the true exercise of virtue? or is it indeed some Amazon that hath counterfeited the face of my friend in this sort to vex me? for likelier sure I would have thought it that any outward face might have been disguised than that the face of so excellent a mind could have been thus blemished. O sweet Pyrocles, separate yourself a little, if it {59} be possible, from yourself, and let your own mind look upon your own proceedings; so shall my words be needless, and you best instructed. See with yourself how fit it will be for you in this your tender youth, born so great a prince, and of so rare not only expectation, but proof, desired of your old father, and wanted of your native country, now so near your home, to divert your thoughts from the way of goodness, to lose, nay, to abuse your time. Lastly, to overthrow all the excellent things you have done, which have filled the world with your fame; as if you should drown your ship in the long desired haven; or, like an ill player, should mar the last act of his tragedy. Remember, for I know you know it, that if we will be men the reasonable part of our soul is to have absolute commandment, against which, if any sensual weakness arise, we are to yield all our sound forces to the overthrowing of so unnatural a rebellion, wherein how can we want courage, since we are to deal against so weak an adversary that in itself is nothing but weakness? nay, we are to resolve that if reason direct it we must do it; and if we must do it, we will do it: for, to say ‘I cannot,’ is childish; and ‘I will not,’ womanish. And see how extremely every way you can endanger your mind; for, to take this womanish habit, without you frame your behavior accordingly, is wholly vain: your behaviour can never come kindly from you, but as the mind is proportioned unto it. So that you must resolve if you will play your part to any purpose, whatsoever peevish imperfections are in that sex to soften your heart to receive them, the very first down-step to all wickedness: for do not deceive yourself, my dear cousin, there is no man suddenly either excellently good or extremely evil, but grows either as he holds himself up in virtue, or lets himself slide to viciousness. And let us see what power is the author of all these troubles; forsooth love, love, a passion, and the basest and fruitlessest of all passions: fear breedeth wit; anger is the cradle of courage; joy openeth and enableth the heart; sorrow, as it closeth, so it draweth it inward to look to the correcting of itself; and so all of them generally have power towards some good by the direction of reason. But this bastard Love (for indeed the name of love is most unworthily applied to so hateful a humour) as it is engendered betwixt lust and idleness, as the matter it works upon is nothing but a certain base weakness which some gentle fools call a gentle heart; as his adjoined companions be unquietness, longings, fond comforts, faint discomforts, hopes, jealousies, ungrounded rages, causeless yielding, so is the highest end it aspires unto, a little pleasure with much pain before and great repentance after. But that end, how endless it runs into infinite evils, were fit enough for the matter we speak of, but not for your ears, in whom, indeed, there is so much true {60} disposition to virtue; yet this much of his worthy effects in yourself is to be seen, that (besides your breaking laws of hospitality with Kalander, and of friendship with me) it utterly subverts the course of nature in making reason give place to sense, and man to woman. And truly I think hereupon it first got the name of love: for indeed the true love hath that excellent nature in it, that it doth transform the very essence of the lover into the thing loved, uniting, and as it were, incorporating it with a secret and inward working. And herein do these kinds of loves imitate the excellent: for, as the love of heaven makes one heavenly, the love of virtue, virtuous, so doth the love of the world make one become worldly: and this effeminate love of a woman doth so womanize a man, that, if he yield to it, it will not only make him an Amazon, but a launder, a distaff, a spinner, or whatsoever other vile occupation their idle heads can imagine and their weak hands perform. Therefore to trouble you no longer with my tedious, but loving words, if either you remember what you are, what you have been, or what you must be, if you consider what it is that moved you, or by what kind of creature you are moved, you shall find the cause so small, the effect so dangerous, yourself so unworthy to run into the one, or to be driven by the other, that I doubt not I shall quickly have occasion rather to praise you for having conquered it, than to give you further counsel how to do it.”

But in Pyrocles this speech wrought no more but that he, who before he was espied was afraid, after being perceived, was ashamed, now being hardly rubbed upon, left both fear and shame, and was moved to anger. But the exceeding goodwill he bore to Musidorus striving with it, he thus partly to satisfy him, but principally to loose the reins to his own motions, made him answer: “Cousin! whatsoever good disposition nature hath bestowed upon me, or however that disposition hath been by bringing up confirmed, this I must confess, that I am not yet come to that degree of wisdom to think light of the sex of whom I have my life, since if I be anything, which your friendship rather finds than I acknowledge, I was, to come to it, born of a woman, and nursed of a woman. And certainly, for this point of your speech doth nearest touch me, it is strange to see the unmanlike cruelty of mankind, who, not content with their tyrannous ambition to have brought the other’s virtuous patience under them, like childish masters, think their masterhood nothing without doing injury to them, who, if we will argue by reason, are framed of nature with the same parts of the mind for the exercise of virtue as we are. And for example, even this estate of Amazons, which I now for my greatest honour do seek to counterfeit, doth well witness that if generally the sweetness of their disposition did not make them see the vainness {61} of these things which we account glorious, they neither want valour of mind, nor yet doth their fairness take away their force. And truly we men, and praisers of men, should remember that if we have such excellencies, it is reason to think them excellent creatures, of whom we are: since a kite never brought forth a good flying hawk. But to tell you true, as I think it superfluous to use any words of such a subject which is so praised in itself as it needs no praises; so withal, I fear, lest my conceit, not able to reach unto them, bring forth words which for their unworthiness may be a disgrace to them I so inwardly honour. Let this suffice that they are capable of virtue, and virtue, you yourselves say, is to be loved, and I too, truly: but this I willingly confess, that it likes me much better when I find virtue in a fair lodging than when I am bound to seek it in an ill-favoured creature, like a pearl in a dunghill. As for my fault of being an uncivil guest to Kalander, if you could feel what an inward guest myself am host unto, ye would think it were excusable, in that I rather perform the duties of an host than the ceremonies of a guest. And for my breaking the laws of friendship with you, which I would rather die than effectually do, truly I could find it in my heart to ask you pardon for it, but that your now handling of me gives me reason to confirm my former dealing.”

And here Pyrocles stayed, as to breathe himself, having been transported with a little vehemency, because it seemed him Musidorus had over-bitterly glanced against the reputation of womankind: but then quieting his countenance, as well as out of an unquiet mind it might be, he thus proceeded on: “And poor love,” said he, “dear cousin, is little beholding unto you, since you are not content to spoil it of the honour of the highest power of the mind which notable men have attributed unto it; but you deject it below all other passions, in truth somewhat strangely, since, if love receive any disgrace, it is by the company of these passions you prefer before it. For those kinds of bitter objections as that lust, idleness, and a weak heart should be, as it were, the matter and form of love, rather touch me, dear Musidorus, than love; but I am good witness of my own imperfections, and therefore will not defend myself: but herein I must say you deal contrary to yourself: for if I be so weak, then can you not with reason stir me up as you did by remembrance of my own virtue; or if indeed I be virtuous, then must ye confess that love hath his working in a virtuous heart; and so no doubt hath it, whatsoever I be: for, if we love virtue, in whom shall we love it but in a virtuous creature? without your meaning be, I should love this word Virtue, where I see it written in a book. Those troublesome effects you say it breeds be not the faults of love, but of him that {62} loves, as an unable vessel to bear such a liquor, like evil eyes not able to look on the sun; or like a weak brain, soonest overthrown with the best wine. Even that heavenly love you speak of is accompanied in some hearts with hopes, griefs, longings, and despairs. And in that heavenly love, since there are two parts, the one the love itself, the other the excellency of the thing loved: I, not able at the first leap to frame both in me, do now, like a diligent workman, make ready the chief instrument and first part of that great work, which is love itself; which when I have a while practised in this sort, then you shall see me turn it to greater matters. And thus gently you may, if it please you, think of me. Neither doubt ye, because I wear a woman’s apparel, I will be the more womanish, since I assure you, for all my apparel, there is nothing I desire more than fully to prove myself a man in this enterprise. Much might be said in my defence, much more for love, and most of all for that divine creature which hath joined me and love together. But these disputations are fitter for quiet schools than my troubled brains, which are bent rather in deeds to perform than in words to defend the noble desire that possesseth me.” “O lord,” said Musidorus, “how sharp-witted you are to hurt yourself.” “No,” answered he, “but it is the hurt you speak of which makes me so sharp-witted.” “Even so,” said Musidorus, “as every base occupation makes one sharp in that practice and foolish in all the rest.” “Nay rather,” answered Pyrocles, “as each excellent thing once well-learned serves for a measure of all other knowledges.” “And is that become,” said Musidorus, “a measure for other things which never received measure in itself?” “It is counted without measure,” answered Pyrocles, “because the workings of it are without measure, but otherwise, in nature it hath measure, since it hath an end allotted unto it.” The beginning, being so excellent, I would gladly know the end. “Enjoying,” answered Pyrocles, with a sigh, “I speak of the end to which it is directed which end ends not, no sooner than the life.” “Alas! let your own brain disenchant you,” said Musidorus. “My heart is too far possessed,” said Pyrocles. “But the head gives you direction, and the heart gives me life,” answered Musidorus.

But Musidorus was so grieved to see his well-beloved friend obstinate, as he thought, to his own destruction, that it forced him with more than accustomed vehemency to speak these words. “Well, well,” said he, “you list to abuse yourself; it was a very white and red virtue, which you could pick out of a painterly glose of a visage. Confess the truth, and you shall find the utmost was but beauty, a thing, which though it be in as great excellency in yourself as may be in any, yet I am sure you make no further reckoning of it than of an outward fading benefit nature {63} bestowed upon you. And yet such is your want of a true grounded virtue, which must be like itself in all points, that what you wisely account a trifle in yourself, you fondly become a slave unto in another. For my part I now protest I have left nothing unsaid which my wit could make me know, or my most entire friendship to you requires of me. I do not beseech you, even for the love betwixt us, if this other love hath left any in you towards me, and for the remembrance of your old careful father (if you can remember him that forgot yourself) lastly, for Pyrocles’ own sake, who is now upon the point of falling or rising, to purge yourself of this vile infection: otherwise give me leave to leave off this name of friendship as an idle title of a thing which cannot be where virtue is not established.”

The length of these speeches before had not so much cloyed Pyrocles, though he were very impatient of long deliberations, as this last farewell of him he loved as his own life did wound his soul. For thinking himself afflicted, he was the apter to conceive unkindness deeply, insomuch that shaking his head, and delivering some show of tears, he thus uttered his grief: “Alas!” said he, “Prince Musidorus, how cruelly you deal with me; if you seek the victory, take it; and, if ye list, the triumph. Have you all the reason of the world, and with me remain all the imperfections; yet such as I can no more lay from me, than the crow can be persuaded by the swan to cast off all his black feathers. But truly you deal with me like a physician who, seeing his patient in a pestilent fever, should chide him instead of ministering help, and bid him be sick no more; or rather like such a friend, that visiting his friend condemned to perpetual prison, and laden with grievous fetters, should will him to shake off his fetters, or he would leave him. I am sick, and sick to the death; I am prisoner, neither is there any redress but by her to whom I am a slave. Now, if you list, leave him that loves you in the highest degree: but remember ever to carry this with you, that you abandon your friend in his greatest extremity.”

And herewith the deep wound of his love being rubbed afresh with this new unkindness, began, as it were, to bleed again in such sort that he was unable to bear it any longer, but gushing out abundance of tears, and crossing his arms over his woeful heart, he sunk down to the ground, which sudden trance went so to the heart of Musidorus, that falling down by him, and kissing the weeping eyes of his friend, he besought him not to make account of his speech, which if it had been over-vehement, yet was it to be borne withal, because it came out of a love much more vehement, that he had not thought fancy could have received so deep a wound; but now finding in him the force of it, he would {64} no further contrary it but employ all his service to medicine it in such sort as the nature of it required. But even this kindness made Pyrocles the more to melt in the former unkindness, which his manlike tears well shewed, with a silent look upon Musidorus, as who should say: “And is it possible that Musidorus should threaten to leave me?” and this struck Musidorus’s mind and senses so dumb, too, that for grief being not able to say anything, they rested with their eyes placed one upon the other, in such sort as might well paint out the true passion of unkindness to be never aright, but betwixt them that most dearly love.

And thus remained they a time, till at length Musidorus embracing him, said “And will you thus shake off your friend?” “It is you that shake me off,” said Pyrocles, “being for my unperfectness unworthy of your friendship.” “But this,” said Musidorus, “shows you more unperfect to be cruel to him that submits himself unto you. But since you are unperfect,” said he, smiling, “it is reason you be governed by us wise and perfect men. And that authority will I begin to take upon me, with three absolute commandments: the first, that you increase not your evil with further griefs: the second, that you love her with all the powers of your mind: and the last commandment shall be, you command me to do what service I can towards the attaining of your desires.” Pyrocles’s heart was not so oppressed with the two mighty passions of love and unkindness but that it yielded to some mirth at this commandment of Musidorus that he should love, so that something clearing his face from his former shows of grief: “Well,” said he, “dear cousin! I see by the well choosing of your commandments that you are far fitter to be a prince than a counsellor, and therefore I am resolved to employ all my endeavour to obey you, with this condition, that the commandments ye command me to lay upon you shall only be, that you continue to love me, and look upon my imperfections with more affection than judgment.” “Love you,” said he, “alas! how can my heart be separated from the true embracing of it without it burst by being too full of it?” “But,” said he, “let us leave off these flowers of new begun friendship: and now I pray you again tell me, but tell it me fully, omitting no circumstance, the story of your affections, both beginning and proceeding, assuring yourself, that there is nothing so great which I will fear to do for you, nor nothing so small which I will disdain to do for you. Let me, therefore, receive a clear understanding, which many times we miss, while those things we account small, as a speech or a look, are omitted, like as a whole sentence may fail of his congruity by wanting one particle. Therefore between friends all must be laid open, nothing being superfluous nor tedious.” “You shall be obeyed,” said Pyrocles, “and here are {65} we in as fit a place for it as may be; for this arbour nobody offers to come into but myself, I using it as my melancholy retiring place, and therefore that respect is borne unto it: yet if by chance any should come, say that you are a servant sent from the queen of the Amazons to seek me, and then let me alone for the rest.” So sat they down, and Pyrocles thus said:

“Cousin!” said he, “then began the fatal overthrow of all my liberty when, walking among the pictures in Kalander’s house, you yourself delivered unto me what you had understood of Philoclea, who much resembling (though I must say much surpassing) the lady Zelmane, whom so well I loved: there were mine eyes, infected, and at your mouth did I drink the poison. Yet alas! so sweet was it unto me, that I could not be contented, till Kalander had made it more and more strong with his declaration. Which the more I questioned, the more pity I conceived of her unworthy fortune; and when with pity once my heart was made tender, according to the aptness of the humour, it received quickly a cruel impression of that wonderful passion, which to be defined is impossible, because no words reach to the strange nature of it: they only know it, which inwardly feel it; it is called love. Yet did I not (poor wretch!) at first know my disease, thinking it only such a wonted kind of desire to see rare sights, and my pity to be no other but the fruits of a gentle nature. But even this arguing with myself came of further thoughts, and the more I argued the more my thoughts increased. Desirous I was to see the place where she remained, as though the architecture of the lodges would have been much for my learning, but more desirous to see herself, to be judge, forsooth, of the painter’s cunning. For thus at the first did I flatter myself, as though my wound had been no deeper: but when within short time I came to the degree of uncertain wishes, and that those wishes grew to unquiet longings, when I could fix my thoughts upon nothing but that within little varying they should end with Philoclea; when each thing I saw seemed to figure out some part of my passions; when even Parthenia’s fair face became a lecture to me of Philoclea’s imagined beauty; when I heard no word spoken, but that methought it carried the sound of Philoclea’s name; then indeed, then I did yield to the burden, finding myself prisoner, before I had leisure to arm myself: and that I might well, like the spaniel, gnaw upon the chain that ties him; but I should sooner mar my teeth, than procure liberty: yet I take to witness the eternal spring of virtue, that I had never read, heard, nor seen anything: I had never any taste of philosophy, nor inward feeling in myself, which for a while I did not call to my succour. But, alas! what resistance was there, when ere long my very reason was, you will say, corrupted, I must {66} confess, conquered, and that methought even reason did assure me that all eyes did degenerate from their creation which did not honour such beauty? nothing in truth could hold any plea with it but the reverend friendship I bear unto you. For as it went against my heart to break anyway from you, so did I fear, more than any assault, to break it to you: finding, as it is indeed, that to a heart fully resolute, counsel is tedious, but reprehension is loathsome: and that there is nothing more terrible to a guilty heart, than the eye of a respected friend. This made me determine with myself, thinking it a less fault in friendship to do a thing without your knowledge, than against your will, to take this secret course, which conceit was most builded up in me the last day of my parting and speaking with you, when upon your speech with me, and my but naming love, when else perchance I would have gone further, I saw your voice and countenance so change, as it assured me my revealing it should but purchase your grief with my cumber, and therefore (dear Musidorus!) even ran away from my well-known chiding: for having written a letter, which I know not whether you found or no, and taking my chief jewels with me, while you were in the midst of your sport, I got a time, as I think, unmarked by any, to steal away I cared not whither, so I might escape you, and so came I to Ithonia, in the province of Messenia, where, lying secret, I put this in practice, which before I had devised. For remembering by Philanax’s letter and Kalander’s speech, how obstinately Basilius was determined not to marry his daughters, and therefore fearing lest any public dealing should rather increase her captivity than further my love; love (the refiner of invention) had put in my head thus to disguise myself, that under that mask I might, if it were possible, get access, and what access could bring forth commit to fortune and industry, determining to bear the countenance of an Amazon. Therefore in the closest manner I could, naming myself Zelmane, for that dear lady’s sake, to whose memory I am so much bound, I caused this apparel to be made, and bringing it near the lodges, which are hard at hand, by night thus dressed myself, resting till occasion might make me to be found by them whom I sought; which the next morning happened as well as mine own plot could have laid it. For after I had run over the whole pedigree of my thoughts, I gave myself to sing a little, which, as you know, I ever delighted in, so now especially, whether it be the nature of this clime to stir up poetical fancies, or rather as I think, of love, whose scope being pleasure, will not so much as utter his griefs, but in some form of pleasure.

“But I had sung very little, when (as I think, displeased with my bad music) comes master Dametas with a hedging bill in his {67} hand, chafing and swearing by the pantoffle of Pallas, and such other oaths as his rustical bravery could imagine; and when he saw me, I assure you, my beauty was no more beholding to him than my harmony; for leaning his hands upon his bill, and his chin upon his hands, with the voice of one that playeth Hercules in a play, but never had his fancy in his head, the first word he spake unto me, was, ‘Am not I Dametas? why am not I Dametas?’ He needed not to name himself, for Kalander’s description had let such a note upon him as made him very notable unto me; and therefore the height of my thoughts would not descend so much as to make him answer, but continued on my inward discourses; which he (perchance witness of his own unworthiness, and therefore the apter to think himself contemned) took in so heinous a manner, that standing upon his tiptoes, and staring as if he would have had a mote pulled out of his eye. ‘Why,’ said he, ‘thou woman or boy, or both, whatsoever thou be, I tell thee here is no place for thee, here is no place for thee, get thee gone, I tell thee it is the prince’s pleasure, it is Dametas’s pleasure.’ I could not choose but smile at him, seeing him look so like an ape that had newly taken a purgation; yet taking myself with the manner, spake these words to myself: ‘O spirit,’ said I, ‘of mine, how canst thou receive any mirth in the midst of thine agonies? and thou mirth, how darest thou enter into a mind so grown of late thy professed enemy?’ ‘Thy spirit,’ said Dametas, ‘dost thou think me a spirit? I tell thee I am Basilius’s officer, and have charge of him and his daughters.’ ‘O only pearl,’ said I sobbing, ‘that so vile an oyster should keep thee?’ ‘By the comb case of Diana,’ sware Dametas, ‘this woman is mad: oysters and pearls? dost thou think I will buy oysters? I tell thee once again, get thee packing,’ and with that lifted up his bill to hit me with the blunt end of it; but indeed that put me quite out of my lesson; so that I forgot all Zelmaneship, and drawing out my sword, the baseness of the villain yet made me stay my hand, and he (who as Kalander told me, from his childhood ever feared the blade of a sword) ran back, backward, with his hands above his head at least twenty paces, gaping and staring with the very grace, I think, of the clowns that by Latona’s prayers were turned into frogs.

“At length staying, finding himself without the compass of blows, he fell to a fresh scolding, in such mannerly manner, as might well show he had passed thro’ the discipline of a tavern; but seeing me walk up and down without marking what he said, he went his way, as I perceived after, to Basilius: for within a while he came unto me, bearing indeed shows in his countenance of an honest and well-minded gentleman, and with as much courtesy as Dametas with rudeness saluting me: ‘Fair lady,’ said he, ‘it is {68} nothing strange that such a solitary place as this should receive solitary persons, but much do I marvel how such a beauty as yours is should be suffered to be thus alone.’ I, that now knew it was my part to play, looking with a grave majesty upon him, as if I found in myself cause to be reverenced. ‘They are never alone,’ said I, ‘that are accompanied with noble thoughts.’ ‘But those thoughts,’ replied Basilius, ‘cannot in this your loneliness neither warrant you from suspicion in others, nor defend you from melancholy in yourself:’ I then showing a mislike that he pressed me so far; ‘I seek no better warrant,’ said I, ‘than my own conscience, nor no greater pleasure than my own contentation.’ ‘Yet virtue seeks to satisfy others,’ said Basilius. ‘Those that be good,’ said I, ‘and they will be satisfied as long as they see no evil.’ ‘Yet will the best in this country,’ said Basilius, ‘suspect so excellent beauty being so weakly guarded.’ ‘Then are the best but stark naught,’ answered I, ‘for open suspecting others, comes of secret condemning themselves: but in my country, whose manners I am in all places to maintain and reverence, the general goodness which is nourished in our hearts makes every one think the strength of virtue in another, whereof they find the assured foundation in themselves.’ ‘Excellent lady,’ said he, ‘you praise so greatly, and yet so wisely, your country that I must needs desire to know what the nest is out of which such birds do fly.’ ‘You must first deserve it,’ said I, ‘before you may obtain it.’ ‘And by what means,’ said Basilius, ‘shall I deserve to know your estate?’ ‘By letting me first know yours,’ answered I. ‘To obey you,’ said he, ‘I will do it, although it were so much more reason yours should be known first, as you do deserve in all points to be preferred. Know you, fair lady, that my name is Basilius, unworthily lord of this country: the rest, either fame hath already brought to your ears, or (if it please you to make this place happy by your presence) at more leisure you shall understand of me.’ I that from the beginning assured myself it was he, but would not seem I did so, to keep my gravity the better, making a piece of reverence unto him; ‘Mighty prince,’ said I, ‘let my not knowing you serve for the excuse of my boldness, and the little reverence I do you impute to the manner of my country, which is the invincible land of the Amazons: myself niece to Senicia, queen thereof, lineally descended of the famous Penthesilea, slain by the bloody hand of Pyrrhus: I having, in this my youth determined to make the world see the Amazons’ excellencies, as well in private as in public virtue, have passed some dangerous adventures in divers countries, till the unmerciful sea deprived me of my company; so that shipwreck casting me not far hence, uncertain wandering brought me to this place.’ But Basilius (who now {69} began to taste of that, which since he had swallowed up, as I will tell you) fell to more cunning intreating my abode, than any greedy host should use to well-paying passengers. I thought nothing could shoot righter at the mark of my desires; yet had I learned already so much, that it was against my womanhood to be forward in my own wishes. And therefore he (to prove whether intercessions in fitter mouths might better prevail) commanded Dametas to bring forthwith his wife and daughters thither; three ladies, although of diverse, yet of excellent beauty.

“His wife in grave matron-like attire, with countenance and gesture suitable, and of such fairness, being in the strength of her age, as, if her daughters had not been by, might with just price have purchased admiration: but they being there, it was enough that the most dainty eye would think her a worthy mother of such children. The fair Pamela, whose noble heart I find doth greatly disdain that the trust of her virtue is reposed in such a lout’s hands as Dametas, had yet, to show an obedience, taken on shepherdish apparel, which was but of russet-cloth cut after their fashion, with a straight body, open breasted, the nether part full of plaits, with long and wide sleeves: but believe me she did apparel her apparel, and with the preciousness of her body made it most sumptuous. Her hair at the full length, wound about with gold lace, only by the comparison to show how far her hair doth excel in colour: betwixt her breasts (which sweetly rose like two fair mountainets in the pleasant vale of Tempe) there hung a very rich diamond set but in a black horn; the word I have since read is this, ‘Yet still myself.’ And thus particularly have I described them because you may know that mine eyes are not so partial but that I marked them too. But when the ornament of the earth, the model of heaven, the triumph of nature, the life of beauty, the queen of love, young Philoclea appeared in her nymph-like apparel, so near nakedness as one might well discern part of her perfections, and yet so apparelled as did show she kept best store of her beauty to herself: her hair (alas too poor a word, why should I not rather call them her beams) drawn up into a net, able to have caught Jupiter when he was in the form of an eagle; her body (O sweet body!) covered with a light taffeta garment, so cut as the wrought smock came through it in many places, enough to have made your restrained imagination have thought what was under it: with the cast of her black eyes, black indeed, whether nature so made them, that we might be the more able to behold and bear their wonderful shining, or that she, goddess-like, would work this miracle with herself in giving blackness the price above all beauty. Then, I say, indeed methought the lilies grew pale for envy; the roses methought blushed to see sweeter roses in her cheeks; and {70} the apples methought fell down from the trees to do homage to the apples of her breast; then the clouds gave place, that the heavens might more freely smile upon her, at the least the clouds of my thought quite vanished, and my sight, then more clear and forcible than ever, was so fixed there, that, I imagine, I stood like a well-wrought image with some life in show but none in practice. And so had I been like enough to have stayed long time but that Gynecia stepping between my sight and the only Philoclea, the change of object made me recover my senses, so that I could with reasonable good manner receive the salutation of her, and of the Princess Pamela, doing them yet no further reverence than one princess useth to another. But when I came to the never enough praised Philoclea, I could not but fall down on my knees, and taking by force her hand, and kissing it, I must confess with more than womanly ardency, ‘Divine lady,’ said I, ‘let not the world, nor those great princesses, marvel to see me, contrary to my manner, do this special honour unto you, since all both men and women, do owe this to the perfection of your beauty.’ But, she blushing like a fair morning in May at this my singularity, and causing me to rise, ‘Noble lady,’ said she, ‘it is no marvel to see your judgment much mistaken in my beauty since you begin with so great an error as to do more honour unto me than to them, to whom I myself owe all service.’ ‘Rather,’ answered I, with a bowed down countenance, ‘that shows the power of your beauty which forced me to do such an error, if it were an error.’ ‘You are so well acquainted,’ said she sweetly, most sweetly smiling, ‘with your own beauty, that it makes you easily fall into the discourse of beauty.’ ‘Beauty in me?’ (said I, truly sighing) ‘alas! if there be any it is in my eyes, which your blessed presence hath imparted unto them.’

“But then, as I think Basilius willing her so to do, ‘Well,’ said she, ‘I must needs confess I have heard that it is a great happiness to be praised of them that are most praiseworthy: and well I find that you are an invincible Amazon since you will overcome, though in a wrong matter. But if my beauty be anything, then let it obtain thus much of you, that you will remain some while in this company to ease your own travel and our solitariness.’ ‘First let me die,’ said I, ‘before any word spoken by such a mouth should come in vain.’ And thus with some other words of entertaining was my staying concluded, and I led among them to the lodge; truly a place for pleasantness, not unfit to flatter solitariness, for, it being set upon such an unsensible rising of the ground as you are come to a pretty height before almost you perceive that you ascend, it gives the eye lordship over a good large circuit, which according to the nature of the country, being diversified between {71} hills and dales, woods and plains, one place more clear, another more darksome, it seems a pleasant picture of nature, with lovely lightsomeness and artificial shadows. The lodge is of a yellow stone, built in the form of a star, having round about a garden framed into like points; and beyond the garden ridings cut out, each answering the angles of the lodge: at the end of one of them is the other smaller lodge, but of like fashion, where the gracious Pamela liveth; so that the lodge seemeth not unlike a fair comet, whose tail stretcheth itself to a star of less greatness.

“So Gynecia herself bringing me to my lodging, anon after I was invited and brought down to sup with them in the garden, a place not fairer in natural ornaments than artificial inventions, where, in a banqueting-house, among certain pleasant trees, whose heads seemed curled with the wrappings about of vine branches, the table was set near to an excellent water-works; for, by the casting of the water in most cunning manner, it makes, with the shining of the sun upon it, a perfect rainbow, not more pleasant to the eye than to the mind, so sensibly to see the proof of the heavenly Iris. There were birds also made so finely that they did not only deceive the sight with their figure, but the hearing with their songs, which the watery instruments made their gorge deliver. The table at which we sat was round, which being fast to the floor whereon we sat, and that divided from the rest of the buildings, with turning a vice, which Basilius at first did to make me sport, the table, and we about the table, did all turn round by means of water which ran under and carried it about as a mill. But alas! what pleasure did it to me to make divers times the full circle round about, since Philoclea, being also set, was carried still in equal distance from me, and that only my eyes did overtake her? which, when the table was stayed, and we began to feed, drank much more eagerly of her beauty than my mouth did of any other liquor. And so was my common sense deceived, being chiefly bent to her, that as I drank the wine, and withal stole a look on her, meseemed I tasted her deliciousness. But alas! the one thirst was much more inflamed than the other quenched. Sometimes my eyes would lay themselves open to receive all the darts she did throw; sometimes close up with admiration, as if with a contrary fancy, they would preserve the riches of that sight they had gotten, or cast my lids as curtains over the image of beauty her presence had painted in them. True it is, that my reason, now grown a servant to passion, did yet often tell his master that he should more moderately use his delight. But he, that of a rebel was become a prince, disdained almost to allow him the place of a counsellor; so that my senses’ delights being too strong for any other resolution, I did even loose the reins unto them, hoping that, {72} going for a woman, my looks would pass either unmarked or unsuspected.

“Now thus I had, as methought, well played my first act, assuring myself that under that disguisement I should find opportunity to reveal myself to the owner of my heart. But who would think it possible, though I feel it true, that in almost eight weeks’ space I have lived here, having no more company but her parents, and I being a familiar, as being a woman, and watchful, as being a lover, yet could never find opportunity to have one minute’s leisure of private conference: the cause whereof is as strange as the effects are to me miserable. And (alas!) this it is.

“At the first sight that Basilius had of me, I think Cupid having headed his arrows with my misfortune, he was stricken, taking me to be such as I profess, with great affection towards me, which since is grown to such a doting love that till I was fain to get this place sometimes to retire unto freely, I was even choked with his tediousness. You never saw four score years dance up and down more lively in a young lover; now, as fine in his apparel, as if he would make me in love with a cloak, and verse for verse with the sharpest-witted lover in Arcadia. Do you not think that is a sallet of wormwood; while mine eyes feed upon the Ambrosia of Philoclea’s beauty? but this is not all; no, this is not the worst: for he, good man, were easy enough to be dealt with, but, as I think, love and mischief having made a wager which should have most power in me, have set Gynecia also on such a fire toward me, as will never, I fear, be quenched but with my destruction. For, she being a woman of excellent wit and of strong working thoughts, whether she suspected me by my over-vehement shows of affection to Philoclea (which love forced me unwisely to utter, while hope of my mask foolishly encouraged me) or that she hath taken some other mark of me, that I am not a woman; or what devil it is hath revealed it unto her, I know not: but so it is, that all her countenances, words, and gestures are even miserable portraitures of a desperate affection. Whereby a man may learn that these avoidings of company do but make the passions more violent when they meet with fit subjects. Truly it were a notable dumb show of Cupid’s kingdom, to see my eyes, languishing with over-vehement longing, direct themselves to Philoclea; and Basilius, as busy about me as a bee, and indeed as cumbersome, making such vehement suits to me, who neither could if I would, nor would if I could, help him, while the terrible wit of Gynecia, carried with the beer of violent love, runs through us all. And so jealous is she of my love to her daughter that I could never yet begin to open my mouth to the unevitable Philoclea but that her unwished presence gave my tale a conclusion before it had a beginning. And surely, if I be not {73} deceived, I see such shows of liking, and, if I be acquainted with passions, of almost a passionate liking in the heavenly Philoclea towards me, that I may hope her ears would not abhor my discourse. And for good Basilius, he thought it best to have lodged us together, but that the eternal hatefulness of my destiny made Gynecia’s jealousy stop that, and all other my blessings. Yet must I confess that one way her love doth me pleasure, for since it was my foolish fortune, or unfortunate folly, to be known by her, that keeps her from betraying me to Basilius. And thus, my Musidorus, you have my tragedy played unto you by myself, which I pray the gods may not indeed prove a tragedy.” And therewith he ended, making a full point of a hearty sigh.

Musidorus recommended to his best discourse, all which Pyrocles had told him. But therein he found such intricateness that he could see no way to lead him out of the maze; yet perceiving his affection so grounded that striving against it did rather anger than heal the wound, and rather call his friendship in question than give place to any friendly counsel: “Well,” said he, “dear cousin! since it hath pleased the gods to mingle your other excellencies with this humour of love, yet happy it is, that your love is employed upon so rare a woman: for certainly a noble cause doth ease much a grievous case. But as it stands now, nothing vexeth me, as that I cannot see wherein I can be serviceable unto you.” “I desire no greater service of you,” answered Pyrocles, “than that you remain secretly in this country, and sometimes come to this place, either late in the night or early in the morning, where you shall have my key to enter, because as my fortune either amends or impairs, I may declare it unto you, and have your counsel and furtherance: and hereby I will of purpose lead her, that is the praise, and yet the stain of all womankind, that you may have so good a view, as to allow my judgment; and as I can get the most convenient time, I will come unto you; for, though by reason of yonder wood you cannot see the lodge, it is hard at hand. But now,” said she, “it is time for me to leave you, and towards evening we will walk out of purpose hitherward, therefore keep yourself close till that time.” But Musidorus, bethinking himself that his horse might happen to betray him, thought it best to return for that day to a village not far off, and dispatching his horse in some sort, the next day early to come afoot thither, and so to keep that course afterward which Pyrocles very well liked of. “Now farewell, dear cousin,” said he, “from me, no more Pyrocles nor Daiphantus now, but Zelmane: Zelmane is my name, Zelmane is my title, Zelmane is the only hope of my advancement.” And with that word going out, and seeing that the coast was clear, Zelmane dismissed Musidorus, who {74} departed as full of care to help his friend as before he was to dissuade him.

Zelmane returned to the lodge, where (inflamed by Philoclea, watched by Gynecia, and tired by Basilius) she was like a horse desirous to run, and miserably spurred, but so short reined as he cannot stir forward. Zelmane sought occasion to speak with Philoclea; Basilius with Zelmane; and Gynecia hindered them all. If Philoclea happened to sigh, and sigh she did often, as if that sigh were to be waited on, Zelmane sighed also, whereto Basilius and Gynecia soon made up four parts of sorrow. Their affection increased their conversation, and their conversation increased their affection. The respect borne bred due ceremonies, but the affection shined so through them, that the ceremonies seemed not ceremonies. Zelmane’s eyes were (like children before sweetmeat) eager, but fearful of their ill-pleasing governors. Time, in one instant, seeming both short and long unto them: short, in the pleasingness of such presence; long, in the stay of their desires.

But Zelmane failed not to entice them all many times abroad because she was desirous her friend Musidorus, near whom of purpose she led them, might have full sight of them. Sometimes angling to a little river near hand, which, for the moisture it bestowed upon the roots of flourishing trees, was rewarded with their shadow. There would they sit down, and pretty wagers be made between Pamela and Philoclea, which could soonest beguile silly fishes, while Zelmane protested that the fit prey for them was hearts of princes. She also had an angle in her hand, but the taker was so taken that she had forgotten taking. Basilius in the meantime would be the cook himself of what was so caught, and Gynecia sit still, but with no still pensiveness. Now she brought them to see a seeled dove, who, the blinder she was, the higher she strove. Another time a kite, which having a gut cunningly pulled out of her, and so let fly, caused all the kites in that quarter, who, as oftentimes the world is deceived, thinking her prosperous when indeed she was wounded, made the poor kite find that opinion of riches may well be dangerous.

But these recreations were interrupted by a delight of more gallant show; for one evening, as Basilius returned from having forced his thoughts to please themselves in such small conquest, there came a shepherd who brought him word that a gentleman desired leave to do a message from his lord unto him. Basilius granted, whereupon the gentleman came, and after the dutiful ceremonies observed in his master’s name, told him that he was sent from Phalantus of Corinth to crave licence that, as he had done in many other courts, so he might in his presence defy all Arcadian knights in the behalf of his mistress’s beauty who would {75} besides herself in person be present to give evident proof what his lance should affirm. The conditions of his challenge were that the defendant should bring his mistress’s picture, which being set by the image of Artesia, so was the mistress of Phalantus named, who in six courses should have the better of the other in the judgment of Basilius, with him both the honours and the pictures should remain. Basilius (though he had retired himself into that solitary dwelling, with intention to avoid, rather than to accept any matters of drawing company, yet because he would entertain Zelmane that she might not think the time so gainful to him loss to her) granted him to pitch his tent for three days not far from the lodge, and to proclaim his challenge that what Arcadian knight, for none else but upon his peril was licensed to come, would defend what he honoured against Phalantus, should have the like freedom of access and return.

This obtained and published, Zelmane being desirous to learn what this Phalantus was, having never known him further than by report of his good jousting, in so much as he was commonly called, “The fair man of arms”; Basilius told her that he had had occasion by one very inward with him to know in part the discourse of his life, which was, that he was a bastard brother to the fair Helen queen of Corinth, and dearly esteemed of her for his exceeding good parts, being honourably courteous, and wronglessly valiant, considerately pleasant in conversation, and an excellent courtier without unfaithfulness, who, finding his sister’s unpersuadable melancholy, through the love of Amphialus, had for a time left her court, and gone into Laconia, where, in the war against the Helots, he had gotten the reputation of one that both durst and knew. But as it was rather choice than nature that led him to matters of arms, so as soon as the spur of honour ceased, he willingly rested in peaceable delights, being beloved in all companies for his lovely qualities, and, as a man may term it, winning cheerfulness; whereby to the prince and court of Laconia, none was more agreeable than Phalantus: and he not given greatly to struggle with his own disposition, followed the gentle current of it, having a fortune sufficient to content, and he content with a sufficient fortune. But in that court he saw, and was acquainted with this Artesia, whose beauty he now defends, became her servant, said himself, and perchance thought himself her lover. “But certainly,” said Basilius, “many times it falls out that these young companions make themselves believe they love at their first liking of a likely beauty; loving, because they will love for want of other business, not because they feel indeed that divine power which makes the heart find a reason in passion, and so, God knows, as inconstantly leave upon the next chance that beauty casts before them. So {76} therefore taking love upon him like a fashion, he courted this lady Artesia, who was as fit to pay him in his own money as might be: for she thinketh she did wrong to her beauty if she were not proud of it, called her disdain of him chastity, and placed her honour in little setting by his honouring her, determining never to marry but him whom she thought worthy of her, and that was one in whom all worthinesses were harboured. And to this conceit not only nature had bent her, but the bringing-up she received at by her sister-in-law Cecropia had confirmed her, who having in her widowhood taken this young Artesia into her charge, because her father had been a dear friend of her dear husband’s, had taught her to think that there is no wisdom but in including both heaven and earth in oneself; and that love, courtesy, gratefulness, friendship, and all other virtues are rather to be taken on than taken in oneself. And so good a disciple she found of her that, liking the fruits of her own planting, she was content if so her son could have liked of it, to have wished her in marriage to my nephew Amphialus. But I think that desire hath lost some of his heat since she hath known that such a queen as Helen is, doth offer so great a price as a kingdom, to buy his favour; for, if I be not deceived in my good sister Cecropia, she thinks no face so beautiful, as that which looks under a crown. But Artesia indeed liked well of my nephew Amphialus: For I can never deem that love, which in haughty hearts proceeds of a desire only to please, and, as it were, peacock themselves; but yet she hath showed vehemency of desire that way, I think because all her desires be vehement, insomuch that she hath both placed her only brother, a fine youth, called Ismenus, to be his ’squire, and herself is content to wait upon my sister till she may see the uttermost what she may work in Amphialus; who being of a melancholy (though, I must say, truly courteous and noble) mind, seems to love nothing less than love, and of late, having through some adventure, or inward miscontentment, withdrawn himself from anybody’s knowledge, where he is; Artesia the easier condescended to go to the court of Laconia, whither she was sent for by the king’s wife, to whom she is somewhat allied.

“And there, after the war of the Helots, this knight Phalantus, at least for tongue-delight, made himself her servant, and she, so little caring as not to show mislike thereof, was content only to be noted to have a notable servant. For truly one in my court, nearly acquainted with him, within these few days made me a pleasant description of their love, while he with cheerful looks would speak sorrowful words, using the phrase of his affection in so high a style, that Mercury would not have wooed Venus with more magnificent eloquence; but else, neither in behaviour, nor action, accusing in himself any great trouble in mind whether he sped or no. And {77} she, on the other side, well finding how little it was, and not caring for more, yet taught him that often it falleth out but a foolish witness to speak more than one thinks.

“For she made earnest benefit of his jest, forcing him in respect of his profession to her such services as were both cumbersome and costly unto him, while he still thought he went beyond her because his heart did not commit the idolatry. So that lastly, she, I think, having mind to make the fame of her beauty an orator for her to Amphialus (persuading herself, perhaps, that it might fall out in him as it doth in some that have delightful meat before them, and have no stomach to it, before other folks praise it) she took the advantage one day, upon Phalantus’s unconscionable praising of her, and certain cast-away vows how much he would do for her sake, to arrest his word as soon as it was out of his mouth, and by the virtue thereof to charge him to go with her thro’ all the courts of Greece, and with the challenge now made to give her beauty the principality over all other. Phalantus was entrapped, and saw round about him, but could not get out. Exceedingly perplexed he was, as he confessed to him that told me the tale, not for doubt he had of himself (for indeed he had little cause, being accounted, with his lance especially, whereupon the challenge is to be tried as perfect as any that Greece knoweth) but because he feared to offend his sister Helen, and withal, as he said, he could not so much believe his love but that he must think in his heart, whatsoever his mouth affirmed, that both she, my daughters, and the fair Parthenia (wife to a most noble gentleman, my wife’s near kinsman) might far better put in their claim for that prerogative. But his promise had bound him prentice, and therefore it was now better with willingness to purchase thanks than with a discontented doing to have the pain and not the reward; and therefore went on as his faith, rather than love, did lead him. And now hath he already passed the courts of Laconia, Elis, Argos, and Corinth: And, as many times it happens that a good pleader makes a bad cause to prevail, so hath his lance brought captives to the triumph of Artesia’s beauty, such, as though Artesia be among the fairest, yet in that company were to have the pre-eminence: For in those courts many knights that had been in other far countries defended such as they had seen and liked in their travel: But their defence had been such that they had forfeited the pictures of their ladies to give a forced false testimony to Artesia’s excellency. And now, lastly, is he come hither, where he hath leave to try his fortune. But I assure you, if I thought it not in due and true consideration an injurious service and churlish courtesy to put the danger of so noble a title in the deciding of such a dangerless combat, I would make young master {78} Phalantus know that your eyes can sharpen a blunt lance, and that age, which my gray hairs, only gotten by the loving care of others, makes seem more than it is, hath not diminished in me the power to protect an undeniable verity.” With that he bustled up himself, as though his heart would fain have walked abroad. Zelmane with an inward smiling gave him outward thanks, desiring him to reserve his force for worthier causes.

So passing their time according to their wont, they waited for the coming of Phalantus, who the next morning having already caused his tents to be pitched near to a fair tree hard by the lodge, had upon the tree made a shield to be hanged up, which the defendant should strike that would call him to the maintaining his challenge. The impresa in the shield was a heaven full of stars, with a speech signifying that it was the beauty which gave the praise. Himself came in next after a triumphant chariot made of carnation-velvet, enriched with purple and pearl, wherein Artesia sat, drawn by four winged horses with artificial flaming mouths and fiery wings, as if she had newly borrowed them of Phoebus. Before her marched, two after two, certain footmen pleasantly attired, who between them held one picture after another of them, that by Phalantus’ well running had lost the prize in the race of beauty, and at every pace they stayed, turned the pictures to each side so leisurely that with perfect judgment they might be discerned. The first that came in, following the order of the time wherein they had been won, was the picture of Andromana, queen of Iberia, whom a Laconian knight, having some time, and with special favour, served, though some years since returned home, with more gratefulness than good fortune defended. But therein Fortune had borrowed wit; for indeed she was not comparable to Artesia, not because she was a good deal older, for time had not yet been able to impoverish her store thereof, but an exceeding red hair with small eyes, did, like ill companions, disgrace the other assembly of most commendable beauties.

Next after her was borne the counterfeit of the Princess of Elis, a lady that taught the beholders no other point of beauty, but this: That as liking is not always the child of beauty, so whatsoever liketh is beautiful; for in that visage there was neither majesty, grace, favour, nor fairness; yet she wanted not a servant that would have made her fairer than the fair Artesia. But he wrote her praises with his helmet in the dust, and left her picture to be a true witness of his overthrow, as his running was of her beauty.

After her was the goodly Artaxia, great queen of Armenia, a lady upon whom nature bestowed and well placed her most delightful colours, and, withal, had proportioned her without any fault, quickly to be discovered by the senses, yet altogether seemed not to make {79} up that harmony that Cupid delights in, the reason whereof might seem a mannish countenance, which overthrew that lovely sweetness, the noblest power of womankind, far fitter to prevail by parley than by battle.

Of a far contrary consideration was the representation of her that next followed, which was Erona queen of Lycia, who though of so brown a hair as no man should have injured it to have called it black, and that in the mixture of her cheeks the white did so much overcome the red, tho’ what was, was very pure, that it came near to paleness, and that her face was a thought longer than the exact Symetrians perhaps would allow; yet love played his part so well in every part that it caught hold of the judgment before it could judge, making it first love, and after acknowledge it fair; for there was a certain delicacy, which in yielding conquered, and with a pitiful look made one find cause to crave help himself.

After her came two ladies, of noble, but not of royal birth: The former was named Baccha, who though very fair, and of a fatness rather to allure, than to mislike, yet her breasts overfamiliarly laid open, with a made countenance about her mouth, between simpering and smiling, her head bowed somewhat down, seemed to languish with over-much idleness, and with an inviting look cast upward, dissuaded with too much persuading, while hope might seem to over-run desire.

The other, whose name was written Leucippe, was of a fine daintiness of beauty, her face carrying in it a sober simplicity, like one that could do much good and meant no hurt, her eyes having in them such a cheerfulness as nature seemed to smile in them, though her mouth and cheeks obeyed to that pretty demureness which the more one marked the more one would judge the poor soul apt to believe, and therefore the more pity to deceive her.

Next came the queen of Laconia, one that seemed born in the confines of beauty’s kingdom: For all her lineaments were neither perfect possessioners thereof, nor absolute strangers thereto: But she was a queen, and therefore beautiful.

But she that followed, conquered indeed with being conquered, and might well have made all the beholders wait upon her triumph, while herself were led captive. It was the excellently fair queen Helen, whose jacinth-hair curled by nature, but intercurled by art, like a fine brook through golden sands, had a rope of fair pearl, which now hiding, now hidden by the hair, did as it were play at fast and loose each with other, mutually giving and receiving richness. In her face so much beauty and favour expressed as, if Helen had not been known, some would rather have judged it the painter’s exercise to show what he could do than the counterfeiting of any living pattern; for no fault the most fault-finding wit could {80} have found, if it were not that to the rest of the body the face was somewhat too little, but that little was such a spark of beauty as was able to inflame a world of love; for everything was full of a choice fineness, that if we wanted anything in majesty it supplied it with increase in pleasure; and if at the first it struck not with admiration, it ravished with delight. And no indifferent soul there was, which if it could resist from subjecting itself to make it his princess, that would not long to have such a playfellow. As for her attire, it was costly and curious, though the look, fixed with more sadness than it seemed nature had bestowed to any that knew her fortune, betrayed that as she used those ornaments not for herself, but to prevail with another, so she feared that all would not serve. Of a far differing, though esteemed equal, beauty, was the fair Parthenia, who next waited on Artesia’s triumph, tho’ far better she might have sat on the throne. For in her everything was goodly and stately, yet so that it might seem that great-mindedness was but the ensign-bearer to the humbleness. For her great grey eye, which might seem full of her own beauty; a large and exceedingly fair forehead, with all the rest of her face and body cast in the mould of nobleness, was yet so attired as might show the mistress thought it either not to deserve, or not to need any exquisite decking, having no adorning but cleanliness; and so far from all art, that it was full of carelessness, unless that carelessness itself, in spite of itself, grew artificial. But Basilius could not abstain from praising Parthenia as the perfect picture of a womanly virtue and wifely faithfulness, telling withal Zelmane how he had understood that when in the court of Laconia her pictures maintained by a certain Sicyonian knight, was lost through want rather of valour than justice, her husband, the famous Argalus, would in a chafe have gone and redeemed it with a new trial. But she, more sporting than sorrowing for her undeserved champion, told her husband she desired to be beautiful in nobody’s eye but his, and that she would rather mar her face as evil as ever it was than that it should be a cause to make Argalus put on armour. Then would Basilius have told Zelmane that which he already knew, of the rare trial of that coupled affection: but the next picture made their mouths give place to their eyes.

It was of a young maid which sat pulling out a thorn out of a lamb’s foot, with her look so attentive upon it, as if that little foot could have been the circle of her thoughts; her apparel so poor, as it had nothing but the inside to adorn it; a sheep-hook lying by her with a bottle upon it. But with all that poverty, beauty played the prince and commanded as many hearts as the greatest queen there did. Her beauty and her estate made her quickly to be known to be the fair shepherdess Urania, whom a rich {81} knight called Lacemon, far in love with her, had unluckily defended.

The last of all in place, because last in the time of her being captive, was Zelmane, daughter to the King Plexirtus, who at the first sight seemed to have some resembling of Philoclea, but with more marking, comparing it to the present Philoclea, who indeed had no paragon but her sister, they might see it was but such a likeness as an unperfect glass doth give, answerable enough in some features and colours, but erring in others. But Zelmane sighing, turning to Basilius, “Alas! Sir,” said she, “here be some pictures which might better become the tombs of their mistresses than the triumph of Artesia.” “It is true sweetest lady,” said Basilius, “some of them be dead, and some other captive; but that hath happened so late, as it may be the knights that defended their beauty knew not so much: without we will say, as in some other hearts I know it would fall out, that death itself could not blot out the image which love hath engraven in them. But divers besides those,” said Basilius, “hath Phalantus, won, but he leaves the rest, carrying only such who either for greatness of estate, or of beauty, may justly glorify the glory of Artesia’s triumph.”

Thus talked Basilius with Zelmane, glad to make any matter subject to speak of with his mistress, while Phalantus, in this pompous manner, brought Artesia with her gentlewoman into one tent, by which he had another, where they both waited who would first strike upon the shield, while Basilius the judge appointed sticklers and trumpets, to whom the other should obey. But none that day appeared, nor the next, till already it had consumed half his allowance of light; but then there came in a knight, protesting himself as contrary to him in mind, as he was in apparel. For Phalantus was all in white, having in his bases and caparison embroidered a waving water, at each side whereof he had nettings cast over, in which were divers fishes naturally made, and so prettily that as the horse stirred, the fishes seemed to strive and leap in the net.

But the other knight, by name Nestor, by birth an Arcadian, and in affection vowed to the fair shepherdess, was all in black, with fire burning both upon his armour and horse. His impresa in his shield was a fire made of juniper, with this word, “More easy and more sweet.” But this hot knight was cooled with a fall, which at the third course he received of Phalantus, leaving his picture to keep company with the other of the same stamp; he going away remedilessly chafing at his rebuke. The next was Polycetes, greatly esteemed in Arcadia for deeds he had done in arms, and much spoken of for the honourable love he had long borne to Gynecia, which Basilius himself was content not only to {82} suffer, but to be delighted with, he carried it in so honourable and open plainness, setting to his love no other mark than to do her faithful service. But neither her fair picture, nor his fair running, could warrant him from overthrow, and her from becoming as then the last of Artesia’s victories, a thing Gynecia’s virtues would little have reckoned at another time, nor then, if Zelmane had not seen it. But her champion went away as much discomforted, as discomfited. Then Telamon for Polixena, and Eurileon for Elpine, and Leon for Zoana, all brave knights, all fair ladies, with their going down, lifted up the balance of his praise for activity, and hers for fairness.

Upon whose loss, as the beholders were talking, there comes into the place where they ran, a shepherd stripling (for his height made him more than a boy, and his face would not allow him a man) brown of complexion, whether by nature or by the sun’s familiarity, but very lovely withal, for the rest so perfect proportioned that nature showed she doth not like men who slubber up matters of mean account. And well might his proportion be judged, for he had nothing upon him but a pair of slops, and upon his body a goat skin which he cast over his shoulder, doing all things with so pretty a grace that it seemed ignorance could not make him do amiss, because he had a heart to do well; holding in his right hand a long staff, and so coming with a look full of amiable fierceness, as in whom choler could not take away the sweetness, he came towards the king, and making a reverence (which in him was comely, because it was kindly). “My liege lord,” said he, “I pray you hear a few words, for my heart will break if I say not my mind to you: I see here the picture of Urania, which I cannot tell how nor why these men when they fall down, they say is not so fair as yonder gay woman. But pray God I may never see my old mother alive, if I think she be any more matched to Urania, than a goat is to a fine lamb; or than the dog that keeps our flock at home, is like your white greyhound that pulled down the stag last day.

“And therefore I pray you let me be dressed as they be, and my heart gives me I shall tumble him on the earth: for indeed he might as well say that a cowslip is as white as a lily: or else I care not, let him come with his great staff, and I with this in my hand, and you shall see what I can do to him.” Basilius saw it was the fine shepherd Lalus, whom once he had afore him in pastoral sports, and had greatly delighted in his wit full of pretty simplicity, and therefore laughing at his earnestness, he bade him be content, since he saw the pictures of so great queens were fain to follow their champions’ fortune. But Lalus, even weeping ripe, went among the rest, longing to see somebody that would revenge Urania’s {83} wrong; and praying heartily for everybody that ran against Phalantus, then beginning to feel poverty that he could not set himself to that trial. But by and by, even when the sun, like a noble heart, began to show his greatest countenance in his lowest estate, there came in a knight, called Phebilus, a gentleman of that country, for whom hateful fortune had borrowed the dart of love, to make him miserable by the sight of Philoclea. For he had even from her infancy loved her, and was stricken by her before she was able to know what quiver of arrows her eyes carried; but he loved and despaired, and the more he despaired, the more he loved. He saw his own worthiness, and thereby made her excellency have more terrible aspect upon him: he was so secret therein, as not daring to be open, that to no creature he ever spoke of it, but his heart made such silent complaints within itself that, while all his senses were attentive thereto, cunning judges might perceive his mind, so that he was known to love, though he denied, or rather was the better known, because he denied it. His armour and his attire was for a sea colour; his impresa, the fish called Sepia, which being in the net, casts a black ink about itself, that in the darkness thereof it may escape: his word was, “Not so.” Philoclea’s picture with almost an idolatrous magnificence was borne in by him. But straight jealousy was a harbinger for disdain in Zelmane’s heart, when she saw any but herself should be avowed a champion for Philoclea, insomuch that she wished his shame, till she saw him shamed. For at the second course he was stricken quite from out of the saddle, so full of grief and rage withal that he would fain with the sword have revenged it, but that being contrary to the order set down, Basilius would not suffer: so that wishing himself in the bottom of the earth, he went his way, leaving Zelmane no less angry with his loss than she would have been with his victory. For if she though before a rival’s praise would have angered her, her lady’s disgrace did make her much more forget what she then thought, while that passion reigned so much the more as she saw a pretty blush in Philoclea’s cheeks betray a modest discontentment. But the night commanded truce for those sports, and Phalantus, though entreated, would not leave Artesia, who in no case would come into the house, having, as it were, sucked of Cecropia’s breath a mortal mislike against Basilius.

But the night, measured by the short ell of sleep, was soon passed over, and the next morning had given the watchful stars leave to take their rest, when a trumpet summoned Basilius to play his judge’s part, which he did, taking his wife and daughters with him; Zelmane having locked her door, so as they could not trouble her for that time: for already there was a knight in the field, ready to prove Helen of Corinth had received great injury, both by the {84} erring judgment of the challenger, and the unlucky weakness of her former defender. The new knight was quickly known to be Clitophon, Kalander’s son of Basilius’s sister, by his armour which, all gilt, was so well handled that it showed like a glittering sand and gravel interlaced with silver rivers. His device he had put in the picture of Helen which he defended; it was the Ermion with a speech that signified, “Rather dead than spotted.” But in that armour since he had parted from Helen, who would no longer his company, finding him to enter into terms of affection, he had performed so honourable actions, still seeking for his two friends by the names of Palladius and Daiphantus, that though his face were covered, his being was discovered, which yet Basilius, who had brought him up in his court, would not seem to do, but glad to see the trial of him, of whom he had heard very well, he commanded the trumpets to sound, to which the two brave knights obeying, they performed their courses, breaking their six staves, with so good, both skill in the hitting and grace in the manner, that it bred some difficulty in the judgment. But Basilius in the end gave sentence against Clitophon, because Phalantus had broken more staves, upon the head, and that once Clitophon had received such a blow that he had lost the reins of his horse with his head well-nigh touching the crupper of the horse. But Clitophon was so angry with the judgment, wherein he thought he had received wrong, that he omitted his duty to his prince, and uncle, and suddenly went his way still in the quest of them, whom as then he had left seeking, and so yielded the field to the next comer.

Who, coming in about two hours after, was no less marked than all the rest before, because he had nothing worth the marking. For he had neither picture nor device, his armour of as old a fashion, besides the rusty poorness, that it might better seem a monument of his grandfather’s courage: about his middle he had, instead of bases, a long cloak of silk, which as unhandsomely, as it needs must, became the wearer, so that all that looked on, measured his length on the earth already, since he had to meet one who had been victorious of so many gallants. But he went on towards the shield, and with a sober grace struck it, but as he let his sword fall upon it, another knight, all in black, came rustling in, who struck the shield almost as soon as he, and so strongly that he broke the shield in two: the ill-apparelled knight, for so the beholders called him, angry with that, as he accounted, insolent injury to himself, hit him such a sound blow that they that looked on said it well became a rude arm. The other answered him again in the same case, so that lances were put to silence, the swords were so busy.

But Phalantus, angry of this defacing shield, came upon the black knight, and with the pommel of his sword set fire to his eyes, which presently was revenged, not only by the black, but the ill-apparelled knight, who disdained another should enter into his quarrel, so as, who ever saw a matachin dance to imitate fighting, this was a fight that did imitate the matachin: for they being but three that fought, everyone had two adversaries, striking him, who struck the third, and revenging perhaps that of him which he had received of the other. But Basilius rising himself came to part them, the stickler’s authority scarcely able to persuade choleric hearers; and part them he did.

But before he could determine, comes in a fourth, halting on foot, who complained to Basilius, demanding justice on the black knight, for having by force taken away the picture of Pamela from him, which in little form he wore in a tablet, and covered with silk had fastened it to his helmet, purposing, for want of a bigger, to paragon the little one with Artesia’s length, not doubting but even in that little quantity, the excellency of that would shine through the weakness of the other, as the smallest star doth through the whole element of fire. And by the way he had met with this black knight, who had, as he said, robbed him of it. The injury seemed grievous, but when it came fully to be examined, it was found that the halting knight meeting the other, asking the cause of his going thitherward, and finding it was to defend Pamela’s divine beauty against Artesia’s, with a proud jollity commanded him to leave that quarrel only for him, who was only worthy to enter into it. But the black knight obeying no such commandments, they fell to such a bickering that he got a halting, and lost his picture. This understood by Basilius, he told him he was now fitter to look to his own body than another’s picture, and so, uncomforted therein, sent him away to learn of Aesculapius that he was not fit for Venus. But then the question arising, who should be the former against Phalantus, of the black or the ill-apparelled knight, who now had gotten the reputation of some sturdy lout, he had so well defended himself; of the one side, was alleged the having a picture which the other wanted; of the other side, the first striking the shield, but the conclusion was, that the ill-apparelled knight should have the precedence, if he delivered the figure of his mistress to Phalantus, who asking him for it, “Certainly,” said he, “her liveliest picture, if you could see it, is in my heart, and the best comparison I could make of her is of the sun and all the other heavenly beauties. But because perhaps all eyes cannot taste the divinity of her beauty, and would rather be dazzled than taught by the light, if it be not clouded by some meaner thing, know ye then, that I defend that same lady, whose image Phebilus so feebly lost {86} yesternight, and, instead of another, if you overcome me, you shall have me your slave to carry that image in your mistress’ triumph.” Phalantus easily agreed to the bargain, which readily he made his own.

But when it came to the trial, the ill-apparelled knight, choosing out the greatest staves in all the store, at the first course gave his head such a remembrance that he lost almost his remembrance, he himself receiving the encounter of Phalantus, without any extraordinary motion; and at the second, gave him such a counterbuff, that because Phalantus was so perfect a horseman, as not to be driven from the saddle, the saddle with broken girths was driven from the horse; Phalantus remaining angry and amazed, because now being come almost to the last of his promised enterprise, that disgrace befell him, which he had never before known.

But the victory being by the judges given, and the trumpets witnessed to the ill-apparelled knight; Phalantus’ disgrace was ingrieved in lieu of comfort of Artesia, who telling him she never looked for other, bade him seek some other mistress. He excusing himself, and turning over the fault to fortune, “Then let that be your ill fortune too,” said she, “that you have lost me.”

“Nay, truly madam,” said Phalantus, “it shall not be so, for I think the loss of such a mistress will prove a great gain,” and so concluded, to the sport of Basilius, to see young folks’ love, that came in masked with so great pomp, go out with so little constancy. But Phalantus first professing great service to Basilius for his courteous intermitting his solitary course for his sake, would yet conduct Artesia to the castle of Cecropia, whither she desired to go, vowing in himself that neither heart nor mouth love should ever any more entangle him, and with that resolution he left the company. Whence all being dismissed (among whom the black knight went away repining at his luck that had kept him from winning the honour, as he knew he should have done to the picture of Pamela) the ill-apparelled knight (who was only desired to stay, because Basilius meant to show him to Zelmane) pull’d off his helmet, and then was known himself to be Zelmane, who that morning, as she told, while the others were busy, had stolen out of the prince’s stable, which was a mile off from the lodge, had gotten a horse, they knowing it was Basilius’s pleasure she should be obeyed, and borrowing that homely armour for want of a better, had come upon the spur to redeem Philoclea’s picture, which, she said, she could not bear, being one of that little wilderness-company, should be in captivity, if the cunning she had learned in her country of the noble Amazons, could withstand it; and under that pretext fain she would have given a secret passport to her affection. But this act painted at one instant redness in Philoclea’s face, and paleness {87} in Gynecia’s, but brought forth no other countenances but of admiration, no speeches but of commendations: all those few, besides love, thinking they honoured themselves in honouring so accomplished a person as Zelmane, whom daily they fought with some or other sports to delight; for which purpose Basilius had, in a house not far off, servants, who though they came not uncalled, yet at call were ready.

And so many days were spent, and many ways used, while Zelmane was like one that stood in a tree waiting a good occasion to shoot, and Gynecia a blancher, which kept the dearest deer from her. But the day being come, on which according to an appointed course, the shepherds were to assemble and make their pastoral sports before Basilius, Zelmane, fearing lest many eyes, and coming divers ways, might hap to espy Musidorus, went out to warn him thereof.

But before she could come to the arbour, she saw walking from her-ward, a man in shepherdish apparel, who being in the sight of the lodge, it might seem he was allowed there. A long cloak he had on, but that cast under his right arm, wherein he held a sheep hook so finely wrought, that it gave a bravery to poverty, and his raiments though they were mean, yet received they handsomeness by the grace of the wearer, though he himself went but a kind of languishing pace, with his eyes sometimes cast up to heaven as though his fancies strove to mount higher; sometimes thrown down to the ground, as if the earth could not bear the burden of his sorrows; at length, with a lamentable tune, he sung those few verses.

And having ended, he struck himself on the breast, saying, “O miserable wretch, whither do thy destinies guide thee?” The voice made Zelmane hasten her pace to overtake him, which having done, she plainly perceived that it was her dear friend Musidorus; whereat marvelling not a little, she demanded of him whether the goddess of those woods had such a power to transform {88} every body, or whether, as in all enterprises else he had done, he meant thus to match her in this new alteration. “Alas,” said Musidorus, “what shall I say, who am loth to say, and yet fain would have said? I find indeed, that all is but lip-wisdom, which wants experience. I now, woe is me, do try what love can do. O Zelmane, who will resist it must either have no wit, or put out his eyes: can any man resist his creation? certainly by love we are made, and to love we are made. Beasts only cannot discern beauty, and let them be in the roll of beasts that do not honour it.” The perfect friendship Zelmane bare him, and the great pity she, by good trial, had of such cases, could not keep her from smiling at him, remembering how vehemently he had cried out against the folly of lovers; and therefore a little to punish him, “Why how now dear cousin,” said she, “you that were last day so high in the pulpit against lovers, are you now become so mean an auditor? remember that love is a passion, and that a worthy man’s reason must ever have the masterhood.” “I recant, I recant,” cried Musidorus, and withal falling down prostrate, “O thou celestial or infernal spirit of love, or what other heavenly or hellish title thou list to have, for effects of both I find in myself, have compassion of me and let thy glory be as great in pardoning them that be submitted to thee as in conquering those that were rebellious.” “No, no,” said Zelmane, “I see you well enough; you make but an interlude of my mishaps, and do but counterfeit thus to make me see the deformity of my passions; but take heed, that this jest do not one day turn to earnest.” “Now I beseech thee,” said Musidorus, taking her fast by the hand, “even for the truth of our friendship, of which, if I be not altogether an unhappy man, thou has some remembrance, and by those secret flames which I know have likewise nearly touched thee, make no jest of that which hath so earnestly pierced me through, nor let that be light unto thee, which is to me so burdenous, that I am not able to bear it.” Musidorus, both in words and behaviour, did so lively deliver out his inward grief that Zelmane found indeed he was throughly wounded: but there rose a new jealousy in her mind, lest it might be with Philoclea, by whom, as Zelmane thought, in right, all hearts and eyes should be inherited. And therefore desirous to be cleared of that doubt, Musidorus shortly, as in haste and full of passionate perplexedness, thus recounted his case unto her.

“The day,” said he, “I parted from you, I being in mind to return to a town from whence I came hither, my horse being before tired, would scarce bear me a mile hence, where being benighted, the sight of a candle, I saw a good way off, guided me to a young shepherd’s house, by name Menalcas, who seeing me to be a {89} straying stranger, with the right honest hospitality which seems to be harboured in the Arcadian breasts, and, though not with curious costliness, yet cleanly sufficiency entertained me; and having by talk with him found the manner of the country something more in particular than I had by Kalander’s report, I agreed to sojourn with him in secret, which he faithfully promised to observe. And so hither to your arbour divers times repaired, and here by your means had the fight, O that it had never been so, nay, O that it might ever be so, of the goddess, who in a definite compass can set forth infinite beauty.” All this while Zelmane was racked with jealousy. But he went on, “For,” said he, “I lying close, and in truth thinking of you, and saying thus to myself, ‘O sweet Pyrocles, how art thou bewitched? where is thy virtue? where is the use of thy reason? how much am I inferior to thee in that state of mind? and yet know I that all the heavens cannot bring me such a thraldom.’ Scarcely, think I, had I spoken this word, when the ladies came forth; at which sight, I think the very words returned back again to strike my soul; at least, an unmeasurable sting I felt in myself that I had spoken such words.” “At which sight,” said Zelmane, not able to bear him any longer. “O,” said Musidorus, “I know your suspicion; No, no, banish all such fear, it was, it is, and must be Pamela.” “Then all is safe,” said Zelmane, “proceed dear Musidorus.” “I will not,” said he, “impute it to my late solitary life, which yet is prone to affections, nor to the much thinking of you (though that called the consideration of love into my mind, which before I ever neglected) not to the exaltation of Venus, nor revenge of Cupid, but even to her, who is the planet, nay, the goddess, against which the only shield must be my sepulchre. When I first saw her I was presently stricken, and I (like a foolish child, that when anything hits him, will strike himself again upon it) would needs look again, as though I would persuade mine eyes, that they were deceived. But alas, well have I found, that love to a yielding heart is a king; but to a resisting, is a tyrant. The more with arguments I shaked the stake, which he had planted in the ground of my heart, the deeper still it sank into it. But what mean I to speak of the causes of my love, which is as impossible to describe, as to measure the back-side of heaven? let this word suffice, I love.

“And that you may know I do so, it was I that came in black armour to defend her picture, where I was both prevented and beaten by you. And so, I that waited here to do you service, have now myself most need of succour.” “But whereupon got you yourself this apparel?” said Zelmane. “I had forgotten to tell you,” said Musidorus, “though that were one principal matter of my speech; so much am I now master of my own {90} mind. But thus it happened: being returned to Menalcas’ house, full of tormenting desire, after a while fainting under the weight, my courage stirred up my wit to seek for some relief before I yielded to perish. At last this came into my head, that every evening, that I had to no purpose last used my horse and armour. I told Menalcas, that I was a Thessalian gentleman, who by mischance having killed a great favourite of the prince of that country, was pursued so cruelly, that in no place but either by favour or corruption, they would obtain my destruction, and that therefore I was determined, till the fury of my persecutors might be assuaged, to disguise myself among the shepherds of Arcadia, and, if it were possible, to be one of them that were allowed the prince’s presence, because if the worst should fall that I were discovered, yet having gotten the acquaintance of the prince, it might happen to move his heart to protect me. Menalcas, being of an honest disposition, pitied my case, which my face, thro’ my inward torment, made credible; and so, I giving him largely for it, let me have this raiment, instructing me in all particularities, touching himself, or myself, which I desired to know; yet not trusting so much to his constancy as that I would lay my life, and life of my life upon it, I hired him to go into Thessalia to a friend of mine, and to deliver him a letter from me; conjuring him to bring me as speedy an answer as he could, because it imported me greatly to know whether certain of my friends did yet possess any favour, whose intercessions I might use for my restitution. He willingly took my letter, which being well sealed, indeed contained other matter. For I wrote to my trusty servant Calodoulus, whom you know as soon as he had delivered the letter, he should keep him prisoner in his house, not suffering him to have conference with any body, till he knew my further pleasure, in all other respects that he should use him as my brother. And is Menalcas gone, and I here a poor shepherd; more proud of this estate than of any kingdom, so manifest it is, that the highest point outward things can bring one unto, is the contentment of the mind, with which no estate; without which, all estates be miserable. Now have I chosen this day, because, as Menalcas told me, the other shepherds are called to make their sports, and hope that you will with your credit find means to get me allowed among them.” “You need not doubt,” answered Zelmane, “but that I will be your good mistress: marry, the best way of dealing must be by Dametas, who since his blunt brain hath perceived some favour the prince doth bear unto me (as without doubt the most servile flattery is lodged most easily in the grossest capacity, for their ordinary conceit draweth a yielding to their greater, and then have they not wit to discern the right degrees of duty) is much more {91} serviceable unto me, than I can find any cause to wish him. And therefore despair not to win him, for every present occasion will catch his senses, and his senses are masters of his silly mind; only reverence him, and reward him, and with that bridle and saddle you shall well ride him.” “O heaven and earth,” said Musidorus, “to what a pass are our minds brought that from the right line of virtue are wried to these crooked shifts? but O love, it is thou that doest it; thou changest name upon name; thou disguisest our bodies, and disfigurest our minds. But indeed thou hast reason; for though the ways be foul, the journey’s end is most fair and honourable.”

“No more sweet Musidorus,” said Zelmane, “of these philosophies; for here comes the very person of Dametas.” And so he did indeed, with a sword by his side, a forest-bill on his neck, and a chopping-knife under his girdle: in which well provided sort, he had ever gone since the fear Zelmane had put him in. But he no sooner saw her, but with head and arms he laid his reverence afore her, enough to have made any man forswear all courtesy. And then in Basilius’s name he did invite her to walk down to the place where that day they were to have the pastorals.

But when he espied Musidorus to be none of the shepherds allowed in that place he would fain have persuaded himself to utter some anger, but that he durst not; yet muttering and champing, as though his cud troubled him, he gave occasion to Musidorus to come near him, and feign his tale of his own life: that he was a younger brother of the shepherd Menalcas, by name Dorus, sent by his father in his tender age to Athens, there to learn some cunning more than ordinary, that he might be the better liked of the prince; and that after his father’s death, his brother Menalcas lately gone thither to fetch him home, was also deceased, where, upon his death, he had charged him to seek the service of Dametas, and to be wholly and ever guided by him, as one in whose judgment and integrity the prince had singular confidence. For token whereof, he gave to Dametas a good sum of gold in ready coin: which Menalcas had bequeathed unto him, upon condition he should receive this poor Dorus into his service, that his mind and manners might grow the better by his daily example. Dametas, that of all manners of style could best conceive of golden eloquence, being withal tickled by Musidorus’s praises, had his brain so turned, that he became slave to that which he that sued to be his servant offered to give him, yet, for countenance sake, he seemed very squeamish, in respect of the charge he had of the princess Pamela. But such was the secret operation of the gold, helped with the persuasion of the Amazon, Zelmane (who said it was pity so handsome a young man should be anywhere else than {92} with so good a master) that in the end he agreed (if that day he behaved himself so to the liking of Basilius, as he might be contented) that then he would receive him into his service.

And thus went they to the lodge, where they found Gynecia and her daughters ready to go to the field, to delight themselves there a while until the shepherds coming: whither also taking Zelmane with them, as they went, Dametas told them of Dorus, and desired he might be accepted there that day instead of his brother Menalcas. As for Basilius, he stayed behind to bring the shepherds, with whom he meant to confer, to breed the better Zelmane’s liking, which he only regarded, while the other beautiful band came to the fair field appointed for the shepherdish pastimes. It was indeed a place of delight; for through the midst of it there ran a sweet brook which did both hold the eye open with her azure streams, and yet seek to close the eye with the purling noise it made upon the pebble stones it ran over: the field itself being set in some places with roses, and in all the rest constantly preserving a flourishing green: the roses, added such a ruddy show unto it, as though the field were bashful at his own beauty: about it, as if it had been to enclose a theatre, grew such sort of trees as either excellency of fruit, stateliness of growth, continual greenness, or poetical fancies, have made at any time famous. In most part of which there had been framed by art such pleasant arbours, that, one answering another, they became a gallery aloft from tree to tree almost round about, which below gave a perfect shadow; a pleasant refuge then from the choleric look of Phoebus.

In this place while Gynecia walked hard by them, carrying many unquiet contentions about her, the ladies sat them down, enquiring divers questions of the shepherd Dorus; who keeping his eye still upon Pamela, answered with such a trembling voice, and abashed countenance, and oftentimes so far from the matter, that it was some sport to the young ladies, thinking it want of education which made him so discountenanced with unwonted presence. But Zelmane that saw in him the glass of her own misery, taking the hand of Philoclea, and with burning kisses setting it close to her lips (as if it should stand there like a hand in the margin of a book, to note some saying worthy to be marked) began to speak those words: “O love, since thou art so changeable in men’s estates, how art thou so constant in their torments?” when suddenly there came out of a wood a monstrous lion, with a she-bear not far from him, of a little less fierceness, which, as they guessed, having been hunted in forests far off, were by chance come thither, where before such beast had never been seen. Then care, not fear, or fear, not for themselves, altered something the countenances of the two lovers; but so, as any man might perceive, was rather an {93} assembling of powers, than dismayedness of courage. Philoclea no sooner espied the lion, but, that obeying the commandment of fear, she leaped up, and ran to the lodge-ward, as fast as her delicate legs could carry her, while Dorus drew Pamela behind a tree, where she stood quaking like a partridge on which the hawk is even ready to seize. But the lion, seeing Philoclea run away, bent his race to her-ward, and was ready to seize himself on the prey when Zelmane (to whom danger then was a cause of dreadlessness, all the composition of her elements being nothing but fiery) with swiftness of desire crossed him, and with force of affection struck him such a blow upon his chine, that she opened all his body: wherewith the valiant beast turning her with open jaws, she gave him such a thrust through his breast, that all the lion could do, was with his paw to tear off the mantle and sleeve of Zelmane with a little scratch, rather than a wound, his death-blow having taken away the effect of his force: but therewithal he fell down, and gave Zelmane leisure to take off his head, to carry it for a present to her lady Philoclea, who all this while, not knowing what was done behind her, kept on her course like Arethusa when she ran from Alpheus; her light apparel being carried up with the wind, that much of those beauties she would at another time have willingly hidden, was presented to the sight of the twice wounded Zelmane. Which made Zelmane not follow her over-hastily, lest she should too soon deprive herself of that pleasure, but carrying the lion’s head in her hand, did not fully overtake her till they came to the presence of Basilius. Neither were they long there, but that Gynecia came thither also, who had been in such a trance of musing that Zelmane was fighting with the lion, before she knew of any lion’s coming: but then affection resisting, and the soon ending of the fight preventing all extremity of fear she marked Zelmane’s fighting: and when the lion’s head was off, as Zelmane ran after Philoclea, so she could not find in her heart but run after Zelmane: so that it was a new sight Fortune had prepared to those woods, to see those great personages thus run one after the other, each carried forward with an inward violence; Philoclea with such fear that she thought she was still in the lion’s mouth; Zelmane with an eager and impatient delight; Gynecia with wings of love, flying she neither knew nor cared to know whither. But now being all come before Basilius, amazed with this sight, and fear having such possession in the fair Philoclea that her blood durst not yet come to her face to take away the name of paleness from her most pure whiteness, Zelmane kneeled down and presented the lion’s head unto her: “Only lady,” said she, “here see you the punishment of that unnatural beast, which contrary to his own kind would have wronged prince’s blood, guided with such traitorous {94} eyes, as durst rebel against your beauty.” “Happy am I, and my beauty both (answered the sweet Philoclea then blushing, for fear had bequeathed his room to his kinsman bashfulness) that you, excellent Amazon, were there to teach him good manners.” “And even thanks to that beauty,” answered Zelmane, “which can give an edge to the bluntest swords.”

There Philoclea told her father how it had happened; but as she had turned her eyes in her tale to Zelmane she perceived some blood upon Zelmane’s shoulder, so that starting with the lovely grace and pity she showed it to her father and mother, who, as the nurse sometimes with over-much kissing may forget to give the babe suck, so had they with too much delighting, in beholding and praising Zelmane, left off to mark whether she needed succour. But then they ran both unto her, like a father and mother to an only child, and, though Zelmane assured them it was nothing, would needs see it, Gynecia having skill in chirurgery, an art in those days much esteemed because it served to virtuous courage, which even ladies would, ever with the contempt of cowards, seem to cherish. But looking upon it (which gave more inward bleeding wounds to Zelmane, for she might sometimes feel Philoclea’s touch while she helped her mother) she found it was indeed of no importance; yet applied she a precious balm unto it of power to heal a greater grief.

But even then, and not before, they remembered Pamela, and therefore Zelmane, thinking of her friend Dorus, was running back to be satisfied, when they might all see Pamela coming between Dorus and Dametas, having in her hand the paw of a bear, which the shepherd Dorus had newly presented unto her, desiring her to accept it, as of such a beast, which though she deserved death for her presumption, yet was her wit to be esteemed, since she could make so sweet a choice. Dametas for his part came piping and dancing, the merriest man in a parish: but when he came so near as he might be heard of Basilius, he would needs break through his ears with this joyful song of their good success.

Being all now come together, and all desirous to know each other’s adventures, Pamela’s noble heart would needs gratefully make known the valiant means of her safety, which, directing her speech to her mother, she did in this manner: “As soon,” said she, “as ye were all run away, and that I hoped to be in safety, there came out of the same woods a horrible foul bear, which (fearing belike to deal while the lion was present as soon as he was gone) came furiously towards the place where I was, and this young shepherd left alone by me, I truly (not guilty of any wisdom, which since they lay to my charge, because they say it is the best refuge against that beast, but even pure fear bringing forth that effect of wisdom) fell down flat on my face, needing not counterfeit being dead, for indeed I was little better. But this young shepherd with a wonderful courage, having no other weapon but that knife you see, standing before the place where I lay, so behaved himself that the first sight I had, when I thought myself already near Charon’s ferry, was the shepherd showing me his bloody knife in token of victory.” “I pray you (said Zelmane speaking to Dorus, whose valour she was careful to have manifested) in what sort, so ill weaponed, could you achieve this enterprise?” “Noble lady,” said Dorus, “the manner of those beasts fighting with any man, is to stand up upon their hinder feet, and so this did, and being ready to give me a shrewd embracement, I think the god Pan, ever careful of the chief blessing of Arcadia, guided my hand so just to the heart of the beast that neither she could once touch me nor (which is the only matter in this worthy remembrance) breed any danger to the princess. For my part, I am rather, with all subjected humbleness, to thank her excellencies, since the duty thereunto gave me heart to save myself than to receive thanks for a deed which was her only aspiring.” And this Dorus spoke, keeping affection as much as he could back from coming into his eyes and gestures. But Zelmane, that had the same character in her heart, could easily decipher it, and therefore to keep him the longer in speech, desired to understand the conclusion of the matter, and how the honest Dametas was escaped. “Nay,” said Pamela, “none shall take that office from myself, being so much bound to him as I am for my education.” And with that word, scorn borrowing the countenance of mirth, somewhat she smiled, and thus spoke on: “When,” said she, “Dorus made me assuredly perceive that all cause of fear was passed, the truth is, I was ashamed to find myself alone with this shepherd, and therefore looking about me, if I could see anybody, at length we both perceived the gentle Dametas, lying with his head and breast as far as he could thrust himself into a bush, drawing up his legs as close unto him as he could: for, like a man of a very kind nature, {96} soon to take pity on himself, he was fully resolved not to see his own death. And when this shepherd pushed him, bidding him to be of good cheer, it was a great while ere we could persuade him that Dorus was not the bear, so that he was fain to pull him out by the heels, and show him the beast as dead as he could wish it: which, you may believe me, was a very joyful sight unto him. But then he forgot all courtesy, for he fell upon the beast, giving it many a manful wound, swearing by much, it was not well such beasts should be suffered in a commonwealth. And then my governor, as full of joy, as before of fear, came dancing and singing before, as even now you saw him.” “Well, well,” said Basilius, “I have not chosen Dametas for his fighting, nor for his discoursing but for his plainness and honesty, and therein I know he will not deceive me.” But then he told Pamela (not so much because she should know it, as because he would tell it) the wonderful act Zelmane had performed, which Gynecia likewise spoke of, both in such extremity of praising, as was easy to be seen, the construction of their speech might best be made by the grammar rules of affection. Basilius told with what a gallant grace she ran with the lion’s head in her hand, like another Pallas with the spoils of Gorgon. Gynecia swore she saw the very face of the young Hercules killing the Nemean lion; and all with a grateful assent confirmed the same praises; only poor Dorus (though of equal desert, yet not proceeding of equal estate) should have been less forgotten, had not Zelmane again with great admiration begun to speak of him; asking whether it were the fashion or no in Arcadia that shepherds should perform such valorous enterprises.

This Basilius, having the quick sense of a lover, took, as though his mistress had given him a secret reprehension, that he had not showed more gratefulness to Dorus; and therefore as nimbly as he could, enquired of his estate, adding promise of great rewards, among the rest, offering to him, if he would exercise his courage in soldiery, he would commit some charge unto him under his lieutenant Philanax. But Dorus, whose ambition climbed by another stair, having first answered touching his estate that he was brother to the shepherd Menalcas, who among other was wont to resort to the prince’s presence, and excused his going to soldiery by the unaptness he found in himself that way, he told Basilius that his brother in his last testament had willed him to serve Dametas, and therefore, for due obedience thereunto, he would think his service greatly rewarded if he might obtain by that means to live in the sight of the prince and yet practice his own chosen vocation. Basilius, liking well his goodly shape and handsome manner, charged Dametas to receive him like a son into his house, saying, that his valour, and Dametas’s truth would be {97} good bulwarks against such mischiefs, as, he sticked not to say, were threatened to his daughter Pamela.

Dametas, no whit out of countenance with all that had been said, because he had no worse to fall into than his own, accepted Dorus; and withal telling Basilius that some of the shepherds were come, demanded in what place he would see their sports, who first was curious to know whether it were not more requisite for Zelmane’s hurt to rest than sit up at those pastimes: and she, that felt no wound but one, earnestly desired to have the pastorals. Basilius commanded it should be at the gate of the lodge, where the throne of the prince being, according to the ancient manner, he made Zelmane sit between him and his wife therein, who thought herself between drowning and burning, and the two young ladies of either side the throne, and so prepared their eyes and ears to be delighted by the shepherds.

But, before all of them were assembled to begin their sports, there came a fellow who being out of breath, or seeming so to be for haste, with humble hastiness told Basilius, that his mistress, the lady Cecropia, had sent him to excuse the mischance of her beast ranging in that dangerous sort, being happened by the folly of the keeper, who thinking himself able to rule them, had carried them abroad, and so was deceived: whom yet, if Basilius would punish for it, she was ready to deliver. Basilius made no other answer, but that his mistress, if she had any more such beasts, should cause them to be killed: and then he told his wife and Zelmane of it, because they should not fear those woods, as though they harboured such beasts where the like had never been seen. But Gynecia took a further conceit of it, mistrusting greatly Cecropia, because she had heard much of the devilish wickedness of her heart, and that particularly she did her best to bring up her son Amphialus, being brother’s son to Basilius, to aspire to the crown as next heir male after Basilius, and therefore saw no reason but that she might conjecture, it proceeded rather of some mischievous practice, than of misfortune. Yet did she only utter her doubt to her daughters, thinking, since the worst was past, she would attend a further occasion, lest overmuch haste might seem to proceed of the ordinary mislike between sisters-in-law only they marvelled that Basilius looked no further into it, who, good man, thought so much of his late conceived commonwealth, that all other matters were but digressions unto him. But the shepherds were ready, and with well handling themselves, called their senses to attend their pastimes.

Basilius, because Zelmane so would have it, used the artificial day of torches, to lighten the sports their invention could minister: and because many of the shepherds were but newly come, he did {98} in a gentle manner chastise their negligence, with making them, for that night the torch bearers; and the others he willed with all freedom of speech and behaviour to keep their accustomed method, which while they prepared to do, Dametas, who much disdained, since his late authority, all his old companions, brought his servant Dorus in good acquaintance and allowance of them, and himself stood like a director over them, with nodding, gaping, winking, or stamping, showing how he did like or mislike those things he did not understand. The first sports the shepherds showed were full of such leaps and gambols as being according to the pipe which they bore in their mouths, even as they danced, made a right picture of their chief god Pan, and his companions the Satyrs. Then would they cast away their pipes, and holding hand in hand dance as it were in a brawl, by the only cadence of their voices, which they would use in singing some short couplets, whereto the one half beginning, the other half should answer as the one half, saying:

Then joining all their voices, and dancing a faster measure, they would conclude with some such words:

Having thus varied both their song and dances into divers sorts of inventions, their last sport was, one of them to provoke another to a more large expressing of his passions: which Thyrsis (accounted one of the best singers amongst them) having marked in Dorus’s dancing, no less good grace and handsome behaviour than extreme tokens of a troubled mind, began first with his pipe, and then with his voice, thus to challenge Dorus, and was by him answered in the under-written sort.

THE FIRST ECLOGUES

Dorus did so well in answering Thyrsis that everyone desired to hear him sing something alone. Seeing therefore a lute lying under the Princess Pamela’s feet, glad to have such an errand to {103} approach her, he came, but came with a dismayed grace, all his blood stirred betwixt fear and desire, and playing upon it with such sweetness, as everybody wondered to see such skill in a shepherd, he sung unto it with a sorrowing voice, these elegiac verses:

Dorus when he had sung this, having had all the while a free beholding of the fair Pamela (who could well have spared such honour; and defended the assault he gave unto her face with bringing a fair stain of shamefacedness unto it) let fall his arms, and remained so fastened in his thoughts as if Pamela had grafted him there to grow in continual imagination. But Zelmane espying it, and fearing he should too much forget himself, she came to him, and took out of his hand the lute, and laying fast hold of Philoclea’s face with her eyes, she sung these sapphics, speaking as it were to her own hope:

Great was the pleasure of Basilius, and greater would have been Gynecia’s but that she found too well it was intended to her daughter. As for Philoclea, she was sweetly ravished withal. When Dorus, desiring in a secret manner to speak of their cases, as perchance the parties intended might take some light of it, making low reverence to Zelmane, began this provoking song in Hexameter verse unto her. Whereunto she soon finding whether his words were directed, in like tune and verse, answered as followeth:

What exclaiming praises Basilius gave to this Eclogue any man may guess that knows love is better than a pair of spectacles to make everything seem greater which is seen through it: and then is never tongue-tied where fit commendation, whereof womankind is so liquorish, is offered unto it. But before any other came in to supply the place, Zelmane having heard some of the shepherds by chance name Strephon and Claius, supposing thereby they had been present, was desirous both to hear them for the fame of their friendly love, and to know them for their kindness towards her best loved friend. Much grieved was Basilius, that any desire of his mistress should be unsatisfied, and therefore to represent them unto her, as well as in their absence it might be, he commanded one Lamon, who had at large set down their country pastimes and first love to Urania, to sing the whole discourse which he did in this manner.

As Lamon would have proceeded, Basilius knowing, by the wasting of the torches that the night also was far wasted, and withal remembering Zelmane’s hurt, asked her whether she thought it not better to reserve the complaint of Claius till another day. Which she, perceiving the song had already worn out much time, and not knowing when Lamon would end, being even now stepping over to a new matter, though much delighted with what was spoken, willingly agreed unto. And so of all sides they went to recommend themselves to the elder brother of death.

ARCADIA
BOOK II

In these pastoral times a great number of days were sent to follow their flying predecessors, while the cup of poison (which was deeply tasted of the noble company) had left no sinew of theirs without mortally searching into it; yet never manifesting his venomous work, till once, that the night (parting away angry that she could distil no more sleep into the eyes of lovers) had no sooner given place to the breaking out of the morning light, and the sun bestowed his beams upon the tops of the mountains, but that the woeful Gynecia, to whom rest was no ease, had left her loathed lodging, and gotten herself into the solitary places, those deserts were full of going up and down with such unquiet motions, as a grieved and hopeless mind is wont to bring forth. There appeared unto the eyes of her judgment the evils she was like to run into, with ugly infamy waiting upon them: she felt the terrors of her own conscience; she was guilty of a long exercised virtue, which made his vice the fuller of deformity. The uttermost of the good she could aspire unto was a mortal wound to her vexed spirits: and lastly, no small part of her evils was that she was wise to see her evils. Insomuch, that having a great while thrown her countenance ghastly about her (as if she had called all the powers of the world to be witnesses of her wretched estate) at length casting up her watery eyes to heaven: “O sun,” said she, “whose unspotted light directs the steps of mortal mankind, art thou not ashamed to impart the clearness of thy presence to such a dust-creeping worm as I am? O ye heavens, which continually keep the course allotted unto you, can none of your influences prevail so much upon the miserable Gynecia, as to make her preserve a course so long embraced by her? O deserts, deserts, how fit a guest am I for you, since my heart can people you with wild ravenous beasts, which in you are {122} wanting? O virtue, where dost thou hide thyself? what hideous thing is this which doth eclipse thee? Or is it true that thou wert never but a vain name, and no essential thing, which hast thus left thy professed servant, when she had most need of thy lovely presence? O imperfect proportion of reason which can too much foresee and too little prevent?” “Alas! alas!” said she, “if there were but one hope for all my pains, or but one excuse for all my faultiness! But wretch that I am, my torment is beyond all succour, and my evil deserving doth exceed my evil fortune. For nothing else did my husband take this strange resolution to live so solitary: for nothing else have the winds delivered this strange guest to my country: for nothing else have the destinies reserved my life to this time, but that only I, most wretched I, should become a plague to myself and a shame to womankind. Yet if my desire, how unjust soever it be, might take effect, though a thousand deaths followed it, and every death were followed with a thousand shames, yet should not my sepulchre receive me without some contentment. But alas! though sure I am that Zelmane is such as can answer my love, yet as sure I am that this disguising must needs come for some foretaken conceit: and then wretched Gynecia where canst thou find any small ground-plot for hope to dwell upon? no, no, it is Philoclea his heart is set upon; it is my daughter I have borne to supplant me. But if it be so, the life I have given thee, ungrateful Philoclea, I will sooner with these hands bereave thee of than my birth shall glory she hath bereaved me of my desires: in shame there is no comfort, but to be beyond all bounds of shame.”

Having spoken thus, she began to make a piteous war in her fair hair; when she might hear, not far from her, an extremely doleful voice, but so suppressed with a kind of whispering note that she could not conceive the words distinctly. But, as a lamentable tune is the sweetest music to a woeful mind, she drew thither near-way in hope to find some companion of her misery; and as she paced on, she was stopped with a number of trees, so thickly placed together that she was afraid she should, with rushing through, stop the speech of the lamentable party which she was so desirous to understand: and therefore sitting her down as softly as she could, for she was now in distance to hear, she might first perceive a lute excellently well played upon, and then the same doleful voice accompanying it with these verses:

The ending of the song served but for a beginning of new plaints, as if the mind, oppressed with too heavy a burden of cares, was fain to discharge itself of all sides, and, as it were, paint out the hideousness of the pain in all sorts of colours. For the woeful person, as if the lute had evil joined with the voice, threw it to the ground with such like words: “Alas, poor lute! how much art thou deceived to think that in my miseries thou could’st ease my woes, as in my careless times thou wast wont to please my fancies? The time is changed, my lute, the time is changed; and no more did my joyful mind then receive everything to a joyful consideration, than my careful mind now makes each thing taste the bitter juice of care. The evil is inward, my lute, the evil is inward; which all thou dost, doth serve but to make me think more freely of. And alas! what is then thy harmony, but the sweet meats of sorrow? the discord of my thoughts, my lute, doth ill agree to the concord of thy strings, therefore be not ashamed to leave thy master, since he is not afraid to forsake himself.”

And thus much spoke, instead of a conclusion, was closed up with so hearty a groaning that Gynecia could not refrain to show herself, thinking such griefs could serve fitly for nothing but her own fortune. But as she came into the little arbour of this sorrowful music, her eyes met with the eyes of Zelmane, which was the party that thus had indited herself of misery, so that either of them remained confused with a sudden astonishment, Zelmane fearing lest she had heard some part of those complaints, which she had risen up that morning early of purpose to breathe out in secret to herself. But Gynecia a great while stood still with a kind of dull amazement, looking steadfastly upon her; at length returning to some use of herself, she began to ask Zelmane what cause carried her so early abroad? But, as if the opening of her mouth to Zelmane had opened some great flood-gate of sorrow, whereof her heart could not abide the violent issue, she sunk to the ground, with her hands over her face, crying vehemently, “Zelmane help me, O Zelmane have pity on me.” Zelmane ran to her, marvelling {124} what sudden sickness had thus possessed her, and beginning to ask her the cause of her pain, and offering her service to be employed by her; Gynecia opening her eyes wildly upon her, pricked with the flames of love and the torments of her own conscience; “O Zelmane, Zelmane,” said she, “dost thou offer my physic, which art my only poison? or wilt thou do me service, which hast already brought me into eternal slavery?” Zelmane then knowing well at what mark she shot, yet loth to enter into it: “Most excellent lady,” said she, “you were best retire yourself into your lodging that you the better may pass this sudden fit.” “Retire myself?” said Gynecia, “If I had retired myself into myself, when thou to me, unfortunate guest, camest to draw me from myself, blessed had I been, and no need had I had of this counsel. But now alas! I am forced to fly to thee for succour, whom I accuse of all my hurt, and make thee judge of my cause, who art the only author of my mischief.” Zelmane the more astonished, the more she understood her; “Madam,” said she, “whereof do you accuse me that I will not clear myself? or wherein may I stead you that you may not command me?” “Alas!” answered Gynecia, “what shall I say more? take pity on me, O Zelmane, but not as Zelmane, and disguise not with me in words, as I know thou dost in apparel.” Zelmane was much troubled with that word, finding herself brought to this strait. But as she was thinking what to answer her, they might see old Basilius pass hard by them without ever seeing them, complaining likewise of love very freshly, and ending his complaint with this song, love having renewed both his invention and voice.

Which being done he looked very curiously upon himself, sometimes fetching a little skip as if he had said his strength had not yet forsaken him: but Zelmane having in this time {125} gotten some leisure to think for an answer, looking upon Gynecia as if she thought she did her some wrong: “Madam,” said she, “I am not acquainted with those words of disguising, neither is it the profession of an Amazon, neither are you a party with whom it is to be used: if my service may please you, employ it, so long as you do me no wrong in misjudging of me.” “Alas! Zelmane,” said Gynecia, “I perceive you know full little how piercing the eyes are of a true lover: there is no one beam of those thoughts you have planted in me but is able to discern a greater cloud than you do go in. Seek not to conceal yourself further from me, nor force not the passion of love into violent extremities.” Now was Zelmane brought to an exigent, when the king turning his eyes that way through the trees, perceived his wife and mistress together, so that framing the most lovely countenance he could, he came straightway towards them, and at the first word, thanking his wife for having entertained Zelmane, desired her she would now return into the lodge, because he had certain matters of estate to impart to the Lady Zelmane. The queen, being nothing troubled with jealousy in that point, obeyed the king’s commandment, full of raging agonies, and determinately bent that as she would seek all loving means to win Zelmane, so she would stir up terrible tragedies rather than fail of her intent. And so went she from them to the lodge-ward with such a battle in her thoughts, and so deadly an overthrow given to her best resolutions that even her body, where the field was fought, was oppressed withal, making a languishing sickness wait upon the triumph of passion, which the more it prevailed in her, the more it made her jealousy watchful, both over her daughter and Zelmane, having ever one of them intrusted to her own eyes.

But as soon as Basilius was rid of his wife’s presence, falling down on his knees, “O lady,” said he, “which hast only had the power to stir up again those flames which had so long lain dead in me, see in me the power of your beauty, which can make old age come to ask counsel of youth, and a prince unconquered to become a slave to a stranger: and when you see that power of yours, love that at least in me, since it is yours, although of me you see nothing to be loved.” “Worthy prince” (answered Zelmane, taking him up from his kneeling) “both your manner and your speech are so strange unto me that I know not how to answer it better than with silence.” “If silence please you,” said the king, “it shall never displease me, since my heart is wholly pledged to obey you, otherwise, if you would vouchsafe mine ears such happiness as to hear you, they shall convey your words to such a mind as will with the humblest degree of reverence receive them.” “I disdain not to speak to you, mighty prince,” {126} said Zelmane, “but I disdain to speak of any matter which may bring my honour into question”: and therewith, with a brave counterfeited scorn she departed from the king, leaving him not so sorry for his short answer as proud in himself that he had broken the matter. And thus did the king, feeding his mind with those thoughts, pass great time in writing verses, and making more of himself than he was wont to do, that, with a little help, he would have grown into a pretty kind of dotage.

But Zelmane being rid of this loving, but little loved company, “Alas!” said she, “poor Pyrocles, was there ever one, but I, that had received wrong, and could blame nobody? that having more than I desire, am still in want of what I would? truly, love, I must needs say thus much on my behalf; thou hast employed my love there, where all love is deserved; and for recompense hast sent me more love than ever I desired. But what wilt thou do Pyrocles? which way canst thou find to rid thee of thy intricate troubles? to her whom I would be known to, I live in darkness; and to her am revealed from whom I would be most secret. What shift shall I find against the diligent love of Basilius? what shield against the violent passions of Gynecia? and if that be done, yet how am I the nearer to quench the fire that consumes me? Well, well, sweet Philoclea, my whole confidence must be builded in thy divine spirit which cannot be ignorant of the cruel wound I have received by you.”

But as sick folks when they are alone think company would relieve them, and yet having company do find it noisome, changing willingly outward objects, when indeed the evil is inward, so poor Zelmane was no more weary of Basilius, than she was of herself when Basilius was gone: and ever the more, the more she turned her eyes to become her own judges. Tired therewith, she longed to meet her friend Dorus that upon the shoulders of friendship she might lay the burden of sorrow, and therefore went toward the other lodge, where among certain beeches she found Dorus, apparelled in flannel, with a goat’s-skin cast upon him and a garland of laurel mix’d with cypress leaves on his head, waiting on his master Dametas, who at that time was teaching him how with his sheep-hook to catch a wanton lamb, and how with the same to cast a little clod at any one that strayed out of company. And while Dorus was practising, one might see Dametas holding his hand under his girdle behind him, nodding from the waist upwards, and swearing he never knew man go more awkwardly to work, and that they might talk of book-learning what they would, but for his part he never saw more unfeaty fellows than great clerks were.

But Zelmane’s coming saved Dorus from further chiding. {127} And so she beginning to speak with him of the number of his master’s sheep, and which province of Arcadia bare the finest wool, drew him on to follow her in such country-discourses; till, being out of Dametas’s hearing, with such vehemency of passion, as though her heart would climb into her mouth to take her tongue’s office, she declared unto him upon what briars the roses of her affections grew; how time still seemed to forget her, bestowing no one hour of comfort upon her; she remaining still in one plight of ill fortune, saving so much worse as continuance of evil doth in itself increase evil. “Alas, my Dorus,” said she, “thou seest how long and languishingly the weeks are passed over since our last talking. And yet I am the same, miserable I, that I was, only stronger in longing, and weaker in hoping.” Then fell she to so pitiful a declaration of the insupportableness of her desires that Dorus’s ears, not able to show what wounds that discourse gave unto them, procured his eyes with tears to give testimony how much they suffered for her suffering; till passion, a most cumbersome guest to itself, made Zelmane, the sooner to shake it off, earnestly entreat Dorus that he also, with like freedom of discourse, would bestow a map of his little world upon her that she might see whether it were troubled with such unhabitable climes of cold despairs and hot rages as hers was.

And so walking under a few palm-trees (which being loving in her own nature seemed to give their shadow the willinglier because they held discourse of love) Dorus thus entered to the description of his fortune.

“Alas,” said he, “dear cousin, that it hath pleased the high power to throw us to such an estate as the only intercourse of our true friendship must be a bartering of miseries: for my part, I must confess, indeed, that from a huge darkness of sorrows I am crept, I cannot say to a lightsomeness, but, to a certain dawning, or rather peeping out of some possibility of comfort: but woe is me; so far from the mark of my desires, that I rather think it such a light as comes through a small hole to a dungeon that the miserable caitiff may the better remember the light of which he is deprived, or, like a scholar who is only come to that degree of knowledge to find himself utterly ignorant: but thus stands it with me. After that by your means I was exalted to serve in yonder blessed lodge, for a while I had, in the furnace of my agonies, this refreshing that, because of the service I had done in killing of the bear, it pleased the princess, in whom indeed stateliness shines through courtesy, to let fall some gracious look upon me: sometimes to see my exercise, sometime to hear my songs. For my part, my heart would not suffer me to omit any occasion whereby I might make the incomparable Pamela see how much extraordinary {128} devotion I bare to her service: and withal strove to appear more worthy in her sight, that small desert, joined to so great affection, might prevail something in the wisest lady. But too well, alas! I found that a shepherd’s service was but considered of as from a shepherd, and the acceptation limited to no further proportion than of a good servant. And when my countenance had once given notice that there lay affection under it, I saw straight, majesty, sitting in the throne of beauty, draw forth such a sword of just disdain that I remained as a man thunderstruck, not daring, no not able to behold that power. Now to make my estate known, seemed again impossible, by reason of the suspiciousness of Dametas, Miso and my young mistress Mopsa: for Dametas, according to the constitution of a dull head, thinks no better way to show himself wise than by suspecting everything in his way, which suspicion Miso, for the hoggish shrewdness of her brain, and Mopsa (for a very unlikely envy she hath stumbled upon against the princess’s unspeakable beauty) were very glad to execute: so that I (finding my service by this means lightly regarded, my affection despised, and myself unknown) remained no fuller of desire than void of counsel how to come to my desire; which, alas! if these trees could speak, they might well witness, for many times have I stood here, bewailing myself unto them, many times have I, leaning to yonder palm, admired the blessedness of it, that it could bear love without sense of pain; many times, when my master’s cattle came hither to chew their cud in this fresh place, I might see the young bull testify his love? but how? with proud looks and joyfulness. ‘O wretched mankind,’ said I then to myself, ‘in whom wit, which should be the governor of his welfare, becomes the traitor to his blessedness: these beasts, like children to nature, inherit her blessings quietly; we like bastards are laid abroad, even as fondlings, to be trained up by grief and sorrow. Their minds grudge not at their bodies’ comfort, nor their senses are letted from enjoying their objects; we have the impediments of honour, and the torments of conscience.’ Truly in such cogitations I have sometimes so long stood that methought my feet began to grow into the ground, with such a darkness and heaviness of mind, that I might easily have been persuaded to have resigned over my very essence. But love (which one time lay burdens, another time giveth wings) when I was at the lowest of my downward thoughts, pulled up my heart to remember, that nothing is achieved before it be throughly attempted, and that lying still, doth never go forward; and that therefore it was time, now or never, to sharpen my invention, to pierce through the hardness of this enterprise, never ceasing to assemble all my conceits, one after another, how to manifest both my mind and {129} estate, till at last I lighted and resolved on this way, which yet perchance you will think was a way rather to hide it. I began to counterfeit the extremest love towards Mopsa that might be; and as for the love, so lively it was indeed within me, although to another subject, that little I needed to counterfeit any notable demonstrations of it; and so making a contrariety the place of my memory, in her foulness I beheld Pamela’s fairness, still looking on Mopsa, but thinking on Pamela, as if I saw my sun shine in a puddled water: I cried out of nothing but Mopsa, to Mopsa my attendance was directed; to Mopsa the best fruits I could gather were brought; to Mopsa it seemed still that mine eyes conveyed my tongue: so that Mopsa was my saying; Mopsa was my singing; Mopsa (that is only suitable in laying a foul complexion upon a filthy favour, setting forth both in sluttishness) she was the load-star of my life; she the blessing of mine eyes; she the overthrow of my desires, and yet the recompense of my overthrow; she the sweetness of my heart, even sweetening the death which her sweetness drew upon me. In sum, whatsoever I thought of Pamela, that I said of Mopsa; whereby as I got my master’s goodwill, who before spited me, fearing lest I should win the princess’s favour from him, so did the same make the princess the better content to allow me her presence: whether indeed it were that a certain spark of noble indignation did rise in her not to suffer such a baggage to win away anything of hers, how meanly soever she reputed of it, or rather, as I think, my words being so passionate, and shooting so quite contrary from the marks of Mopsa’s worthiness, she perceived well enough whither they were directed; and therefore being so masked, she was contented as a sport of wit to attend them: whereupon one day determining to find some means to tell, as of a third person, the tale of mine own love and estate, finding Mopsa, like a cuckoo by a nightingale, alone with Pamela, I came in unto them, and with a face, I am sure, full of cloudy fancies, took a harp and sung this song:

“The song being ended, which I had often broken off in the midst with grievous sighs which overtook every verse I sung, I let fall my harp from me, and casting mine eye sometimes upon Mopsa, but settling my sight principally upon Pamela. ‘And is it the only fortune, most beautiful Mopsa,’ said I, ‘of wretched Dorus that fortune must be the measure of his mind? am I only he, that because I am in misery more misery must be laid upon me? must that which should be cause of compassion become an argument of cruelty against me? alas! excellent Mopsa, consider that a virtuous prince requires the life of his meanest subject, and the heavenly sun disdains not to give light to the smallest worm. O Mopsa, Mopsa, if my heart could be as manifest to you, as it is uncomfortable to me, I doubt not the height of my thoughts should well countervail the lowness of my quality. Who hath not heard of the greatness of your estate? who seeth not that your estate is much excelled with that sweet uniting of all beauties which remaineth and dwelleth with you? who knows not that all these are but ornaments of that divine spark within you which, being descended from heaven, could not elsewhere pick out so sweet a mansion? but if you will know what is the band that ought to knit all these excellencies together, it is a kind mercifulness to such a one as is in his soul devoted to those perfections.’ Mopsa, who already had had a certain smackring towards me, stood all this while with her hands sometimes before her face, but most commonly with a certain special grace of her own, wagging her lips, and grinning instead of smiling: but all the words I could get of her was, wrying her waist, and thrusting out her chin, ‘in faith you jest with me: you are a merry man indeed.’

“But the ever pleasing Pamela (that well found the comedy would be marred if she did not help Mopsa to her part), was content to urge a little further of me. ‘Master Dorus,’ said the fair Pamela, ‘methinks you blame your fortune very wrongfully, since the fault is not in fortune but in you that cannot frame yourself to your fortune, and as wrongfully do require Mopsa to so great a disparagement as to her father’s servant, since she is not worthy to be loved that hath not some feeling of her own worthiness.’ I stayed a good while after her words, in hopes she would have continued her speech, so great a delight I received in hearing her, but seeing her say no further, with a quaking all over my body, I thus answered her: ‘Lady, most worthy of all duty how falls it out that you, in whom all virtues shine, will take the patronage of fortune, the only rebellious handmaid against virtue; especially, since before your eyes you have a pitiful spectacle of her wickedness, a forlorn creature, which must remain not such as I am, but such as she makes me, since she must be {131} the balance of worthiness or disparagement. Yet alas! if the condemned man, even at his death, have leave to speak, let my mortal wound purchase thus much consideration; since the perfections are such in the party I love, as the feeling of them cannot come into any unnoble heart, shall that heart, which doth not only feel them, but hath all the working of his life placed in them, shall that heart, I say, lifted up to such a height, be counted base? O let not an excellent spirit do itself such wrong as to think where it is placed, embraced and loved, there can be any unworthiness, since the weakest mist is not easier driven away by the sun than that is chased away with so high thoughts.’ ‘I will not deny,’ answered the gracious Pamela, ‘but that the love you bear to Mopsa, hath brought you to the consideration of her virtues, and that consideration may have made you the more virtuous, and so the more worthy: but even that then, you must confess, you have received of her, and so are rather gratefully to thank her, than to press any further, till you bring something of your own, whereby to claim it. And truly Dorus, I must in Mopsa’s behalf say thus much to you, that if her beauties have so overtaken you, it becomes a true lover to have your heart more set upon her good than your own, and to bear a tenderer respect to her honour than your satisfaction.’ ‘Now by my hallidame, madam,’ said Mopsa, throwing a great number of sheep’s eyes upon me, ‘you have even touched mine own mind to the quick, forsooth.’

“I finding that the policy that I had used had at leastwise produced thus much happiness unto me, as that I might, even in my lady’s presence, discover the sore which had deeply festered within me, and that she could better conceive my reasons applied to Mopsa, than she would have vouchsafed them, whilst herself was a party, thought good to pursue on my good beginning, using this fit occasion of Pamela’s wit, and Mopsa’s ignorance. Therefore with an humble piercing eye, looking upon Pamela as if I had rather been condemned by her mouth than highly exalted by the other, turning myself to Mopsa, but keeping mine eye where it was: ‘Fair Mopsa,’ said I, ‘well do I find by the wise knitting together of your answer that any disputation I can use is as much too weak, as I unworthy. I find my love shall be proved no love, without I leave to love, being too unfit a vessel in whom so high thoughts should be engraven. Yet since the love I bear you hath so joined itself to the best part of my life, as the one cannot depart but that the other will follow, before I seek to obey you in making my last passage, let me know which is my unworthiness, either of mind, estate, or both?’ Mopsa was about to say, in neither; for her heart I think tumbled with overmuch kindness, when {132} Pamela with a more favourable countenance than before, finding how apt I was to fall into despair, told me I might therein have answered myself, for besides that it was granted me that the inward feeling of Mopsa’s perfections had greatly beautified my mind, there was none could deny but that my mind and body deserved great allowance. ‘But Dorus,’ said she, ‘you must be so far master of your love, as to consider that since the judgment of the world stands upon matter of fortune, and that the sex of womankind of all other is most bound to have regardful eye to men’s judgments, it is not for us to play the philosophers in seeking out your hidden virtues, since that which in a wise prince would be counted wisdom, in us will be taken for a light grounded affection: so is not one thing, one done by divers persons.’

“There is no man in a burning fever feels so great contentment in cold water greedily received (which as soon as the drink ceaseth, the rage reneweth) as poor I found my soul refreshed with her sweetly pronounced words; and newly and more violently again inflamed as soon as she had enclosed up her delightful speech with no less well graced silence. But remembering in myself that as well the soldier dieth which standeth still as he that gives the bravest onset, and seeing that to the making up of my fortune there wanted nothing so much as the making known of mine estate, with a face well witnessing how deeply my soul was possessed, and with the most submissive behaviour that a thralled heart could express, even as my words had been too thick for my mouth, at length spoke to this purpose: ‘Alas, most worthy Princess,’ said I, ‘and do not then your own sweet words sufficiently testify that there was never man could have a juster action against filthy fortune than I, since all things being granted me, her blindness is my only let? O heavenly God, I would either she had such eyes as were able to discern my desires, or were blind not to see the daily cause of my misfortune. But yet,’ said I, ‘most honoured lady, if my miserable speeches have not already cloyed you, and that the very presence of such a wretch become not hateful in your eyes, let me reply thus much further against my mortal sentence, by telling you a story which happened in this same country long since, for woes make the shortest time seem long, whereby you shall see that my estate is not so contemptible, but that a prince hath been content to take the like upon him, and by that only hath aspired to enjoy a mighty princess.’ Pamela graciously harkened, and I told my tale in this sort.

“‘In the country of Thessalia (alas! why name I that accursed country which brings forth nothing but matters of tragedy? but name it I must) in Thessalia, I say, there was (well may I say {133} there was) a prince, no, no prince, whom bondage wholly possessed, but yet accounted a prince, and named Musidorus. O Musidorus, Musidorus! But to what serve exclamations, where there are no ears to receive the sound? This Musidorus being yet in the tenderest age, his worthy father payed to nature, with a violent death, her last duties, leaving his child to the faith of his friends, and the proof of time: death gave him not such pangs as the foresightful care he had of his silly successor. And yet if in his foresight he could have seen so much, happy was that good prince in his timely departure which barred him from the knowledge of his son’s miseries, which his knowledge could neither have prevented nor relieved. The young Musidorus (being thus, as for the first pledge of the destinies goodwill, deprived of his principal stay) was yet for some years after, as if the stars would breathe themselves for a greater mischief, lulled up in as much good luck as the heedful love of his doleful mother, and the flourishing estate of his country could breed unto him.

“‘But when the time now came that misery seemed to be ripe for him, because he had age to know misery, I think there was a conspiracy in all heavenly and earthly things to frame fit occasions to lead him unto it. His people, to whom all foreign matters in foretime were odious, began to wish in their beloved prince, experience by travel: his dear mother, whose eyes were held open only with the joy of looking upon him, did now dispense with the comfort of her widowed life, desiring the same her subjects did, for the increase of her son’s worthiness.

“‘And hereto did Musidorus’s own virtue, see how virtue can be a minister to mischief, sufficiently provoke him; for indeed thus much must I say for him, although the likeness of our mishaps makes me presume to pattern myself unto him, that well-doing was at that time his scope, from which no faint pleasure could withhold him. But the present occasion which did knit all this together, was his uncle the king of Macedon who, having lately before gotten such victories as were beyond expectation, did at this time send both for the prince his son (brought up together, to avoid the wars, with Musidorus); and for Musidorus himself, that his joy might be the more full, having such partakers of it. But alas! to what a sea of miseries my plaintful tongue doth lead me?’ and thus out of breath, rather with that I thought than that I said, I stayed my speech, till Pamela showing by countenance that such was her pleasure, I thus continued it: ‘These two young princes, to satisfy the king, took their way by sea, towards Thrace, whether they would needs go with a navy to succour him, he being at that time before Byzantium with a mighty army besieging it, where at that time his court was. But when the conspired heavens had {134} gotten this subject of their wrath upon so fit place as the sea was, they straight began to breathe out in boisterous winds some part of their malice against him, so that with the loss of all his navy, he only with the prince his cousin, were cast aland far off from the place whither their desires would have guided them. O cruel winds, in your unconsiderate rages, why either began you this fury, or why did you not end it in his end? but your cruelty was such, as you would spare his life for many deathful torments. To tell you what pitiful mishaps fell to the young prince of Macedon his cousin, I should too much fill your ears with strange horrors; neither will I stay upon those laboursome adventures, nor loathsome misadventures to which, and through which his fortune and courage conducted him; my speech hasteneth itself to come to the full point of Musidorus’s misfortunes. For, as we find the most pestilent diseases do gather in themselves all the infirmities with which the body before was annoyed, so did his last misery embrace in extremity of itself all his former mischiefs. Arcadia; Arcadia was the place prepared to be the stage of his endless overthrow; Arcadia was, alas! well might I say it is, the charmed circle where all his spirits for ever should be enchanted. For here, and nowhere else, did his infected eyes make his mind know what power heavenly beauty had to throw it down to hellish agonies. Here, here did he see the Arcadian king’s eldest daughter, in whom he forthwith placed so all his hopes of joy, and joyful parts of his heart that he left in himself nothing but a maze of longing, and a dungeon of sorrow. But alas! what can saying make them believe, whom seeing cannot persuade? those pains must be felt before they can be understood; no outward utterance can command a conceit. Such was as then the state of the king, as it was no time by direct means to seek her. And such was the state of his captivated will as he could delay no time of seeking her.

“‘In this entangled cause, he clothed himself in a shepherd’s weed, that under the baseness of that form, he might at last have free access to feed his eyes with that which should at length eat up his heart. In which doing, thus much without doubt he hath manifested that this estate is not always to be rejected, since under that veil there may be hidden things to be esteemed. And if he might with taking on a shepherd’s look cast up his eyes to the fairest princess nature in that time created, the like, nay the same desire of mine need no more to be disdained, or held for disgraceful. But now alas! mine eyes wax dim, my tongue begins to falter, and my heart to want force to help either, with the feeling remembrance I have, in what heap of miseries the caitiff prince lay at this time buried. Pardon therefore most excellent princess, if I cut off the course of my dolorous tale, since, if I be understood, {135} I have said enough for the defence of my baseness, and for that which after might befall to that pattern of ill fortune, the matters are too monstrous for my capacity, his hateful destinies must best declare their own workmanship.’

“Thus having delivered my tale in this perplexed manner, to the end the princess might judge that he meant himself, who spoke so feelingly; her answer was both strange, and in some respect comfortable. For would you think it? she hath heard heretofore of us both by means of the valiant prince Plangus, and particularly of our casting away, which she (following mine own style) thus delicately brought forth: ‘You have told,’ said she, ‘Dorus, a pretty tale, but you are much deceived in the latter end of it. For the Prince Musidorus with his cousin Pyrocles did both perish upon the coast of Laconia, as a noble gentleman called Plangus, who was well acquainted with the history, did assure my father.’ O how that speech of hers did pour joys in my heart! O blessed name, thought I, of mine, since thou hast been in that tongue, and passed through those lips, though I can never hope to approach them. ‘As for Pyrocles,’ said I, ‘I will not deny it, but that he is perished:’ (which I said lest sooner suspicion might arise of your being here than yourself would have it) and yet affirmed no lie unto her, since I only said, I would not deny it. ‘But for Musidorus,’ said I, ‘I perceive indeed you have either heard or read the story of that unhappy prince; for this was the very objection which that peerless princess did make unto him, when he sought to appear such as he was before her wisdom: and thus I have read it fair written in the certainty of my knowledge, he might answer her, that indeed the ship wherein he came, by a treason was perished: and therefore that Plangus might easily be deceived, but that he himself was cast upon the coast of Laconia, where he was taken up by a couple of shepherds, who lived in those days famous; for that both loving one fair maid, they yet remained constant friends; one of whose songs not long since was sung before you by the shepherd Lamon, and brought by them to a nobleman’s house near Mantinea, whose son had, a little before his marriage, been taken prisoner, and by the help of this prince Musidorus, though naming himself by another name, was delivered.’ Now these circumlocutions I did use, because of the one side I knew the princess would know well the parties I meant; and of the other, if I should have named Strephon, Claius, Kalander and Clitophon, perhaps it would have rubb’d some conjecture into the heavy head of mistress Mopsa.

“‘And therefore,’ said I, ‘most divine lady, he justly was thus to argue against such suspicions, that the prince might easily by those parties be satisfied, that upon that wreck such a one was {136} taken up, and therefore that Plangus might well err, who knew not of any one’s taking up: again that he that was so preserved brought good tokens to be one of the two, chief of that wrecked company: which two, since Plangus knew to be Musidorus and Pyrocles, he must needs be one of them, although, as I said, upon a fore-taken vow, he was otherwise at that time called. Besides, the princess must needs judge that no less than a prince durst undertake such an enterprise, which, though he might get the favour of the princess, he could never defend with less than a prince’s power, against the force of Arcadia. Lastly, said he, for a certain demonstration, he presumed to show unto the princess a mark he had on his face, as I might,’ said I, ‘show this of my neck to the rare Mopsa:’ and, withal, showed my neck to them both, where, as you know, there is a red spot bearing figure, as they tell me, of a lion’s paw, that she may ascertain herself, that I am Menalcas’ brother. ‘And so did he, beseeching her to send someone she might trust into Thessalia, secretly to be advertised, whether the age, the complexion, and particularly that notable sign, did not fully agree with their prince Musidorus.’ ‘Do you not know further,’ said she, with a settled countenance not accusing any kind of inward motion, ‘of that story?’ ‘Alas, no,’ said I, ‘for even here the historiographer stopped, saying, the rest belonged to astrology.’ And therewith, thinking her silent imaginations began to work upon somewhat to mollify them, as the nature of music is to do, and, withal, to show what kind of shepherd I was, I took up my harp, and sang these few verses:

“And then, partly to bring Mopsa again to the matter, lest she should too much take heed to our discourses, but principally, if it were possible to gather some comfort out of her answers, I kneeled down to the princess, and humbly besought her to move Mopsa in my behalf, that she would unarm her noble heart of that steely resistance against the sweet blows of love: that since all her parts were decked with some particular ornament; her face with beauty, her head with wisdom, her eyes with majesty, her countenance with gracefulness, her lips with loveliness, her tongue with victory, that she would make her heart the throne of pity, being the most {137} excellent raiment of the most excellent part. Pamela without show either of favour or disdain, either of heeding or neglecting what I had said, turned her speech to Mopsa, and with such a voice and action, as might show she spoke of a matter which little did concern her; ‘Take heed to yourself,’ said she, Mopsa, ‘for your shepherd can speak well: but truly, if he do fully prove himself such as he saith, I mean, the honest shepherd Menalcas’s brother and heir, I know no reason why you should think scorn of him.’ Mopsa though, in my conscience, she were even then far spent towards me, yet she answered her, that for all my quaint speeches, she would keep her honesty close enough, and that, as for the way of matrimony, she would step never a foot further till my master, her father, had spoken the whole word himself, no she would not. But ever and anon turning her muzzle towards me, she threw such a prospect upon me as might well have given a surfeit to any weak lover’s stomach. But, lord, what a fool am I, to mingle that drivel’s speeches among my noble thoughts! but because she was an actor in this tragedy, to give you a full knowledge, and to leave nothing that I can remember, unrepeated.

“Now the princess being about to withdraw herself from us, I took a jewel made in the figure of a crab-fish, which, because it looks one way and goes another, I thought it did fitly pattern out my looking to Mopsa, but bending to Pamela: the word about it was, ‘By force, not choice;’ and still kneeling, besought the princess that she would vouchsafe to give it Mopsa, and with the blessedness of her hand to make acceptable unto her that toy which I had found following of late an acquaintance of mine at the plough. ‘For,’ said I, ‘as the earth was turned up, the ploughshare lighted upon a great stone; we pull’d that up, and so found both that and some other pretty things which we had divided betwixt us.’

“Mopsa was benumbed with joy when the princess gave it her: but in the princess I could find no apprehension of what I either said or did, but with a calm carelessness letting each thing slide (just as we do by their speeches who neither in matter nor person do anyway belong unto us) which kind of cold temper, mix’d with that lightening of her natural majesty, is of all others most terrible unto me: for yet if I found she contemned me, I would desperately labour both in fortune and virtue to overcome it; if she only misdoubted me I were in heaven; for quickly I would bring sufficient assurance; lastly, if she hated me, yet I should know what passion to deal with; and either with infiniteness of desert I would take away the fuel from that fire; or if nothing would serve, then I would give her my heart’s blood to quench it. But this cruel quietness, neither retiring to mislike, nor proceeding {138} to favour; gracious, but gracious still after one manner; all her courtesies, having this engraven in them that what is done, is for virtue’s sake, not for the parties, ever keeping her course like the sun, who neither for our praises nor curses will spur or stop his horses. This, I say, heavenliness of hers, for howsoever my misery is, I cannot but so entitle it, is so impossible to reach unto that I almost begin to submit myself to the tyranny of despair, not knowing any way of persuasion, where wisdom seems to be unsensible. I have appeared to her eyes like myself, by a device I used with my master, persuading him that we two might put on certain rich apparel I had provided, and so practice something on horseback before Pamela, telling him, it was apparel I had gotten for playing well the part of a king in a tragedy at Athens: my horse indeed was it I had left at Menalcas’s house, and Dametas got one by friendship out of the prince’s stable. But howsoever I show, I am no base body, all I do is but to beat a rock and get foam.”

But as Dorus was about to tell further, Dametas (who came whistling, and counting upon his fingers how many load of hay seventeen fat oxen eat up in a year) desired Zelmane from the king that she would come into the lodge where they stayed for her. “Alas!” said Dorus, taking his leave, “the sum is this, that you may well find you have beaten your sorrow against such a wall, which, with the force of a rebound, may well make your sorrow stronger.” But Zelmane turning her speech to Dametas, “I shall grow,” said she, “skilful in country matters if I have often conference with your servant.” “In sooth,” answered Dametas with a graceless scorn, “the lad may prove well enough, if he over soon think not too well of himself, and will bear away that he heareth of his elders.” And therewith as they walked to the other lodge, to make Zelmane find she might have spent her time better with him, he began with a wild method to run over all the art of husbandry, especially employing his tongue about well dunging of a field, while poor Zelmane yielded her ears to those tedious strokes, not warding them so much as with any one answer, till they came to Basilius and Gynecia, who attended for her in a coach to carry her abroad to see some sports prepared for her. Basilius and Gynecia, sitting in the one end, placed her at the other, with her left side to Philoclea. Zelmane was moved in her mind to have kissed their feet for the favour of so blessed a seat, for the narrowness of the coach made them join from the foot to the shoulders very close together, the truer touch whereof though it were barred by their envious apparel, yet as a perfect magnet, though but in an ivory box, will through the box send forth his embracing virtue to a beloved needle, so this imparadised neighbourhood made Zelmane’s soul cleave unto her, both through {139} the ivory case of her body and the apparel which did overcloud it. All the blood of Zelmane’s body stirring in her, as wine will do when sugar is hastily put into it, seeking to suck the sweetness of the beloved guest: her heart like a lion new imprisoned, seeing him that restrains his liberty before the grate, not panting, but striving violently, if it had been possible, to have leaped into the lap of Philoclea. But Dametas, even then proceeding from being master of a cart, to be doctor of a coach, not a little proud in himself that his whip at that time guided the rule of Arcadia, drove the coach, the cover whereof was made with such joints that as they might, to avoid the weather, pull it up close when they listed, so when they would they might put each end down and remain as discovered and open sighted as on horseback, till upon the side of the forest they had both greyhounds, spaniels, and hounds, whereof the first might seem the lords, the second the gentlemen, and the last the yeoman of dogs; a cast of merlins there was besides, which, flying of a gallant height over certain bushes, would beat the birds that rose down into the bushes, as falcons will do wild-fowl over a river. But the sport which for that day Basilius would principally show to Zelmane, was the mounty at a heron, which getting up on his waggling wings with pain, till he was come to some height (as though the air next to the earth were not fit for his great body to fly through) was now grown to diminish the sight of himself, and to give example to great persons that the higher they be the less they should show; when a gyrfalcon was cast off after her, who straight spying where the prey was, fixing her eye with desire, and guiding her wing by her eye, used no more strength than industry. For as a good builder to a high tower will not make his stair upright, but winding almost the full compass about, that the steepness be the more unsensible, so she, seeing the towering of her pursued chase, went circling and compassing about, rising so with the less sense of rising, and yet finding that way scantly serve the greediness of her haste, as an ambitious body will go far out of the direct way to win to a point of height which he desires; so would she, as it were, turn tail to the heron, and fly out quite another way, but all was to return in a higher pitch, which once gotten, she would either beat with cruel assaults the heron, who now was driven to the best defence of force, since flight would not serve, or else clasping with him, come down together, to be parted by the over-partial beholders.

Divers of which flights Basilius showing to Zelmane, thus was the riches of the time spent, and the day deceased before it was thought of, till night like a degenerating successor made his departure the better remembered. And therefore, so constrained, they willed Dametas to drive homeward, who, half sleeping, half {140} musing about the mending of a wine-press, guided the horses so ill that the wheel coming over a great stub of a tree, it overturned the coach. Which though it fell violently upon the side where Zelmane and Gynecia sat, yet for Zelmane’s part, she would have been glad of the fall which made her bear the sweet burden of Philoclea, but that she feared she might receive some hurt. But indeed neither she did, nor any of the rest, by reason they kept their arms and legs within the coach, saving Gynecia, who with the only bruise of the fall, had her shoulder put out of joint, which, though by one of the falconers cunning it was set well again, yet with much pain was she brought to the lodge; and pain, fetching his ordinary companion, a fever, with him, drove her to entertain them both in her bed.

But neither was the fever of such impatient heat, as the inward plague-sore of her affection, nor the pain half so noisome, as the jealousy she conceived of her daughter Philoclea, lest this time of her sickness might give apt occasion to Zelmane, whom she misdoubted. Therefore she called Philoclea to her, and though it were late in the night, commanded her in her ear to go to the other lodge, and send Miso to her, with whom she would speak, and she to lie with her sister Pamela. The meanwhile Gynecia kept Zelmane with her, because she would be sure she should be out of the lodge before she licensed Zelmane. Philoclea, not skill’d in any thing better than obedience, went quietly down, and the moon then full, not thinking scorn to be a torch-bearer to such beauty, guided her steps, whose motions bear a mind which bare in itself far more stirring motions. And alas! sweet Philoclea, how hath my pen till now forgot thy passions, since to thy memory principally all this long matter is intended? pardon the slackness to come to those woes, which, having caused in others, thou didst feel in thyself.

The sweet minded Philoclea was in their degree of well-doing, to whom the not knowing of evil serveth for a ground of virtue, and hold their inward powers in better form with an unspotted simplicity, than many who rather cunningly seek to know what goodness is than willingly take into themselves the following of it. But as that sweet and simple breath of heavenly goodness is the easier to be altered because it hath not passed through the worldly wickedness, nor feelingly found the evil that evil carries with it, so now the lady Philoclea (whose eyes and senses had received nothing, but according as the natural course of each thing required; whose tender youth had obediently lived under her parents behests, without framing out of her own will the fore-choosing of any thing) when now she came to a point wherein her judgment was to be practised in knowing faultiness by his first {141} tokens, she was like a young fawn who, coming in the wind of the hunters, doth not know whether it be a thing or not to be eschewed; whereof at this time she began to get a costly experience. For after that Zelmane had a while lived in the lodge with her, and that her only being a noble stranger had bred a kind of heedful attention; her coming to that lonely place, where she had nobody but her parents, a willingness of conversation; her wit and behaviour a liking and silent admiration; at length the excellency of her natural gifts, joined with the extreme shows she made of most devout honouring Philoclea (carrying thus, in one person, the only two bands of goodwill, loveliness and lovingness) brought forth in her heart a yielding to a most friendly affection; which when it had gotten so full possession of the keys of her mind that it would receive no message from her senses without that affection were the interpreter, then straight grew an exceeding delight still to be with her, with an unmeasurable liking of all that Zelmane did: matters being so turned in her, that where at first liking her manners did breed goodwill, now goodwill became the chief cause of liking her manners: so that within a while Zelmane was not prized for her demeanour, but the demeanour was prized because it was Zelmane’s. Then followed that most natural effect of conforming herself to that which she did like, and not only wishing to be herself such another in all things but to ground an imitation upon so much an esteemed authority, so that the next degree was to mark all Zelmane’s doings, speeches, and fashions, and to take them into herself as a pattern of worthy proceeding. Which when once it was enacted, not only by the commonality of passions, but agreed unto by her most noble thoughts, and that reason itself, not yet experienced in the issues of such matters, had granted his royal assent, then friendship, a diligent officer, took care to see the statute thoroughly observed. Then grew on that not only she did imitate the soberness of her countenance, the gracefulness of her speech, but even their particular gestures, so that as Zelmane did often eye her, she would often eye Zelmane; and as Zelmane’s eyes would deliver a submissive, but vehement desire in their look, she, though as yet she had not the desire in her, yet should her eyes answer in like piercing kindness of a look. Zelmane, as much as Gynecia’s jealousy would suffer, desired to be near Philoclea; Philoclea, as much as Gynecia’s jealousy would suffer, desired to be near Zelmane. If Zelmane took her hand, and softly strained it, she also, thinking the knots of friendship ought to be mutual, would, with a sweet fastness, show she was loth to part from it. And if Zelmane sighed, she should sigh also; when Zelmane was sad, she deemed it wisdom, and therefore she would be sad too. {142} Zelmane’s languishing countenance with crossed arms, and sometimes cast up eyes, she thought to have an excellent grace, and therefore she also willingly put on the same countenance, till at the last, poor soul, ere she were aware, she accepted not only the badge, but the service; not only the sign, but the passion signified. For whether it were that her wit in continuance did find that Zelmane’s friendship was full of impatient desire, having more than ordinary limits, and therefore she was content to second Zelmane, though herself knew not the limits, or that in truth, true love, well considered, hath an infective power, at last she fell in acquaintance with love’s harbinger, wishing; first she would wish that they two might live all their lives together, like two of Diana’s nymphs. But that wish she thought not sufficient, because she knew there would be more nymphs besides them, who also would have their part in Zelmane. Then would she wish that she were her sister, that such a natural band might make her more special to her, but against that, she considered, that, though being her sister, if she happened to be married she should be robbed of her. Then grown bolder she would wish either herself, or Zelmane, a man, that there might succeed a blessed marriage between them. But when that wish had once displayed his ensign in her mind, then followed whole squadrons of longings, that so it might be with a main battle of mislikings and repinings against their creation, that so it was not. Then dreams by night began to bring more unto her than she durst wish by day, whereout waking did make her know herself the better by the image of those fancies. But as some diseases when they are easy to be cured, they are hard to be known, but when they grow easy to be known, they are almost impossible to be cured, so the sweet Philoclea, while she might prevent it, she did not feel it, now she felt it, when it was past preventing; like a river, no rampires being built against it, till already it have overflowed. For now indeed love pulled off his mask, and showed his face unto her, and told her plainly that she was his prisoner. Then needed she no more paint her face with passions, for passions shone through her face; then her rosy colour was often increased with extraordinary blushing, and so another time, perfect whiteness descended to a degree of paleness; now hot, then cold, desiring she knew not what, nor how, if she knew what. Then her mind, though too late, by the smart was brought to think of the disease, and her own proof taught her to know her mother’s mind, which, as no error gives so strong assault as that which comes armed in the authority of a parent, so greatly fortified her desires to see that her mother had the like desires. And the more jealous her mother was, the more she thought the jewel precious which was with so many locks guarded. {143} But that prevailing so far, as to keep the two lovers from private conference, then began she to feel the sweetness of a lover’s solitariness, when freely with words and gestures, as if Zelmane were present, she might give passage to her thoughts, and so, as it were, utter out some smoke of those flames, wherewith else she was not only burned but smothered. As this night, that going from the one lodge to the other, by her mother’s commandment, with doleful gestures and uncertain paces, she did willingly accept the time’s offer to be a while alone: so that going a little aside into the wood, where many times before she had delighted to walk, her eyes were saluted with a tuft of trees, so close set together, that, with the shade the moon gave through it, it might breed a fearful kind of devotion to look upon it: but true thoughts of love banished all vain fancy of superstition. Full well she did both remember and like the place, for there had she often with their shade beguiled Phoebus of looking upon her: there had she enjoyed herself often, while she was mistress of herself and had no other thoughts, but such as might arise out of quiet senses.

But the principal cause that invited her remembrance was a goodly white marble stone that should seem had been dedicated in ancient time to the Sylvan gods, which she finding there a few days before Zelmane’s coming, had written these words upon it as a testimony of her mind against the suspicion her captivity made her think she lived in. The writing was this.

But now that her memory served as an accuser of her change, and that her own handwriting was there to bear testimony against her fall; she went in among those few trees, so closed in the tops together, that they might seem a little chapel: and there might she, by the help of the moon-light, perceive the goodly stone which served as an altar in that woody devotion. But neither the light was enough to read the words, and the ink was already foreworn, and in many places blotted, which as she perceived, “Alas!” said she, “fair marble, which never received’st spot but by my writing: well do these blots become a blotted writer. But pardon her which did not dissemble then, although she have changed since. Enjoy, enjoy the glory of thy nature, which can so constantly bear the marks of my inconstancy.” And herewith, hiding her eyes with her soft hand, there came into her head certain verses, which if she had had present commodity, she would have adjoined as a retraction to the other. They were to this effect.

But seeing she could not see means to join as then this recantation to the former vow, laying all her fair length under one of the trees, for a while she did nothing but turn up and down, as if she had hoped to turn away the fancy that had mastered her, and hid her face, as if she could have hidden herself from her own fancies. At length with a whispering note to herself: “O me unfortunate wretch,” said she, “what poisonous heats be these which thus torment me? how hath the sight of this strange guest invaded my soul? alas what entrance found this desire, or what strength had it thus to conquer me?” Then a cloud passing between her sight and the moon, “O Diana,” said she, “I would either the cloud that now hides the light of my virtue would as easily pass away as you will quickly overcome this let, or else that you were for ever thus darkened to serve for an excuse of my outrageous folly.” Then looking to the stars, which had perfectly as then beautified the {145} clear sky: “My parents,” said she, “have told me that in those fair heavenly bodies there are great hidden deities, which have their working in the ebbing and flowing of our estates. If it be so, then, O you stars! judge rightly of me, and if I have with wicked intent made myself a prey to fancy, or if by any idle lusts I framed my heart fit for such an impression, then let this plague daily increase in me, till my name be made odious to womankind. But if extreme and unresistable violence have oppressed me, who will ever do any of you sacrifice, O you stars, if you do not succour me? No, no, you will not help me. No, no, you cannot help me: sin must be the mother, and shame the daughter of my affection. And yet are these but childish objections, simple Philoclea, it is the impossibility that doth torment me: for, unlawful desires are punished after the effect of enjoying; but impossible desires are punished in the desire itself. O then, O ten times unhappy that I am, since wherein all other hope kindleth love, in me despair should be the bellows of my affection: and of all despairs the most miserable, which is drawn from impossibility. The most covetous man longs not to get riches out of a ground which never can bear anything; why? because it is impossible. The most ambitious wight vexeth not his wits to climb into heaven; why? because it is impossible. Alas! then, O love, why dost thou in thy beautiful sampler set such a work for my desire to take out, which is as much impossible? and yet alas! why do I thus condemn my fortune before I hear what she can say for herself? what do I, silly wench, know what love hath prepared for me? do I not think my mother, as well, at least as furiously as myself, love Zelmane? and should I be wiser than my mother? either she sees a possibility in that which I see impossible, or else impossible loves need not misbecome me. And do I not see Zelmane, who doth not think a thought which is not first weighed by wisdom and virtue, doth not she vouchsafe to love me with like order? I see it, her eyes depose it to be true; what then? and if she can love poor me, shall I think scorn to love such a woman as Zelmane? away then all vain examinations of why and how. Thou lovest me, most excellent Zelmane, and I love thee:” and with that, embracing the very ground whereon she lay, she said to herself, for even to herself she was ashamed to speak it out in words, “O my Zelmane, govern and direct me, for I am wholly given over unto thee.”

In this depth of muses and divers sorts of discourses, would she ravingly have remained, but that Dametas and Miso, who were round about to seek her, understanding she was come to their lodge that night, came hard by her; Dametas saying that he would not deal in other body’s matters, but for his part he did not like that maids should once stir out of their father’s houses, but if it {146} were to milk a cow, or save a chicken from a kite’s foot, or some such other matter of importance. And Miso swearing that if it were her daughter Mopsa, she would give her a lesson for walking so late that should make her keep within doors for one fortnight. But their jangling made Philoclea rise, and pretending as though she had done it but to sport with them, went with them, after she had willed Miso to wait upon her mother to the lodge; where, being now accustomed by her parent’s discipline as well as her sister to serve herself, she went alone up to Pamela’s chamber, where, meaning to delight her eyes, and joy her thoughts with the sweet conversation of her beloved sister, she found her, though it were in the time that the wings of night doth blow sleep most willingly into mortal creatures, sitting in a chair, lying backward, with her head almost over the back of it, and looking upon a wax-candle which burnt before her; in one hand holding a letter, in the other her handkerchief, which had lately drunk up the tears of her eyes, leaving instead of them crimson circles, like red flakes in the element when the weather is hottest; which Philoclea finding, for her eyes had learned to know the badges of sorrow, she earnestly entreated to know the cause thereof that either she might comfort, or accompany her doleful humour. But Pamela, rather seeming sorry that she had perceived so much, than willing to open any further; “O my Pamela,” said Philoclea, “who are to me a sister in nature, a mother in counsel, a princess by the law of our country, and, which name methinks of all other is the dearest, a friend by my choice and your favour, what means this banishing me from your counsels? do you love your sorrow so well as to grudge me part of it? or do you think I shall not love a sad Pamela so well as a joyful? or be my ears unworthy, or my tongue suspected? What is it, my sister, that you should conceal from your sister, yea and servant Philoclea?” Those words won no further of Pamela, but that telling her they might talk better as they lay together, they impoverished their clothes to enrich their bed, which for that night might well scorn the shrine of Venus: and their cherishing one another with dear, though chaste embracements, with sweet though cold kisses, it might seem that love was come to play him there without dart, or that weary of his own fires, he was there to refresh himself between their sweet breathing lips.

But Philoclea earnestly again entreated Pamela to open her grief: who, drawing the curtain that the candle might not complain of her blushing, was ready to speak: but the breath, almost formed into words, was again stopped by her and turned into sighs. But at last, “I pray you,” said she, sweet Philoclea, “let us talk of some other thing: and tell me whether you did ever see anything so amended as our pastoral sports be since that Dorus came {147} hither?” O love, how far thou seest with blind eyes? Philoclea had straight found her, and therefore to draw out more: “Indeed,” said she, “I have often wondered to myself how such excellencies could be in so mean a person, but belike fortune was afraid to lay her treasures where they should be stained with so many perfections, only I marvel how he can frame himself to hide so rare gifts under such a block as Dametas.” “Ah,” said Pamela, “if you knew the cause, but no more do I neither; and to say the truth: but lord, how are we fallen to talk of this fellow? and yet indeed if you were sometimes with me to mark him while Dametas reads his rustic lecture unto him how to feed his beasts before noon, where to shade them in the extreme heat, how to make the manger handsome for his oxen, when to use the goad, and when the voice; giving him rules of a herdman, though he pretend to make him a shepherd, to see all the while with what a grace, which seems to set a crown upon his base estate, he can descend to those poor matters, certainly you would: but to what serves this? no doubt we were better sleep than talk of those idle matters.” “Ah my Pamela,” said Philoclea, “I have caught you; the constancy of your wit was not wont to bring forth such disjointed speeches: you love, dissemble no further.” “It is true,” said Pamela, “now you have it; and with less ado should, if my heart could have thought those words suitable for my mouth. But indeed, my Philoclea, take heed: for I think virtue itself is no armour of proof against affection. Therefore learn by my example.” Alas! thought Philoclea to herself, your shears come too late to clip the bird’s wings that already is flown away. But then Pamela, being once set in the stream of her love, went away amain, withal telling her how his noble qualities had drawn her liking towards him; but yet ever weighing his meanness, and so held continually in due limits; till seeking many means to speak with her, and ever kept from it, as well because she shunn’d it, seeing and disdaining his mind, as because of her jealous jailors, he had at length used the finest policy that might be in counterfeiting love to Mopsa, and saying to Mopsa whatsoever he would have her know; and in how passionate manner he had told his own tale in a third person, making poor Mopsa believe, that it was a matter fallen out many ages before. “And in the end, because you shall know my tears come not neither of repentance nor misery, who, think you, is my Dorus fallen out to be? even the Prince Musidorus, famous over all Asia for his heroical enterprises, of whom you remember how much good the stranger Plangus told my father; he not being drowned, as Plangus thought, though his cousin Pyrocles indeed perished. Ah my sister, if you had heard his words, or seen his gestures when he made me know what, and {148} to whom his love was, you would have matched in yourself those two rarely matched together, pity and delight. Tell me dear sister, for the gods are my witnesses I desire to do virtuously, can I without the detestable stain of ungratefulness abstain from loving him, who (far exceeding the beautifulness of his shape with the beautifulness of his mind, and the greatness of his estate with the greatness of his acts) is content so to abase himself, as to become Dametas’s servant for my sake? you will say, how know I him to be Musidorus, since the handmaid of wisdom is slow of belief? that consideration did not want in me; for the nature of desire itself is no easier to receive belief, than it is hard to ground belief. For as desire is glad to embrace the first show of comfort, so is desire desirous of perfect assurance, and that have I had of him, not only by necessary arguments to any of common sense, but by sufficient demonstrations. Lastly, he would have me send to Thessalia, but truly I am not as now in mind to do my honourable love so much wrong as so far to suspect him: yet poor soul, knows he no other, but that I do both suspect, neglect, yea, and detest him. For every day he finds one way or other to set forth himself unto me, but all are rewarded with like coldness of acceptation.

“A few days since, he and Dametas had furnished themselves very richly to run at the ring before me. O how mad a sight it was to see Dametas, like rich tissue furred with lamb-skins? but O how well it did with Dorus, to see with what a grace he presented himself before me on horseback, making majesty wait upon humbleness? how at the first, standing still with his eyes bent upon me, as though his motions were chained to my look, he so stayed till I caused Mopsa bid him do something upon his horse: which no sooner said, but, with a kind rather of quick gesture than show of violence, you might see him come towards me, beating the ground in so due time that no dancer can observe better measure. If you remember the ship we saw once when the sea went high upon the coast of Argos, so went the beast. But he, as if centaur-like he had been one piece with the horse, was no more moved than one with the going of his own legs, and in effect so did he command him as his own limbs; for tho’ he had both spurs and wand, they seemed rather marks of sovereignty than instruments of punishment, his hand and leg, with most pleasing grace, commanding without threatening, and rather remembering than chastising; at least if sometimes he did it was so stolen as neither our eyes could discern it nor the horse with any change did complain of it: he ever going so just with the horse, either forth-right or turning that it seemed he borrowed the horse’s body, so he lent the horse his mind. In the turning one might perceive the bridle-hand something gently stir: but indeed {149} so gently that it did rather distil virtue than use violence. Himself, which methinks is strange, showing at one instant both steadiness and nimbleness; sometimes making him turn close to the ground, like a cat, when scratchingly she wheels about after a mouse; sometimes with a little more rising before, now like a raven leaping from ridge to ridge, then like one of Dametas’s kids bound over the hillocks, and all so done, as neither the lusty kind showed any roughness, nor the easier any idleness; but still like a well-obeyed master, whose beck is enough for a discipline, ever concluding each thing he did with his face to me-wards, as if thence came not only the beginning but ending of his motions. The sport was to see Dametas, how he was tossed from the saddle to the mane of the horse, and thence to the ground, giving his gay apparel almost as foul an outside as it had an inside. But as before he had ever said, he wanted but horse and apparel to be as brave a courtier as the best, so now bruised with proof, he proclaimed it a folly for a man of wisdom to put himself under the tuition of a beast, so as Dorus was fain alone to take the ring. Wherein truly at least my womanish eyes could not discern, but that taking his staff from his thigh, the descending it a little down, the getting of it up into the rest, the letting of the point fall, and taking the ring, was but all one motion, at least, if they were divers motions, they did so stealingly slip one into another that the latter part was ever in hand before the eye could discern the former was ended. Indeed Dametas found fault that he showed no more strength in shaking of his staff, but to my conceit the fine cleanness of bearing it was exceeding delightful.

“But how delightful soever it was, my delight might well be in my soul, but it never went to look out of the window to do him any comfort. But how much more I found reason to like him, the more I set all the strength of mine to suppress it, or at least to conceal it. Indeed I must confess, that as some physicians have told me, that when one is cold outwardly, he is not inwardly, so truly the cold ashes laid upon my fire did not take the nature of fire from it. Full often hath my breast swollen with keeping my sighs imprisoned; full often have the tears I drove back from mine eyes, turned back to drown my heart. But alas! what did that help poor Dorus? whose eyes, being his diligent intelligencers, could carry unto him no other news, but discomfortable. I think no day passed but by some one invention he would appear unto me to testify his love. One time he danced the matachin dance in armour, O with what a graceful dexterity! I think to make me see that he had been brought up in such exercises: another time he persuaded his master, to make my time seem shorter, in manner of a dialogue, to play Priamus, while he played Paris. Think, {150} sweet Philoclea, what a Priamus we had: but truly, my Paris was a Paris, and more than a Paris: who, while in a savage apparel, with naked neck, arms, and legs, he made love to Oenone, you might well see by his changed countenance and true tears, that he felt the part he played. Tell me, sweet Philoclea, did you ever see such a shepherd? tell me, did you ever hear of such a prince? and then tell me if a small or unworthy assault have conquered me. Truly I would hate my life, if I thought vanity led me. But since my parents deal so cruelly with me, it is time for me to trust something to my own judgment. Yet hitherto have my looks been as I told you, which continuing after many of those his fruitless trials, have wrought such change in him as I tell you true,” with that word she laid her hand upon her quaking side, “I do not a little fear him. See what a letter this is,” then drew she the curtain, and took the letter from under her pillow, “which to-day, with an afflicted humbleness, he delivered me, pretending before Mopsa that I should read it unto her to mollify, forsooth, her iron stomach.” With that she read the letter, containing thus much:

“O my Philoclea, is he a person to write those words? and are those words lightly to be regarded? but if you had seen when with trembling hand he had delivered it how he went away, as if he had been but the coffin that carried himself to his sepulchre. Two times, I must confess, I was about to take courtesy into mine eyes, but both times the former resolution stopped the entry of it, so that he departed without obtaining any further kindness. But he was no sooner out of the door; but that I looked to the door kindly, and truly the fear of him ever since hath put me into such perplexity, as now you found me.” “Ah my Pamela,” said Philoclea, “leave sorrow. The river of your tears will soon lose his fountain; it is in your hand as well to stitch up his life again, as it was before to rent it.” And so, though with self-grieved mind, she comforted her sister, till sleep came to bathe himself in Pamela’s fair weeping eyes.

Which when Philoclea found, wringing her hands, “O me,” said she, “indeed the only subject of the destinies’ displeasure, whose greatest fortunateness is more unfortunate than my sister’s greatest unfortunateness. Alas! she weeps because she would be no sooner happy; I weep, because I can never be happy; her tears flow from pity, mine from being too far lower than the reach of pity: Yet do I not envy thee, dear Pamela, I do not envy thee, only I could wish that being thy sister in nature I were not so far off akin in fortune.”

But the darkness of sorrow overshadowing her mind, as the night did her eyes, they were both content to hide themselves under the wings of sleep, till the next morning had almost lost his name, before the two sweet sleeping sisters awaked from dreams, which flattered them with more comfort than their waking could, or would consent unto. For then they were called up by Miso, who, having been with Gynecia, had received commandment to be continually with her daughters, and particularly not to let Zelmane and Philoclea have any private conference but that she should be present to hear what passed: Miso having now her authority increased, but came with scowling eyes to deliver a slavering good morrow to the two ladies, telling them it was a shame for them to mar their complexions, yea and conditions too, with long lying abed; and that when she was of their age, she trowed, she would have made a handkerchief by that time a-day. The two sweet princesses with a smiling silence answered her entertainment, and, obeying her direction, covered their dainty beauties with the glad {152} clothes. But as soon as Pamela was ready, and sooner she was than her sister, of the agony of Dorus’s giving a fit to herself, which the words of his letter, lively imprinted in her mind, still remembered her of, she called to Mopsa, and willed her to fetch Dorus to speak with her; because, she said, she would take further judgment of him before she would move Dametas to grant her in marriage unto him: Mopsa, as glad as of sweetmeat to go of such an errand, quickly returned with Dorus to Pamela, who intended both by speaking with him to give some comfort to his passionate heart, and withal to hear some part of his life past, which although fame had already delivered unto her, yet she desired in more particular certainties to have it from so beloved an historian. Yet the sweetness of virtue’s disposition, jealous, even over itself, suffered her not to enter abruptly into questions of Musidorus, whom she was half ashamed she did love so well, and more than half sorry she could love no better, but thought best first to make her talk arise of Pyrocles, and his virtuous father: which thus she did.

“Dorus,” said she, “you told me the last day that Plangus was deceived in that he affirmed the prince Musidorus was drowned, but, withal, you confessed his cousin Pyrocles perished, of whom certainly in that age there was a great loss, since, as I have heard, he was a young prince, of whom all men expected as much as man’s power could bring forth, and yet virtue promised for him their expectation should not be deceived.” “Most excellent lady,” said Dorus, “no expectation in others, nor hope in himself could aspire to a higher mark than to be thought worthy to be praised by your judgment, and made worthy to be praised by your mouth. But most sure it is, that as his fame could by no means get so sweet and noble an air to fly in, as in your breath, so could not you, leaving yourself aside, find in the world a fitter subject of commendation; as noble as a long succession of royal ancestors, famous and famous for victories, could make him; of shape most lovely, and yet of mind more lovely, valiant, courteous, wise, what should I say more? sweet Pyrocles, excellent Pyrocles, what can my words but wrong thy perfections, which I would to God in some small measure thou had’st bequeathed to him that ever must have thy virtues in admiration, that, masked at least in them, I might have found some more gracious acceptation?” With that he imprisoned his look for a while upon Mopsa, who thereupon fell into a very wide smiling. “Truly,” said Pamela, “Dorus I like well your mind that can raise itself out of so base a fortune as yours is, to think of the imitating so excellent a prince as Pyrocles was. Who shoots at the mid-day sun, though he be sure he shall never hit the mark, yet as sure he is, he shall shoot higher {153} than who aims but at a bush. But I pray you, Dorus,” said she, “tell me, since I perceive you are well acquainted with that story, what prince was that Euarchus father to Pyrocles, of whom so much fame goes, for his rightly royal virtues, or by what ways he got that opinion. And then so descend to the causes of his sending first away from him, and then to him for that excellent son of his, with the discourse of his life and loss: and therein you may, if you list, say something of that same Musidorus his cousin, because they going together, the story of Pyrocles, which I only desire, may be the better understood.”

“Incomparable lady,” said he, “your commandment doth not only give me the will, but the power to obey you; such influence hath your excellency. And first, for that famous king Euarchus, he was, at this time you speak of, king of Macedon, a kingdom, which in older time had such a sovereignty over all the provinces of Greece that even the particular kings therein did acknowledge, with more or less degrees of homage, some kind of fealty thereunto: as among the rest, even this now most noble, and by you ennobled, kingdom of Arcadia. But he, when he came to his crown finding by his latter ancestors either negligence, or misfortune that in some ages many of those duties had been intermitted would never stir up old titles, how apparent soever, whereby the public peace, with the loss of many not guilty souls, should be broken; but contenting himself to guide that ship, wherein the heavens had placed him, showed no less magnanimity in dangerless despising than others in dangerous affecting the multiplying of kingdoms: for the earth hath since borne enough bleeding witnesses that it was no want of true courage. Who as he was most wise to see what was best, and most just in the performing what he saw, and temperate in abstaining from anything anyway contrary, so think I, no thought can imagine a greater heart to see and contemn danger, where danger would offer to make any wrongful threatening upon him. A prince, that indeed especially measured his greatness by his goodness: and if for anything he loved greatness it was because therein he might exercise his goodness. A prince of a goodly aspect, and the more goodly by a grave majesty, wherewith his mind did deck his outward graces; strong of body, and so much the stronger, that he by a well-disciplined exercise taught it both to do, and suffer. Of age so as he was above fifty years, when his nephew Musidorus took on such shepherdish apparel for the love of the world’s paragon, as I now wear.

“This king left orphan both of father and mother, whose father and grandfather likewise had died young, he found his estate, when he came to the age which allowed his authority, so disjointed even in the noblest and strongest limbs of government that the {154} name of a king was grown even odious to the people, his authority having been abused by those great lords and little kings, who in those between-times of reigning, by unjust favouring those that were partially theirs, and oppressing them that would defend their liberty against them, had brought in, by a more felt than seen manner of proceeding, the worst kind of Oligarchy; that is, when men are governed indeed by a few, and yet are not taught to know what those few be to whom they should obey.

“For they having the power of kings, but not the nature of kings, used the authority as men do their farms, of which they see within a year they shall go out; making the king’s sword strike whom they hated, the king’s purse reward whom they loved; and, which is worst of all, making the royal countenance serve to undermine the royal sovereignty. For the subjects could taste no sweeter fruits of having a king than grievous taxation to serve vain purposes; laws made rather to find faults than to prevent faults: the court of a prince rather deemed as a privileged place of the unbridled licentiousness than as the abiding of him, who as a father should give a fatherly example unto his people. Hence grew a very dissolution of all estates, while the great men, by the nature of ambition never satisfied, grew factious among themselves: and the underlings glad indeed to be underlings to them they hated least, to preserve them from such they hated most. Men of virtue suppressed, lest the shining should discover the others’ filthiness; and at length virtue itself almost forgotten, when it had no hopeful end whereunto to be directed; old men long nusled in corruption, scorning them that would seek reformation, young men were fault-finding, but very faulty, and so given to new-fangleness both of manners, apparel, and each thing else, by the custom of self-guilty evil, glad to change, though oft for worse; merchandise abused, and so towns decayed for want of just and natural liberty; offices even of judging souls, sold; public defences neglected; and in sum, left too long I trouble you, all awry, and, which wried it to the most wry course of all, wit abused, rather to feign reason why it should be amiss, than how it should be amended.

“In this, and a much worse plight than it is fit to trouble your excellent ears withal, did the king Euarchus find his estate when he took upon him the regiment, which, by reason of the long stream of abuse, he was forced to establish by some even extreme severity, not so much for the very faults themselves, which he rather sought to prevent than to punish, as for the faulty ones, who, strong even in their faults, scorned his youth, and could not learn to digest that the man which they so long had used to mask their own appetites, should now be the reducer of them into order. But so soon as some few, but indeed notable examples, had thundered a duty into {155} the subjects’ hearts, he soon showed, no baseness of suspicion, nor the basest baseness of envy, could any whit rule such a ruler. But then shined forth indeed all love among them, when an awful fear engendered by justice, did make that love most lovely: his first and principal care being to appear unto his people such as he would have them be, and to be such as he appeared; making his life the example of his laws, and his laws as it were his axioms arising out of his deeds. So that within small time he won a singular love in his people, and ingraffed singular confidence. For how could they choose but love him, whom they found so truly to love them? he even in reason disdaining, that they that have charge of beasts, should love their charge and care for them; and that he that was to govern the most excellent creature, should not love so noble a charge. And, therefore, where most princes, seduced by flattery to build upon false grounds of government, make themselves, as it were, another thing from the people, and so count it gain what they get from them and, as it were two counter-balances, that their estate goes highest when the people goes lowest, by a fallacy of argument thinking themselves most kings when the subject is most basely subjected, he contrariwise, virtuously and wisely acknowledging that he with his people made all but one politic body, whereof himself was the head, even so cared for them as he would for his own limbs, never restraining their liberty, without it stretched to licentiousness, nor pulling from them their goods, which they found were not employed to the purchase of a greater good; but in all his actions showing a delight in their welfare, brought that to pass, that, while by force he took nothing, by their love he had all. In sum, peerless princess, I might as easily set down the whole art of government as to lay before your eyes the picture of his proceedings. But in such sort he flourished in the sweet comfort of doing much good, when, by an occasion of leaving his country, he was forced to bring forth his virtue of magnanimity, as before he had done of justice.

“He had only one sister, a lady, least I should too easily all to partial praises of her, of whom it may be justly said, that she was no unfit branch to the noble stock whereof she was come. Her he had given in marriage to Dorilaus prince of Thessalia, not so much to make a friendship, as to confirm the friendship between their posterity, which between them, by the likeness of virtue, had been long before made: for certainly, Dorilaus could need no amplifier’s mouth for the highest point of praise.” “Who hath not heard,” said Pamela, “of the valiant, wise, and just Dorilaus, whose unripe death doth yet, so many years since, draw tears from virtuous eyes; and indeed, my father is wont to speak of nothing with greater admiration, than of the notable friendship, a rare thing {156} in princes, more rare between princes, that so holily was observed to the last of those two excellent men. But,” said she, “go on I pray you.”

“Dorilaus,” said he, “having married his sister, had his marriage in short time blest, for so are folk wont to say, how unhappy soever the children after grow, with a son, whom they named Musidorus, of whom I must needs first speak before I come to Pyrocles, because as he was born first, so upon his occasion grew, as I may say accidentally, the other’s birth. For scarcely was Musidorus made partaker of this oft-blinding light, when there were found numbers of soothsayers who affirmed strange and incredible things should be performed by that child; whether the heavens at that time listed to play with ignorant mankind, or that flattery be so presumptuous as even at times to borrow the face of divinity. But certainly, so did the boldness of their affirmation accompany the greatness of what they did affirm, even descending to particularities, what kingdoms he should overcome, that the king of Phrygia, who over-superstitiously thought himself touched in the matter, sought by force to destroy the infant, to prevent his after expectations: because a skilful man, having compared his nativity with the child, so told him. Foolish man, either vainly fearing what was not to be feared, or not considering that if it were a work of the superior powers, the heavens at length are never children. But so he did, and by the aid of the kings of Lydia and Crete, joining together their armies, invaded Thessalia, and brought Dorilaus to some behind-hand of fortune, when his faithful friend and brother Euarchus came so mightily to his succour, that with some interchanging changes of fortune, they begat of a just war, the best child, Peace. In which time Euarchus made a cross marriage also with Dorilaus’s sister, and shortly left her with child of the famous Pyrocles, driven to return to the defence of his own country, which in his absence, helped with some of the ill-contented nobility, the mighty king of Thrace, and his brother king of Pannonia, had invaded. The success of those wars was too notable to be unknown to your ears, to which it seems all worthy fame hath glory to come unto. But there was Dorilaus, valiantly requiring his friend’s help, in a great battle deprived of life, his obsequies being no more solemnized by the tears of his partakers than the blood of his enemies; with so piercing a sorrow to the constant heart of Euarchus that the news of his son’s birth could lighten his countenance with no show of comfort, although all the comfort that might be in a child, truth itself in him forthwith delivered. For what fortune only soothsayers foretold of Musidorus, that all men might see prognosticated in Pyrocles, both heavens and earth giving tokens of the coming forth of an heroical virtue. The {157} senate house of the planets was at no time so set for the decreeing of perfection in a man, as at that time all folks skilful therein did acknowledge: only love was threatened, and promised to him, and so to his cousin, as both the tempest and haven of his best years. But as death may have prevented Pyrocles, so unworthiness must be the death of Musidorus.

“But the mother of Pyrocles, shortly after her childbirth dying, was cause that Euarchus recommended the care of his only son to his sister, doing it the rather because the war continued in cruel heat, betwixt him and those ill neighbours of his. In which meantime those young princes, the only comforters of that virtuous widow, grew on so that Pyrocles taught admiration to the hardest conceits: Musidorus, perchance because among his subjects, exceedingly beloved; and by the good order of Euarchus, well performed by his sister, they were so brought up that all the sparks of virtue which nature had kindled in them were so blown to give forth their uttermost heat, that, justly it may be affirmed, they inflamed the affections of all that knew them. For almost before they could perfectly speak, they began to receive conceits not unworthy of the best speakers; excellent devices being used, to make even their sports profitable; images of battles and fortifications being then delivered to their memory, which after, their stronger judgments might dispense, the delight of tales being converted to the knowledge of all the stories of worthy princes, both to move them to do nobly, and teach them how to do nobly; the beauty of virtue still being set before their eyes, and that taught them with far more diligent care than grammatical rules, their bodies exercised in all abilities, both of doing and suffering, and their minds acquainted by degrees with dangers; and in sum, all bent to the making up of princely minds: no servile fear used towards them, nor any other violent restraint, but still as to princes: so that a habit of commanding was naturalized in them, and therefore the further from tyranny: nature having done so much for them in nothing, as that it made them lords of truth, whereon all the other goods were builded.

“Among which nothing I so much delight to recount, as the memorable friendship that grew betwixt the two princes, such as made them more like than the likeness of all other virtues, and made them more near one to the other than the nearness of their blood could aspire unto; which I think grew the faster, and the faster was tied between them by reason that Musidorus being older by three or four years, it was neither so great a difference in age as did take away the delight in society, and yet by the difference there was taken away the occasion of childish contentions, till they had both passed over the humour of such contentions. For {158} Pyrocles bare reverence full of love to Musidorus, and Musidorus had a delight full of love in Pyrocles. Musidorus, what he had learned either for body or mind, would teach it to Pyrocles; and Pyrocles was so glad to learn of none as of Musidorus: till Pyrocles, being come to sixteen years of age, he seemed so to over-run his age in growth, strength, and all things following it, that not Musidorus, no nor any man living, I think, could perform any action, either on horse, or foot, more strongly, or deliver that strength more nimbly, or become the delivery more gracefully, or employ all more virtuously. Which may well seem wonderful: but wonders are no wonders in a wonderful subject.

“At which time, understanding that the king Euarchus, after so many years of war, and the conquest of all Pannonia, and almost Thrace, had now brought the conclusion of all to the siege of Byzantium, to the raising of which siege, great forces were made, they would needs fall to the practice of those virtues which they before learned. And therefore the mother of Musidorus nobly yielding over her own affects to her children’s good, for a mother she was in affect to them both, the rather that they might help her beloved brother, they break off all delays, which Musidorus for his part thought already had devoured too much of his good time, but that he had once granted a boon, before he knew what it was, to his dear friend Pyrocles, that he would never seek the adventures of arms until he might go with him, which having fast bound his heart, a true slave to faith, he had bid a tedious delay of following his own humour for his friend’s sake, till now being both sent for by Euarchus, and finding Pyrocles able every way to go through with that kind of life, he was as desirous for his sake as for his own, to enter into it. So therefore preparing a navy, that they might go like themselves, and not only bring the comfort of their presence, but of their power, to their dear parent Euarchus, they recommended themselves to the sea, leaving the shore of Thessalia full of tears and vows, and were received thereon with so smooth and smiling a face, as if Neptune had as then learned falsely to fawn on princes. The wind was like a servant, waiting behind them so just, that they might fill the sails as they listed; and the best sailors showing themselves less covetous of his liberality, so tempered it that they all kept together like a beautiful flock, which so well could obey their master’s pipe: without sometimes, to delight the princes’ eyes, some two or three of them would strive, who could, either by the cunning of well spending the wind’s breath, or by the advantageous building of their moving houses, leave their fellows behind them in the honour of speed: while the two princes had leisure to see the practice of that, which before they had learned by books: to consider the art of catching the {159} wind prisoner, to no other end, but to run away with it; to see how beauty and use can so well agree together, that of all the trinkets, wherewith they are attired, there is not one but serves to some necessary purpose. And, O lord! to see the admirable power and noble effects of love, whereby the seeming insensible loadstone, with a secret beauty, holding the spirit of iron in it, can draw that hard-hearted thing unto it, and like a virtuous mistress, not only make it bow itself, but with it make it aspire to so high a love as of the heavenly poles, and thereby to bring forth the noblest deeds that the children of the earth can boast of. And so the princes delighting their conceits with confirming their knowledge, seeing wherein the sea-discipline differed from land-service, they had for a day, and almost a whole night, as pleasing entertainment as the falsest heart could give to him he means worst to.

“But by that the next morning began a little to make a gilded show of a good meaning, there arose even with the sun, a veil of dark clouds before his face, which, shortly, like ink poured into water, had blacked over all the face of heaven, preparing as it were a mournful stage for a tragedy to be played on. For forthwith the winds began to speak louder, and, as in a tumultuous kingdom, to think themselves fittest instruments of commandment; and blowing whole storms of hail and rain upon them, they were sooner in danger, than they could almost bethink themselves of change. For then the traitorous sea began to swell in pride against the afflicted navy, under which, while the heaven favoured them, it had lain so calmly, making mountains of itself, over which the tossed and tottering ship should climb, to be straight carried down again to a pit of hellish darkness; with such cruel blows against the sides of the ship that, which way soever it went, was still in his malice, that there was left neither power to stay nor way to escape. And shortly had it so dissevered the loving company, which the day before had tarried together, that most of them never met again, but were swallowed up in his never satisfied mouth. Some indeed, as since was known, after long wandering, returned into Thessalia, others recovered Byzantium, and served Euarchus in his war. But in the ship wherein the princes were, now left as much alone as proud lords be when fortune fails them, though they employed all industry to save themselves, yet what they did was rather for duty to nature than hope to escape so ugly a darkness as if it would prevent the night’s coming, usurped the day’s right: which accompanied sometimes with thunders, always with horrible noises of the chafing winds, made the masters and pilots so astonished that they knew not how to direct, and if they knew, they could scarcely, when they directed, hear their own whistle. For the sea strove with the winds which should be louder, {160} and the shrouds of the ship, with a ghastful noise to them that were in it, witnessed that their ruin was the wager of the others’ contention, and the heaven roaring out thunders the more amazed them, as having those powers for enemies. Certainly there is no danger carries with it more horror than that which grows in those floating kingdoms. For that dwelling place is unnatural to mankind, and then the terribleness of the continual motion, the desolation of the far-being from comfort, the eye and the ear having ugly images ever before it, doth still vex the mind, even when it is best armed against it. But thus the day passed, if that might be called day, while the cunningest mariners were so conquered by the storm that they thought it best with stricken sails to yield to be governed by it: the valiantest feeling inward dismayedness, and yet the fearfullest ashamed fully to show it, seeing that the princes, who were to part from the greatest fortunes, did in their countenances accuse no point of fear, but encouraging them to do what might be done, putting their hands to every most painful office, taught them at one instant to promise themselves the best, and yet to despise the worst. But so were they carried by the tyranny of the wind, and the treason of the sea all that night, which the older it was, the more wayward it showed itself towards them: till the next morning, known to be a morning better by the hour-glass than by the day’s clearness, having run fortune so blindly, as itself ever was painted, lest the conclusion should not answer to the rest of the play, they were driven upon a rock, which, hidden with those outrageous waves, did, as it were, closely dissemble his cruel mind, till with an unbelieved violence, but to them that have tried it, the ship ran upon it, and seeming willinger to perish than to have her course stayed, redoubled her blows, till she had broken herself in pieces, and as it were, tearing out her own bowels to feed the sea’s greediness, lest nothing within it but despair of safety and expectation of a loathsome end. There was to be seen the divers manner of minds in distress: some sat upon the top of the poop weeping and wailing, till the sea swallowed them; some one more able to abide death than fear of death, cut his own throat to prevent drowning; some prayed: and there wanted not of them which cursed, as if the heavens could not be more angry than they were. But a monstrous cry begotten of many roaring voices, was able to infect with fear a mind that had not prevented it with the power of reason.

“But the princes, using the passions of fearing evil, and desiring to escape only to serve the rule of virtue, not to abandon one’s self, leaped to a rib of the ship, which broken from his fellows, floated with more likelihood to do service than any other limb of that ruinous body; upon which they had gotten already two brethren {161} well known servants of theirs; and straight they four were carried out of sight, in that huge rising of the sea, from the rest of the ship. But the piece they were on sinking by little and little under them, not able to support the weight of so many, the brethren, the elder whereof was Leucippus, the younger Nelsus, showed themselves right faithful and grateful servants unto them: grateful, I say, for this cause: those two gentlemen had been taken prisoners in the great war the king of Phrygia made upon Thessalia, in the time of Musidorus’s infancy, and having been sold into another country, though peace fell after between those realms, could not be delivered because of their valour known, but for a far greater sum than either all their friends were able, or the dowager willing to make, in respect of the great expenses herself and people had been put to in those wars, and so had they remained in prison about thirteen years, when the two young princes, hearing speeches of their good deserts, found means both by selling all the jewels they had of a great price, and by giving under their hands great estates when they should come to be kings, which promises their virtue promised for them should be kept, to get so much treasure as redeemed them from captivity. This remembered, and kindly remembered by those two brothers, perchance helped by a natural duty to their princes’ blood, they willingly left hold of the board, committing themselves to the sea’s rage, and even when they meant to die, themselves praying for the princes’ lives. It is true, that neither the pain nor danger, so moved the princes’ hearts as the tenderness of that loving part, far from glory, having so few lookers on; far from hope of reward, since themselves were sure to perish.

“But now of all the royal navy they lately had, they had left but one little piece of one ship, whereon they kept themselves, in all truth having interchanged their cares, while either cared for other, each comforting and counselling how to labour for the better, and to abide the worse. But so fell it out, that as they were carried by the tide which there, seconded by the storm, ran exceeding swiftly, Musidorus seeing, as he thought, Pyrocles not well upon the board, as he would with his right hand have helped him on better, he had no sooner unfastened his hold but that a wave forcibly spoiled his weaker hand of hold, and so for a time parted those friends, each crying to the other; but the noise of the sea drowned their farewell. But Pyrocles, then careless of death, if it had come by any means but his own, was shortly brought out of the sea’s fury to the land’s comfort, when in my conscience I know that comfort was but bitter unto him: and bitter indeed it fell out even in itself to be unto him.

“For being cast on land much bruised and beaten both with the {162} sea’s hard farewell, and the shore’s rude welcome; and even almost deadly tired with the length of his uncomfortable labour, as he was walking up to discover somebody, to whom he might go for relief, there came straight running unto him certain, who, as it was after known, by appointment watched, with many others, in divers places along the coast, who laid hands on him, and without either questioning with him, or showing will to hear him, like men fearful to appear curious, or which was worse, having no regard to the hard plight he was in, being so wet and weak, they carried him some miles thence to a house of a principal officer of that country. Who with no more civility (though with much more business than those under fellows had showed) began in captious manner to put interrogatories unto him. To which, he unused to such entertainment, did shortly and plainly answer, what he was and how he came thither. But that no sooner known, with numbers of armed men to guard him (for mischief, not from mischief) he was sent to the king’s court, which as then was not above a day’s journey off, with letters from that officer, containing his own serviceable diligence in discovering so great a personage, adding withal more than was true of his conjectures, because he would endear his own service.

“This country whereon he fell was Phrygia, and it was to the king thereof to whom he was sent, a prince of a melancholy constitution both of body and mind; wickedly sad, ever musing of horrible matters, suspecting, or rather condemning all men of evil, because his mind had no eye to spy goodness: and therefore accusing Sycophants, of all men, did best sort to his nature; but therefore not seeming Sycophants, because of no evil they said, they could bring any new or doubtful thing unto him, but such as already he had been apt to determine, so as they came but as proofs of his wisdom: fearful, and never secure, while the fear he had figured in his own mind had any possibility of event. A toad-like retiredness, and closeness of mind; nature teaching the odiousness of poison, and the danger of odiousness. Yet while youth lasted in him, the exercises of that age, and his humour, not yet fully discovered, made him something the more frequentable, and less dangerous. But after that years began to come on with some, though more seldom, shows of a bloody nature, and that the prophecy of Musidorus’s destiny came to his ears (delivered unto him, and received of him with the hardest interpretation, as though his subjects did delight in the hearing thereof). Then gave he himself indeed to the full current of his disposition, especially after the war of Thessalia, wherein, though in truth wrongly, he deemed his unsuccess proceeded of their unwillingness to have him prosper: and then thinking himself contemned {163} (knowing no countermine against contempt, but terror) began to let nothing pass which might bear the colour of a fault without sharp punishment: and when he wanted faults, excellency grew a fault! and it was sufficient to make one guilty, that he had power to be guilty. And as there is no humour, to which impudent poverty cannot make itself serviceable, so were there enough of those of desperate ambition, who would build their houses upon others’ ruins, which after should fall by like practices. So as a servitude came mainly upon that poor people, whose deeds were not only punished, but words corrected, and even thoughts by some mean or other pulled out of them; while suspicion bred the mind of cruelty, and the effects of cruelty stirred up a new cause of suspicion. And in this plight, full of watchful fearfulness, did the storm deliver sweet Pyrocles to the stormy mind of that tyrant; all men that did such wrong to so rare a stranger, whose countenance deserved both pity and admiration, condemning themselves as much in their hearts, as they did brag in their faces.

“But when this bloody king knew what he was, and in what order he and his cousin Musidorus (so much of him feared) were come out of Thessalia, assuredly thinking, because ever thinking the worst, that those forces were provided against him; glad of the perishing, as he thought, of Musidorus, determined in public sort to put Pyrocles to death. For having quite lost the way of nobleness, he strove to climb to the height of terribleness; and thinking to make all men adread, to make such one an enemy who would not spare, not fear to kill so great a prince; and lastly, having nothing in him why to make him his friend, he thought he would take him away from being his enemy. The day was appointed, and all things prepared for that cruel blow, in so solemn an order, as if they would set forth tyranny in most gorgeous decking. The princely youth, of invincible valour, yet so unjustly subjected to such outrageous wrong, carrying himself in all his demeanour, so constantly abiding extremity, that one might see it was the cutting away of the greatest hope of the world, and destroying virtue in his sweetest growth.

“But so it fell out, that his death was prevented by a rare example of friendship in Musidorus, who, being almost drowned, had been taken up by a fisherman belonging to the kingdom of Bithynia: and being there, and understanding the full discourse (as fame was very prodigal of so notable an accident) in what case Pyrocles was: learning withal that his hate was far more to him than to Pyrocles, he found means to acquaint himself with a nobleman of that country, to whom largely discovering what he was, he found him a most fit instrument to effectuate his desire. For this nobleman had been one, who in many wars had served Euarchus, {164} and had been so mind-stricken by the beauty of virtue in that noble king that, though not born his subject, he ever professed himself his servant. His desire therefore to him was to keep Musidorus in a strong castle of his, and then to make the king of Phrygia understand, that if he would deliver Pyrocles, Musidorus would willingly put himself into his hands, knowing well, that how thirsty soever he was of Pyrocles’s blood, he would rather drink that of Musidorus.

“The nobleman was loth to preserve one by the loss of another, but time urging resolution, the importunity of Musidorus, which showed a mind not to over-live Pyrocles, with the affection he bare to Euarchus, so prevailed, that he carried this strange offer of Musidorus, which by the tyrant was greedily accepted.

“And so upon security of both sides, they were interchanged: where I may not omit the work of friendship in Pyrocles, who both in speech and countenance to Musidorus, well showed that he thought himself injured and not relieved by him; asking him what he had ever seen in him, why he could not bear the extremities of mortal accidents as well as any man? and why he should envy him the glory of suffering death for his friend’s cause, and, as it were, rob him of his own possession? but in that notable contention (where the conquest must be the conqueror’s destruction, and safety the punishment of the conquered) Musidorus prevailed because he was a more welcome prey to the unjust king; and a cheerfully going towards, as Pyrocles went frowardly fromward his death, he was delivered to the king, who could not be enough sure of him, without he fed his own eyes upon one whom he had begun to fear, as soon as the other began to be.

“Yet because he would in one act both make ostentation of his own felicity, into whose hands his most feared enemy was fallen, and withal cut off such hopes from his suspected subjects, when they should know certainly he was dead, with much more skilful cruelty, and horrible solemnity he caused each thing to be prepared for his triumph of tyranny. And so the day being come, he was led forth by many armed men who often had been the fortifiers of wickedness, to the place of execution, where coming with a mind comforted in that he had done such service to Pyrocles, this strange encounter he had.

“The excelling Pyrocles was no sooner delivered by the king’s servants to a place of liberty than he bent his wit and courage, and what would they not bring to pass? how either to deliver Musidorus, or to perish with him. And finding he could get in that country no forces sufficient by force to rescue him to bring himself to die with him, little hoping of better event, he put himself in poor raiment, and by the help of some few crowns he took of {165} that nobleman, who full of sorrow, though not knowing the secret of his intent, suffered him to go in such order from him, he, even he, born to the greatest expectation, and of the greatest blood that any prince might be, submitted himself to be servant to the executioner that should put to death Musidorus: a far notabler proof of his friendship, considering the height of his mind, than any death could be. That bad officer not suspecting him, being arrayed fit for such an estate, and having his beauty hidden by many foul spots he artificially put upon his face, gave him leave not only to wear a sword himself, but to bear his sword prepared for the justified murder. And so Pyrocles taking his time, when Musidorus was upon the scaffold, separated somewhat from the rest, as allowed to say something, he stepped unto him, and putting the sword into his hand, not bound, a point of civility the officers used towards him because they doubted no such enterprise, ‘Musidorus,’ said he, ‘die nobly.’ In truth never man between joy before knowledge what to be glad of, and fear after considering his case, had such a confusion of thoughts, as I had, when I saw Pyrocles so near me.” But with that Dorus blushed, and Pamela smiled, and Dorus the more blushed at her smiling, and she the more smiled at his blushing, because he had, with the remembrance of that plight he was in, forgotten in speaking of himself to use the third person.

But Musidorus turned again her thoughts from his cheeks to his tongue in this sort: “But,” said he, “when they were with swords in hands, not turning backs one to the other, for there they knew was no place of defence, but making it a preservation in not hoping to be preserved, and now acknowledging themselves subject to death, meaning only to do honour to their princely birth, they flew amongst them all, for all were enemies, and had quickly either with flight or death, left none upon the scaffold to annoy them, wherein Pyrocles, the excellent Pyrocles, did such wonders beyond belief, as was able to lead Musidorus to courage, though he had been born a coward. But indeed just rage and desperate virtue did such effects, that the popular sort of the beholders began to be almost superstitiously amazed, as at effects beyond mortal power. But the king with angry threatenings from out a window, where he was not ashamed the world should behold him a beholder, commanded his guard and the rest of his soldiers to hasten their death. But many of them lost their bodies to lose their souls, when the princes grew almost so weary, as they were ready to be conquered with conquering.

“But as they were still fighting with weak arms and strong hearts, it happened that one of the soldiers, commanded to go up after his fellows against the princes, having received a light hurt, {166} more wounded in his heart, went back with as much diligence as he came up with modesty: which another of his fellows seeing, to pick a thank of the king, struck him upon the face, reviling him that so accompanied, he would run away from so few. But he, as many times it falls out, only valiant, when he was angry, in revenge thrust him through: which with his death was straight revenged by a brother of his, and that again requited by a fellow of the others. There began to be a great tumult amongst the soldiers: which seen, and not understood by the people, used to fears, but not used to be bold in them, some began to cry treason; and that voice straight multiplying itself, the king, O the cowardice of a guilty conscience, before any man set upon him, fled away. Where with a bruit, either by art or some well-meaning men, or by some chance, as such things often fall out by, ran from one to the other that the king was slain: wherewith certain young men of the bravest minds, cried with a loud voice, ‘Liberty,’ and encouraging the other citizens to follow them, set upon the guard and soldiers as chief instruments of tyranny: and quickly aided by the princes, they had left none of them alive, nor any other in the city, who they thought had in any sort set his hand to the work of their servitude, and, god knows, by the blindness of rage, killing many guiltless persons, either for affinity to the tyrant, or enmity to the tyrant-killers. But some of the wiser, seeing that a popular license is indeed the many-headed tyranny, prevailed with the rest to make Musidorus their chief: choosing one of them, because princes, to defend them; and him, because elder and most hated of the tyrant, and by him to be ruled: whom forthwith they lifted up, Fortune, I think smiling at her work therein, that a scaffold of execution should grow to a scaffold of coronation.

“But by and by there came news of more certain truth, that the king was not dead, but fled to a strong castle of his near hand, where he was gathering forces in all speed possible to suppress this mutiny. But now they had run themselves too far out of breath, to go back again to the same career; and too well they knew the sharpness of his memory to forget such an injury; therefore learning virtue of necessity, they continued resolute to obey Musidorus, who seeing what forces were in the city, with them issued against the tyrant, while they were in this heat, before practices might be used to deliver them, and with them met the king, who likewise hoping little to prevail by time, knowing and finding his people’s hate, met him with little delay in the field where himself was slain by Musidorus, after he had seen his only son, a prince of great courage and beauty, but fostered up in blood by his naughty father, slain by the hand of Pyrocles. This victory obtained with great and truly not undeserved honour to the two {167} princes, the whole estates of the country with one consent, gave the crown and all other marks of sovereignty to Musidorus, desiring nothing more than to live under such a government as they promised themselves of him.

“But he, thinking it a greater greatness to give a kingdom, than get a kingdom, understanding that there was left of the blood royal, and next to the succession, an aged gentleman of approved goodness, who had gotten nothing by his cousin’s power but danger from him, and odiousness for him, having passed his time in modest secrecy, and as much from intermeddling in matters of government, as the greatness of his blood would suffer him, did, after having received the full power to his own hand, resign all to the nobleman; but with such conditions, and cautions of the conditions, as might assure the people, with as much assurance as worldly matters bear, that not only that governor, of whom indeed they looked for of good, but the nature of the government, should be no way apt to decline to tyranny.

“This doing set forth no less the magnificence than the other act did his magnanimity; so that greatly praised of all, and justly beloved of the new king, who in all both words and behaviour protested himself their tenant and liegeman, they were drawn thence to revenge those two servants of theirs, of whose memorable faith, I told you, most excellent princess, in willingly giving themselves to be drowned for their sakes: but drowned indeed they were not, but got with painful swimming upon a rock, from whence, after being come as near famishing as before drowning, the weather breaking up, they were brought to the mainland of Bithynia, the same country upon which Musidorus also was fallen, but not in so lucky a place.

“For they were brought to the king of the country, a tyrant also not through suspicion, greediness or revengefulness, as he of Phrygia, but, as I may term it, of a wanton cruelty: inconstant in his choice of friends, or rather never having a friend but a play-fellow; of whom when he was weary, he could not otherwise rid himself than by killing them; giving sometimes prodigally, not because he loved them to whom he gave, but because he lusted to give; punishing, not so much for hate or anger, as because he felt not the smart of punishment; delighted to be flattered, at first for those virtues which were not in him, at length making his vices virtues worthy the flattering; with like judgment glorying, when he had happened to do a thing well, as when he had performed some notable mischief.

“He chanced at that time, for indeed long time none lasted with him, to have next in use about him a man of the most envious disposition that, I think, ever infected the air with his breath; {168} whose eyes could not look right upon any happy man, nor ears bear the burden of anybody’s praise; contrary to the natures of all other plagues, plagued with others’ well being; making happiness the ground of his unhappiness, and good news the argument of his sorrow: in sum, a man whose favour no man could win, but by being miserable. And so because those two faithful servants of theirs came in miserable sort to that court, he was apt enough at first to favour them; and the king understanding of their adventure, wherein they had showed so constant a faith unto their lords, suddenly falls to take a pride in making much of them, extolling them with infinite praises, and praising himself in his heart, in that he praised them. And by and by where they made great courtiers, and in the way of minions, when advancement, the most mortal offence to envy, stirred up their former friend to overthrow his own work in them; taking occasion upon the knowledge, newly come to the court, of the late death of the king of Phrygia destroyed by their two lords, who having been a near kinsman to this prince of Pontus, by this envious counsellor, partly with suspicion of practice, partly with glory of, in part, revenging his cousin’s death, the king was suddenly turned, and every turn with him was a down-fall, to lock them up in prison, as servants to his enemies, whom before he had never known, nor, till that time one of his own subjects had entertained and dealt for them, did ever take heed of. But now earnest in every present humour, and making himself brave in his liking, he was content to give them just cause of offence, when they had power to make just revenge. Yet did the princes send unto him before they entered into war, desiring their servants’ liberty. But he, swelling in their humbleness like a bubble blown up with a small breath broken with a great, forgetting, or never knowing humanity, caused their heads to be stricken off, by the advice of his envious counsellor, who now hated them so much the more, as he foresaw their happiness in having such, and so fortunate masters, and sent them with unroyal reproaches to Musidorus and Pyrocles, as if they had done traitorously, and not heroically in killing his tyrannical cousin.

“But that injury went beyond all degree of reconcilement, so that they making forces in Phrygia, a kingdom wholly at their commandment, by the love of the people, and gratefulness of the king, they entered his country; and wholly conquering it, with such deeds as at least fame said were excellent, took the king, and by Musidorus’s commandment, Pyrocles’s heart more inclining to pity, he was slain upon the tomb of their two true servants; which they caused to be made for them with royal expenses, and notable workmanship to preserve their dead lives. For his wicked servant he should have felt the like, or worse, but that his heart broke {169} even to death with the beholding the honour done to their dead carcasses. There might Pyrocles quietly have enjoyed that crown, by all the desire of that people, most of whom had revolted unto him, but he finding a sister of the late king’s, a fair and well esteemed lady, looking for nothing more, than to be oppressed with her brother’s ruins, gave her in marriage to the nobleman his father’s old friend, and endowed with them the crown of that kingdom. And not content with those public actions of princely, and as it were, governing virtue, they did, in that kingdom and some other near about, divers acts of particular trials, more famous because more perilous. For in that time those regions were full both of cruel monsters, and monstrous men, all which in short time by private combats they delivered the countries of.

“Among the rest, two brothers of huge both greatness and force, therefore commonly called giants, who kept themselves in a castle seated upon the top of a rock, impregnable, because there was no coming unto it but by one narrow path where one man’s force was able to keep down an army. Those brothers had a while served the king of Pontus, and in all his affairs, especially of war, whereunto they were only apt, they had showed, as unconquered courage, so a rude faithfulness: being men indeed by nature apter to the faults of rage than of deceit; not greatly ambitious, more than to be well and uprightly dealt with; rather impatient of injury, than delighted with more than ordinary courtesies; and in injuries more sensible of smart or loss than of reproach or disgrace. Those men being of this nature, and certainly jewels to a wise man, considering what indeed wonders they were able to perform, yet were discarded by that worthy prince, after many notable deserts, as not worthy the holding, which was the more evident to them because it suddenly fell from an excess of favour, which, many examples having taught them, never stopped his race till it came to an headlong overthrow: they full of rage, retired themselves unto this castle: where thinking nothing juster than revenge, nor more notable than the effects of anger, that, according to the nature, full of inward bravery and fierceness, scarcely in the glass of reason, thinking itself fair but when it is terrible, they immediately gave themselves to make all the country about them subject to that king, to smart for their lord’s folly, not caring how innocent they were, but rather thinking the more innocent they were, the more it testified their spite, which they desired to manifest. And with use of evil, growing more and more evil, they took delight in slaughter, and pleased themselves in making others’ wrack the effect of their power: so that where in the time that they obeyed a master, their anger was a serviceable power of the mind to do public good, so now unbridled, and blind judge of itself, it made wickedness {170} violent, and praised itself in excellency of mischief, almost to the ruin of the country, not greatly regarded by their careless and loveless king. Till now those princes finding them so fleshed in cruelty as not to be reclaimed, secretly undertook the matter alone: for accompanied they would not have suffered them to have mounted; and so those great fellows scornfully receiving them, as foolish birds fallen into their net, it pleased the eternal justice to make them suffer death by their hands: and so they were manifoldly acknowledged the savers of that country.

“It were the part of a very idle orator to set forth the numbers of well-devised honours done unto them, but as high honour is not only gotten and born by pain and danger, but must be nursed by the like, or else vanisheth as soon as it appears to the world, so the natural hunger thereof, which was in Pyrocles suffered him not to account a resting seat of that, which either riseth or falleth, but still to make one occasion beget another, whereby his doings might send his praise to others’ mouths to rebound again true contentment to his spirit. And therefore having well established those kingdoms under good governors, and rid them by their valour of such giants and monsters, as before-time armies were not able to subdue, they determined in unknown order to see more of the world, and to employ those gifts, esteemed rare in them, to the good of mankind; and therefore would themselves, understanding that the king Euarchus was passed all the cumber of his war, go privately to seek exercises of their virtue, thinking it not so worthy to be brought to heroical effects by fortune or necessity, like Ulysses and Aeneas, as by one’s own choice and working. And so went they away from very unwilling people to leave them, making time haste itself to be a circumstance of their honour, and one place witness to another of the truth of their doings. For scarcely were they out of the confines of Pontus, but that as they rode alone armed, for alone they went, one serving the other, they met an adventure, which though not so notable for any great effect they performed, yet worthy to be remembered for the unused examples therein, as well of true natural goodness as of wretched ungratefulness.

“It was in the kingdom of Galatia, the season being, as in the depth of winter, very cold and as then suddenly grown to so extreme and foul a storm, that never any winter, I think, brought forth a fouler child: so that the princes were even compelled by the hail, that the pride of the wind blew into their faces, to seek some shrouding place, which a certain hollow rock offering unto them, they made it their shield against the tempest’s fury. And so staying there, till the violence thereof was passed, they heard the speech of a couple, who not perceiving them, being hid within {171} that rude canopy, held a strange and pitiful disputation, which made them step out, yet in such sort as they might see unseen. There they perceived an aged man, and a young, scarcely come to the age of a man, both poorly arrayed, extremely weather-beaten; the old man blind, and the young man leading him; and yet through all those miseries, in both there seemed to appear a kind of nobleness, not suitable to that affliction. But the first words they heard, were those of the old man. ‘Well Leonatus,’ said he, ‘since I cannot persuade thee to lead me to that which should end my grief and my trouble, let me now entreat thee to leave me: fear not, my misery cannot be greater than it is, and nothing doth become me but misery: fear not the danger of my blind steps, I cannot fall worse than I am: and do not I pray thee, do not obstinately continue to infect thee with my wretchedness: but fly, fly from this region only worthy of me.’ ‘Dear father,’ answered he, ‘do not take away from me the only remnant of my happiness: while I have power to do you service, I am not wholly miserable.’ ‘Ah my son,’ said he, and with that he groaned, as if sorrow strove to break his heart, ‘how evil fits it me to have such a son? and how much doth thy kindness upbraid my wickedness?’ Those doleful speeches, and some others to like purpose, well showing they had not been born to the fortune they were in, moved the princes to go out unto them, and ask the younger what they were? ‘Sirs,’ answered he with a good grace, and made the more agreeable by a certain noble kind of piteousness, ‘I see well you are strangers that know not our misery, so well here known that no man dare know but that we must be miserable. Indeed our state is such, as though nothing is so needful unto us as pity, yet nothing is more dangerous unto us than to make ourselves so known as may stir pity: but your presence promiseth that cruelly shall not over-run hate, and if it did, in truth our state is sunk below the degree of fear.

“‘This old man, whom I lead, was lately rightful prince of this country of Paphlagonia, by the hard-hearted ungratefulness of a son of his, deprived not only of his kingdom, whereof no foreign forces were ever able to spoil him, but of his sight, the riches which nature grants to the poorest creatures: whereby and by other his unnatural dealings, he hath been driven to such griefs, as even now he would have had me to have led him to the top of this rock, thence to cast himself headlong to death, and so would have had me, who received my life of him, to be the worker of his destruction. But noble gentlemen,’ said he, ‘if either of you have a father, and feel what dutiful affection is ingrafted in a son’s heart, let me entreat you to convey this afflicted prince to some place of rest and security: amongst your worthy acts it shall be {172} none of the least, that a king of such might and fame, and so unjustly oppressed, is in any sort by you relieved.’

“But before they could make him answer, his father began to speak. ‘Ah my son,’ said he, ‘how evil an historian are you that leave out the chief knot of all the discourse? my wickedness, my wickedness! and if thou dost it to spare my ears, the only sense now left me proper for knowledge, assure thyself thou dost mistake me: and I take witness of that sun which you see,’ with that he cast up his blind eyes as if he would hunt for light, ‘and wish myself in worse case than I do wish myself, which is as evil as may be, if I speak untruly, that nothing is so welcome to my thoughts as the publishing of my shame. Therefore know, you gentlemen (to whom from my heart I wish that it may not prove some ominous foretoken of misfortune to have met with such a miser as I am) that whatsoever my son, O God, that truth binds me to reproach him with the name of my son, hath said is true. But besides those truths, this also is true, that having had, in lawful marriage, of a mother fit to bear royal children, this son, such a one as partly you see, and better shall know by my short declaration, and so enjoyed the expectations in the world of him, till he was grown to justify their expectations, so as I needed envy no father for the chief comfort of mortality, to leave another one’s-self after me, I was carried by a bastard son of mine, if at least I be bound to believe the words of that base woman my concubine, his mother, first to mislike, then to hate, lastly to destroy, or to do my best to destroy this son, I think you think, undeserving destruction. What ways she used to bring me to it, if I should tell you, I should tediously trouble you with as much poisonous hypocrisy, desperate fraud, smooth malice, hidden ambition, and smiling envy, as in any living person could be harboured: but I list it not; no remembrance of naughtiness delights me but mine own; and methinks, the accusing his traps might in some manner excuse my fault, which certainly I loath to do. But the conclusion is, that I gave order to some servants of mine, whom I thought as apt for such charities as myself, to lead him out into a forest, and there to kill him.

“‘But those thieves, better natured to my son than myself, spared his life, letting him go to learn to live poorly which he did, giving himself to be a private soldier in a country hereby: but as he was ready to be greatly advanced for some noble pieces of service which he did, he heard news of me, who drunk in my affection to that unlawful and unnatural son of mine, suffered myself to be governed by him, that all favours and punishments passed by him, all offices and places of importance distributed to his favourites; so that, ere I was aware, I had left myself nothing but the name {173} of a king, which he shortly weary of too, with many indignities if anything may be called an indignity which was laid upon me, threw me out of my seat, and put out my eyes, and then, proud in his tyranny, let me go, neither imprisoning, nor killing me, but rather delighting to make me feel my misery; misery indeed, if ever there were any; full of wretchedness, fuller of disgrace, and fullest of guiltiness. And as he came to the crown by so unjust means, as unjustly he kept it, by force of stronger soldiers in citadels, the nests of tyranny and murderers of liberty; disarming all his own countrymen, that no man durst show himself a well-willer of mine: to say the truth, I think, few of them being so, considering my cruel folly to my good son, and foolish kindness to my unkind bastard: but if there were any who felt a pity of so great a fall, and had yet any sparks of unslain duty left in them towards me, yet durst they not show it, scarcely with giving me alms at their doors, which yet was the only sustenance of my distressed life, nobody daring to show so much charity as to lend me a hand to guide my dark steps, till this son of mine, God knows, worthy of a more virtuous, and more fortunate father, forgetting my abominable wrongs, not reckoning danger, and neglecting the present good way he was in of doing himself good, came hither to do this kind office you see him perform towards me, to my unspeakable grief; not only because his kindness is a glass even to my blind eyes of my naughtiness, but that above all griefs, it grieves me he should desperately adventure the loss of his well-deserving life for mine that yet owe more to fortune for my deserts, as if he would carry mud in a chest of crystal. For well I know, he that now reigneth, how much soever, and with good reason, he despiseth me, of all men despised; yet he will not let slip any advantage to make away with him, whose just title, ennobled by courage and goodness, may one day shake the seat of a never secure tyranny. And for this cause I craved of him to lead me to the top of this rock, indeed I must confess, with meaning to free him from so serpentine a companion, as I am. But he finding what I purposed, only therein since he was born, showed himself disobedient unto me. And now gentlemen, you have the true story, which I pray you publish to the world, that my mischievous proceedings may be the glory of his filial piety, the only reward now left for so great a merit. And if it may be, let me obtain that of you, which my son denies me: for never was there more pity in saving any than in ending me, both because therein my agony shall end, and so you shall perceive this excellent young man, who else wilfully follows his own ruin.’

“The matter in itself lamentable, lamentably expressed by the old prince, which needed not take to himself the gestures of pity, {174} since his face could not put off the marks thereof, greatly moved the two princes to compassion, which could not stay in such hearts as theirs without seeking remedy. But by and by the occasion was presented: for Plexirtus, so was the bastard called, came thither with forty horse, only of purpose to murder his brother, of whose coming he had soon advertisement, and thought no eyes of sufficient credit in such a matter but his own, and therefore came himself to be actor and spectator. And as soon as he came, not regarding the weak, as he thought, guard but of two men, commanded some of his followers to set their hands to his, in the killing of Leonatus. But the young prince, though not otherwise armed but with a sword, how falsely soever he was dealt with by others, would not betray himself, but bravely drawing it out, made the death of the first that assailed him, warn his fellows to come more warily after him. But then Pyrocles and Musidorus were quickly become parties (so just a defence deserving as much as old friendship) and so did behave them among that company, more injurious than valiant, that many of them lost their lives for their wicked master.

“Yet perhaps had the number of them at last prevailed, if the king of Pontus, lately by them made so, had not come unlooked for to their succour. Who (having had a dream which had fixed his imagination vehemently upon some great danger, presently to follow those two princes, whom he most dearly loved) was come in all haste, following as well as he could their track, with a hundred horses in that country, which he thought, considering who then reigned, a fit place enough to make the stage of any tragedy.

“But then the match had been so ill made for Plexirtus that his ill-led life and worse-gotten honour should have tumbled together to destruction had there not come in Tydeus and Telenor, with forty or fifty in their suite, to the defence of Plexirtus. These two were brothers, of the noblest house of that country, brought up from their infancy with Plexirtus, men of such prowess as not to know fear in themselves, and yet to teach it in others that should deal with them, for they had often made their lives triumph over most terrible dangers, never dismayed, and ever fortunate; and truly no more settled in valour, than disposed to goodness and justice, if either they had lighted on a better friend, or could have learned to make friendship a child, and not the father of virtue. But bringing up, rather than choice, having first knit their minds unto him (indeed crafty enough, either to hide his faults, or never to show them, but when they might pay home) they willingly held out the course, rather to satisfy him than all the world; and rather to be good friends, than good men: so as though they did not like the evil he did, yet they liked him that did the evil: and though {175} not counsellors of the offence, yet protectors of the offender. Now they having heard of this sudden going out with so small a company, in a country full of evil-wishing minds towards him, though they knew not the cause, followed him; till they found him in such case that they were to venture their lives, or else he to lose his, which they did with such force of mind and body, that truly I may justly say, Pyrocles and Musidorus had never till then found any that could make them so well repeat their hardest lesson in the feats of arms. And briefly so they did; that if they overcame not, yet were they not overcome, but carried away that ungrateful master of theirs to a place of security, howsoever the princes laboured to the contrary. But this matter being thus far begun, it became not the constancy of the princes so to leave it; but in all haste making forces both in Pontus, and Phrygia, they had in few days left him but only that one strong place where he was. For, fear having been the only knot that had fastened his people unto him, that once united by a greater force, they all scattered from him, like so many birds whose cage had been broken.

“In which season the blind king, having in the chief city of his realm set the crown upon his son Leonatus’s head, with many tears both of joy and sorrow, setting forth to the whole people his own faults, and his son’s virtue; after he had kissed him, and forced his son to accept honour of him, as of his new-become subject, even in a moment died, as it should seem, his heart broken with unkindness and affliction, stretched so far beyond his limits with this access of comfort that it was able no longer to keep safe his vital spirits. But the new king, having no less lovingly performed all duties to him dead, than alive, pursued on the siege of his unnatural brother, as much for the revenge of his father as the establishing of his own quiet. In which siege truly I cannot but acknowledge the prowess of those two brothers, than whom the princes never found in all their travel, two of greater ability to perform, nor of abler skill for conduct.

“But Plexirtus finding that if nothing else, famine would at last bring him to destruction, thought better by humbleness to creep, where by pride he could not march. For certainly so had Nature formed him, and the exercise of craft conformed him to all turningness of flights, that, though no man had less goodness in his soul than he, no man could better find the places whence arguments might grow of goodness to another; though no man felt less pity, no man could tell better how to stir pity; no man more impudent to deny, where proofs were not manifest; no man more ready to confess with a repenting manner of aggravating his own evil, where denial would but make the fault fouler. Now he took this way, that having gotten a passport for one, that pretended he {176} would put Plexirtus alive into his hands, to speak with the king his brother, he himself (though much against the minds of the valiant brothers, who rather wished to die in brave defence) with a rope about his neck, bare-footed, came to offer himself to the discretion of Leonatus. Where what submission he used, how cunningly in making greater the fault, he made the faultiness the less, how artificially he could set out the torments of his own conscience, with the burdensome cumber he had found of his ambitious desires, how finely seeming to desire nothing but death, as ashamed to live, he begged life in the refusing it, I am not cunning enough to be able to express; but so fell out of it, that though at first sight Leonatus saw him with no other eye than as the murderer of his father, and anger already began to paint revenge in many colours, ere long he had not only gotten pity but pardon; and if not an excuse of the fault past, yet an opinion of a future amendment: while the poor villains (chief ministers of his wickedness, now betrayed by the author thereof) were delivered to many cruel sorts of death; he so handling it, that it rather seemed he had more come into the defence of an unremediable mischief already committed than that they had done it at first by his consent.

“In such sort the princes left these reconciled brothers (Plexirtus in all his behaviour carrying him in far lower degree of service than the ever-noble nature of Leonatus would suffer him) and taking likewise their leaves of their good friend the king of Pontus, who returned to enjoy some benefit, both of his wife and kingdom, they privately went thence, having only with them the two valiant brothers, who would needs accompany them through divers places, they four doing acts more dangerous, though less famous, because they were but private chivalries; till hearing of the fair and virtuous queen Erona of Lycia, besieged by the puissant king of Armenia, they bent themselves to her succour, both because the weaker, and weaker as being a lady, and partly because they heard the king of Armenia had in his company three of the most famous men living, for matters of arms, that were known to be in the world. Whereof one was the prince Plangus whose name was sweetened by your breath, peerless lady, when the last day it pleased you to mention him unto me, the other two were two great princes, though holding of him, Barzanes and Euardes, men of giant-like both hugeness and force; in which two especially, the trust the king had of victory was reposed. And of them, those brothers Tydeus and Telenor, sufficient judges in warlike matters, spoke so high commendations, that the two princes had even a youthful longing to have some trial of their virtue. And therefore as soon as they were entered into Lycia, they joined themselves with them that faithfully served the poor queen, at that time besieged; and ere {177} long animated in such sort their almost overthrown hearts, that they went by force to relieve the town, though they were deprived of a great part of their strength by the parting of the two brothers, who were sent for in all haste to return to their old friend and master Plexirtus, who, willingly hoodwinking themselves from seeing his faults, and binding themselves to believe what he said, often abused the virtue of courage to defend his foul vice of injustice. But now they were sent for to advance a conquest he was about; while Pyrocles and Musidorus pursued the delivery of the queen Erona.”

“I have heard,” said Pamela, “that part of the story of Plangus, when he passed through this country, therefore you may, if you list, pass over that war of Erona’s quarrel, lest if you speak too much of war matters, you should wake Mopsa, which might happily breed a great broil.” He looked, and saw that Mopsa indeed sat swallowing the sleep with open mouth, making such a noise withal, as nobody could lay the stealing of a nap to her charge. Whereupon, willing to use that occasion, he kneeled down, and with humble heartedness, and hearty earnestness printed in his graces; “Alas!” said he, “divine lady, who have wrought such miracles in me, as to make a prince, none of the basest, to think all principalities base in respect of the sheephook which may hold him up in your sight; vouchsafe now at last to hear in direct words my humble suit, while this dragon sleeps that keeps the golden fruit. If in my desire I wish, or in my hopes aspire, or in my imagination fain to myself anything which may be the least spot to that heavenly virtue which shines in all your doings, I pray the eternal powers, that the words I speak may be deadly poisons, while they are in my mouth, and that all my hopes, all my desires, all my imaginations may only work their own confusion. But if love, love of you, love of your virtues, seek only that favour of you, which becometh that gratefulness which cannot misbecome your excellency, O do not—” He would have said further, but Pamela calling aloud Mopsa, she suddenly started up, staggering, and rubbing her eyes, ran first out of the door, and then back to them, before she knew how she went out, or why she came in again: till at length, being fully come to her little self, she asked Pamela why she had called her. For nothing said Pamela, but that ye might hear some tales of your servant’s telling: “and therefore now,” said she, “Dorus go on.”

But as he, who found no so good sacrifice as obedience, was returning to the story of himself, Philoclea came in, and by and by after her, Miso, so as for that time they were fain to let Dorus depart. But Pamela delighted even to preserve in her memory the words of so well a beloved speaker, repeated the whole {178} substance to her sister, till their sober dinner being come and gone, to recreate themselves something, even tired with the noisomeness of Miso’s conversation, they determined to go, while the heat of the day lasted, to bathe themselves, such being the manner of the Arcadian nymphs often to do, in the river of Ladon, and take with them a lute, meaning to delight them under some shadow. But they could not stir, but that Miso, with her daughter Mopsa was after them: and as it lay in their way to pass by the other lodge, Zelmane out of her window espied them, and so stole down after them, which she might the better do, because that Gynecia was sick, and Basilius, that day being his birth-day, according to his manner, was busy about his devotions; and therefore she went after, hoping to find some time to speak with Philoclea: but not a word could she begin, but that Miso would be one of the audience, so that she was driven to recommend thinking, speaking, and all, to her eyes, who diligently performed her trust, till they came to the river’s side, which of all the rivers of Greece had the praise for excellent pureness and sweetness, insomuch as the very bathing in it was accounted exceeding healthful. It ran upon so fine and delicate a ground, as one could not easily judge whether the river did more wash the gravel, or the gravel did purify the river; the river not running forthright, but almost continually winding, as if the lower streams would return to their spring, or that the river had a delight to play with itself. The banks of either side seeming arms of the loving earth that fain would embrace it, and the river a wanton nymph which still would slip from it; either side of the bank being fringed with most beautiful trees, which resisted the sun’s darts from overmuch piercing the natural coldness of the river. There was among the rest a goodly cypress, who bowing her fair head over the water, it seemed she looked into it, and dressed her green locks by that running river.

There the princesses determining to bathe themselves, though it was so privileged a place, upon pain of death, as nobody durst presume to come hither; yet for the more surety, they looked round about, and could see nothing but a water-spaniel, who came down the river, showing that he hunted for a duck, and with a snuffling grace, disdaining that his smelling force could not as well prevail through the water as through the air; and therefore waiting with his eye to see whether he could espy the ducks getting up again, but then a little below them failing of his purpose, he got out of the river, and shaking off the water (as great men do their friends) now he had no further cause to use it, inweeded himself so that the ladies lost the further marking his sportfulness: and inviting Zelmane also to wash herself with them, and she excusing {179} herself with having taken a late cold, they began by piecemeal to take away the eclipsing of their apparel.

Zelmane would have put to her helping hand, but she was taken with such a quivering, that she thought it more wisdom to lean herself to a tree, and look on, while Miso and Mopsa, like a couple of foreswat melters, were getting the pure silver of their bodies out of the ure of their garments. But as the raiments went off to receive kisses of the ground, Zelmane envied the happiness of all, but of the smock was even jealous, and when that was taken away too, and that Philoclea remained, for her Zelmane only marked, like a diamond taken from out of the rock, or rather like the sun getting from under a cloud, and showing his naked beams to the full view, then was the beauty too much for a patient sight, the delight too strong for a stayed conceit, so that Zelmane could not choose but run, to touch, embrace and kiss her. But conscience made her come to herself, and leave Philoclea, who blushing, and withal smiling, making shamefacedness pleasant, and pleasure shamefaced, tenderly moved her feet, unwonted to feel the naked ground, till the touch of the cold water made a pretty kind of shrugging come over her body, like the twinkling of the fairest among the fixed stars. But the river itself gave way unto her, so that she was straight breast high, which was the deepest that thereabout she could be: and when cold Ladon had once fully embraced them, himself was no more so cold to those ladies, but as if his cold complexion had been heated with love, so seemed he to play about every part he could touch.

“Ah sweet, now sweetest Ladon,” said Zelmane, “why dost thou not stay thy course to have more full taste of thy happiness? but the reason is manifest, the upper streams make such haste to have their part of embracing, that the nether, though lothly, must needs give place unto them. O happy Ladon, within whom she is, upon whom her beauty falls, through whom her eye pierceth. O happy Ladon, which art now an unperfect mirror of all perfection, can’st thou ever forget the blessedness of this impression? if thou do, then let thy bed be turned from fine gravel to weeds and mud; if thou do, let some unjust niggards make wares to spoil thy beauty; if thou do, let some greater river fall into thee, to take away the name of Ladon, O! Ladon, happy Ladon, rather slide than run by her, lest thou should’st make her legs slip from her, and then, O happy Ladon, who would then call thee, but the most cursed Ladon?” But as the ladies played then in the water, sometimes striking it with their hands, the water, making lines in his face, seemed to smile at such beating, and with twenty bubbles not to be content to have the picture of their face in large {180} upon him, but he would in each of these bubbles set forth the miniature of them.

But Zelmane, whose sight was gain-said by nothing but the transparent veil of Ladon (like a chamber where a great fire is kept, though the fire be at one stay, yet with the continuance continually hath his heat increased) had the coals of her affection so kindled with wonder, and blown with delight, that now all her parts grudged, that her eyes should do more homage, than they, to the princes of them. Insomuch that taking up the lute, her wit began to be with a divine fury inspired; her voice would in so beloved an occasion second her wit; her hands accorded the lute’s music to the voice; her panting heart danced to the music; while I think her feet did beat the time; while her body was the room where it should be celebrated; her soul the queen which should be delighted. And so together went the utterance and invention, that one might judge, it was Philoclea’s beauty which did speedily write it in her eyes; or the sense thereof, which did word by word indite it in her mind, whereto she, but as an organ, did only lend utterance. The song was to this purpose:

But as Zelmane was coming to the latter end of her song, she might see the same water-spaniel which before had hunted, come and fetch away one of Philoclea’s gloves, whose fine proportion, showed well what a dainty guest was wont there to be lodged. It was a delight to Zelmane, to see that the dog was therewith delighted, and so let him go a little way withal, who quickly carried it out of sight among certain trees and bushes, which were very close together. But by and by he came again, and amongst the raiment. Miso and Mopsa being preparing sheets against their coming out, the dog lighted of a little book of four or five leaves of paper, and was bearing that away too. But when Zelmane, not knowing what importance it might be of, ran after the dog, who going straight to those bushes, she might see the dog deliver it to a gentleman, who secretly lay there. But she hastily coming in, the gentleman rose up, and with a courteous, though sad, countenance presented himself unto her. Zelmane’s eyes straight willed her mind to mark him, for she thought in herself, she had never seen a man of a more goodly presence, in whom strong making took not away delicacy, nor beauty fierceness: being indeed such a right man-like man, as nature often erring, yet shows she would fain make. But when she had a while, not without admiration, viewed him, she desired him to deliver back the glove and paper, {184} because they were the lady Philoclea’s, telling him withal, that she would not willingly let them know of his close lying in that prohibited place, while they were bathing themselves, because she knew they would be mortally offended withal. “Fair lady,” answered he, “the worst of the complaint is already passed, since I feel of my fault in myself the punishment. But for these things, I assure you, it was my dog’s wanton boldness, not my presumption. With that he gave her back the paper: but for the glove,” said he, “since it is my lady Philoclea’s, give me leave to keep it, since my heart cannot persuade itself to part from it. And I pray you tell the lady, lady indeed of all my desires, that owns it, that I will direct my life to honour this glove with serving her.” “O villain,” cried out Zelmane, maddened with finding an unlooked-for rival, and that he would make her a messenger, “dispatch,” said she, “and deliver it, or by the life of her that owns it, I will make thy soul, though too base a price, pay for it”: and with that drew out her sword, which, Amazon-like, she ever wore about her. The gentleman retired himself into an open place from among the bushes, and then drawing out his too, he offered to deliver it unto her, saying, withal, “God forbid I should use my sword against you, sith, if I be not deceived, you are the same famous Amazon, that both defended my lady’s just title of beauty against the valiant Phalantus, and saved her life in killing the lion, therefore I am rather to kiss your hands, with acknowledging myself bound to obey you.”

But this courtesy was worse than a bastinado to Zelmane: so that again with rageful eyes she bade him defend himself, for no less than his life should answer it. “A hard case,” said he, “to teach my sword that lesson, which hath ever used to turn itself to a shield in a lady’s presence.” But Zelmane hearkening to no more words, began with such witty fury to pursue him with blows and thrusts, that nature and virtue commanded the gentleman to look to his safety. Yet still courtesy, that seemed incorporate in his heart, would not be persuaded by danger to offer any offence, but only to stand upon the best defensive guard he could; sometimes going back, being content in that respect to take on the figure of cowardice; sometimes with strong and well-met wards, sometimes cunning avoidings of his body; and sometimes feigning some blows, which himself pull’d back before they needed to be withstood. And so with play did he a good while fight against the fight of Zelmane, who, more spited with that courtesy, that one that did nothing should be able to resist her, burned away with choler any motions which might grow out of her own sweet disposition, determined to kill him if he fought no better and so redoubling her blows, drove the stranger to no other shift than to {185} ward and go back; at that time seeming the image of innocency against violence. But at length he found, that both in public and private respects, who stands only upon defence, stands upon no defence: for Zelmane seeming to strike at his head, and he going toward it, withal stepped back as he was accustomed: she stopped her blow in the air, and suddenly turning the point, ran full at his breast, so as he was driven with the pommel of his sword, having no other weapon of defence, to beat it down: but the thrust was so strong that he could not so wholly beat it away, but that it met with his thigh, through which it ran. But Zelmane retiring her sword, and seeing his blood, victorious anger was conquered by the before conquering pity; and heartily sorry, and even ashamed with herself she was, considering how little he had done, who well she found could have done more. Insomuch that she said, “Truly I am sorry for your hurt, but yourself gave the cause, both in refusing to deliver the glove, and yet not fighting as I know you could have done. But,” said she, “because I perceive you disdain to fight with a woman, it may be before a year come about, you shall meet with a near kinsman of mine, Pyrocles prince of Macedon, and I give you my word, he for me shall maintain this quarrel against you.” “I would” answered Amphialus, “I had many more such hurts to meet and know that worthy prince, whose virtue I love and admire, though my good destiny hath not been to see his person.”

But as they were so speaking, the young ladies came, to whom, Mopsa, curious in anything but her own good behaviour, having followed and seen Zelmane fighting, had cried, what she had seen, while they were drying themselves: and the water, with some drops, seemed to weep, that it should pass from such bodies. But they careful of Zelmane, assuring themselves that any Arcadian would bear reverence to them, Pamela with a noble mind, and Philoclea with a loving, hastily, hiding the beauties, whereof nature was proud, and they ashamed, they made quick work to come to save Zelmane. But already they found them in talk, and Zelmane careful of his wound. But when they saw him, they knew it was their cousin-german, the famous Amphialus, whom yet with a sweet graced bitterness they blamed for breaking their father’s commandment, especially while themselves were in such sort retired. But he craved pardon, protesting unto them that he had only been to seek solitary places, by an extreme melancholy that had a good while possessed him, and guided to that place by his spaniel, where while the dog hunted in the river, he had withdrawn himself to pacify with sleep his over watched eyes, till a dream waked him, and made him see that whereof he had dreamed, and withal not obscurely signified, that he felt the smart of his {186} own doings. But Philoclea, that was even jealous of herself for Zelmane, would needs have her glove, and not without so mighty a lower as that face could yield. As for Zelmane when she knew it was Amphialus; “Lord Amphialus,” said she, “I have long desired to know you heretofore, I must confess, with more goodwill, but still with honouring your virtue, though I love not your person: and at this time I pray you let us take care of your wound, upon condition you shall hereafter promise that a more knightly combat shall be performed between us.” Amphialus answered in honourable sort, but with such excusing himself, that more and more accused his love to Philoclea, and provoked more hate in Zelmane. But Mopsa had already called certain shepherds not far off, who knew and well observed their limits, to come and help to carry away Amphialus, whose wound suffered him not without danger to strain it: and so he leaving himself with them, departed from them, faster bleeding in his heart than at his wound, which bound up by the sheets, wherewith Philoclea had been wrapped, made him thank the wound, and bless the sword for that favour.

He being gone, the ladies, with merry anger talking, in what naked simplicity their cousin had seen them, returned to the lodge-ward; yet thinking it too early, as long as they had any day, to break off so pleasing a company with going to perform a cumbersome obedience, Zelmane invited them to the little arbour, only reserved for her, which they willingly did: and there sitting, Pamela having a while made the lute in his language show how glad it was to be touched by her fingers, Zelmane delivered up the paper which Amphialus had at first yielded unto her, and seeing written upon the backside of it the complaint of Plangus, remembering what Dorus had told her, and desiring to know how much Philoclea knew of her estate, she took occasion in presenting of it, to ask whether it were any secret or no. “No truly,” answered Philoclea, “it is but even an exercise of my father’s writing, upon this occasion: he was one day, somewhile before your coming hither, walking abroad, having us two with him, almost a mile hence, and crossing a highway, which comes from the city of Megalopolis, he saw this gentleman, whose name is there written, one of the properest and best graced men that ever I saw, being of middle age and of a mean stature. He lay as then under a tree, while his servants were getting fresh post-horses for him. It might seem he was tired with the extreme travel he had taken, and yet not so tired that he forced to take any rest, so hasty he was upon his journey: and withal so sorrowful that the very face thereof was painted in his face, which with pitiful motions, even groans, tears, and passionate talking to himself, moved my {187} father to fall in talk with him, who at first not knowing him, answered him in such a desperate phrase of grief that my father afterward took a delight to set it down in such a form as you see: which if you read, what you doubt of, my sister and I are able to declare unto you, Zelmane willingly opened the leaves, and read it being written dialogue-wise in this manner.”

When Zelmane had read it over, marvelling very much of the speech of Erona’s death, and therefore desirous to know further of it, but more desirous to hear Philoclea speak, “Most excellent lady,” said she, “one may be little the wiser for reading this dialogue, since it neither sets forth what this Plangus is, nor what Erona is, nor what the cause should be which threatens her with death, and him with sorrow; therefore I would humbly crave to understand the particular discourse thereof, because, I must confess, something in my travel I have heard of this strange matter, which I would be glad to find by so sweet an authority confirmed.” “The truth is,” answered Philoclea, “that after he knew my father to be prince of this country, while he hoped to prevail something with him in a great request he made unto him, he was content to open fully the estate both of himself, and of that lady; which with my sister’s help,” said she, “who remembers it better than I, I will declare unto you. And first of Erona, being the chief subject of this discourse, this story, with more tears and exclamations than I list to spend about it, he recounted.”

“Of late there reigned a king in Lydia, who had, for the blessing of his marriage, this only daughter of his, Erona, a princess worthy for her beauty, as much praise, as beauty may be praise-worthy. This princess Erona, being nineteen years of age, seeing the country of Lydia so much devoted to Cupid, as that in every place his naked pictures and images were superstitiously adored (either moved thereunto by the esteeming that it could be no god-head, which could breed wickedness, or the shamefaced consideration of such nakedness) procured so much of her father, as utterly to pull down, and deface all those statutes and pictures: which how terribly he punished, for to that the Lydians impute it, quickly after appeared.

“For she had not lived a year longer, when she was stricken with most obstinate love to a young man but of mean parentage, in her father’s court, named Antiphilus: so mean, as that he was but the son of her nurse, and by that means, without other desert, became known of her. Now so evil could she conceal her fire, and so wilfully persevered she in it that her father offering her the marriage of the great Tiridates, king of Armenia, who desired her more than the joys of heaven, she for Antiphilus’s sake refused it. Many ways her father sought to withdraw her from it, sometimes by persuasions, sometimes by threatenings; once, hiding Antiphilus, and giving her to understand that he was fled the country, lastly, making a solemn execution to be done of another under the name of Antiphilus, whom he kept in prison. But neither she liked persuasions, nor feared threatenings, nor changed for absence: and when she thought him dead, she sought all means, as well by poison as knife, to send her soul, at least to be married in the eternal church with him. This so broke the tender father’s heart, that, leaving things as he found them, he shortly after died. Then forthwith Erona, being seized of the crown, and arming her will with authority, sought to advance her affection to the holy title of matrimony.

“But before she could accomplish all the solemnities, she was overtaken with a war the King Tiridates made upon her, only for her person, towards whom, for her ruin, love had kindled his cruel heart, indeed cruel and tyrannous; for being far too strong in the field, he spared no man, woman, nor child; but, as though there could be found no foil to set forth the extremity of his love, but extremity of hatred, wrote, as it were, the sonnets of his love in the blood, and turned them in the cries of her subjects; although his fair sister Artaxia, who would accompany him in the army, sought all means to appease his fury: till lastly, he besieged Erona in her best city, vowing to win her, or lose his life. And now had he brought her to the point either of a woeful consent, or a ruinous denial, when there came thither, following the course which virtue and fortune led them, two excellent young princes, Pyrocles and Musidorus, the one prince of Macedon, the other of Thessalia: two princes as Plangus said, and he witnessed his saying with sighs and tears, the most accomplished both in body and mind that the sun ever looked upon.” While Philoclea spoke those words; O sweet words, thought Zelmane to herself, which are not only a praise to me, but a praise to praise herself, which out of that mouth issueth.

“Those two princes,” said Philoclea, “as well to help the weaker, especially being a lady as to save a Greek people from being ruined by such whom we call and count barbarous, gathering {193} together such of the honestest Lycians as would venture their lives to succour their princess; giving order by a secret message, they sent into the city that they should issue with all force at an appointed time: they set upon Tiridates’s camp with so well guided a fierceness that being on both sides assaulted, he was like to be overthrown, but that this Plangus, being general of Tiridates’s horsemen, especially aided by the two mighty men Euardes and Barzanes, rescued the footmen, even almost defeated: but yet could not bar the princes, with their succours both of men and victual, to enter the city.

“Which when Tiridates found would make the war long, which length seemed to him worse than a languishing consumption, he made a challenge of three princes in his retinue, against those two princes and Antiphilus: and that thereupon the quarrel should be decided, with compact that neither side should help his fellow, but of whose side the more overcame, with him the victory should remain. Antiphilus (though Erona chose rather to bide the brunt of war, than venture him, yet) could not for shame refuse the offer, especially since the two strangers that had no interest in it, did willingly accept it: besides that, he saw it like enough, that the people, weary of the miseries of war, would rather give him up, if they saw him shrink, than for his sake venture their ruin, considering that the challengers were of far greater worthiness than himself. So it was agreed upon; and against Pyrocles was Euardes king of Bithynia; Barzanes of Hyrcania against Musidorus, two men, that thought the world scarce able to resist them; and against Antiphilus he placed this same Plangus, being his own cousin-german, and son to the king of Iberia. Now so it fell out, that Musidorus slew Barzanes, and Pyrocles Euardes, which victory those princes esteemed above all that ever they had: but of the other side Plangus took Antiphilus prisoner: under which colour, as if the matter had been equal, though indeed it was not, the greater part being overcome of his side, Tiridates continued his war: and to bring Erona to a compelled yielding, sent her word that he would the third morrow after, before the walls of the town, strike off Antiphilus’s head, without his suit in that space were granted, adding, withal, because he had heard of her desperate affection, that, if in the meantime she did herself any hurt, what tortures could be devised should be lain upon Antiphilus.

“Then lo, if Cupid be a god, or that the tyranny of our own thoughts seem as a god unto us: but whatsoever it was then it did set forth the miserableness of his effects; she being drawn to two contraries by one cause (for the love of him commanded her to yield to no other; the love of him commanded her to {194} preserve his life); which knot might well be cut, but untied it could not be. So that love in her passions, like a right make-bate, whispered to both sides arguments of quarrel. ‘What,’ said he, ‘of the one side, dost thou love Antiphilus, O Erona! and shall Tiridates enjoy thy body? With what eyes wilt thou look upon Antiphilus, when he shall know that another possesseth thee? but if thou wilt do it, canst thou do it? canst thou force thy heart? think with thyself, if this man have thee, thou shalt never have more part of Antiphilus than if he were dead. But thus much more, that the affectation shall be still gnawing, and the remorse still present. Death perhaps will cool the rage of thy affection: where thus, thou shalt ever love, and ever lack. Think this beside, if thou marry Tiridates, Antiphilus is so excellent a man that long he cannot be from being in some high place married; can’st thou suffer that too? if another kill him, he doth him the wrong; if thou abuse thy body, thou dost him the wrong. His death is a work of nature, and either now, or at another time he shall die. But it shall be thy work, thy shameful work, which is in thy power to shun, to make him live to see thy faith falsified, and his bed defiled.’ But when love had well kindled that party of her thoughts, then went he to the other side. ‘What,’ said he, ‘O Erona, and is thy love of Antiphilus come to that point, as thou dost now make it a question whether he shall die, or no? O excellent affection, which for too much love will see his head off. Mark well the reasons of the other side, and thou shalt see it is but love of thyself which so disputeth. Thou can’st not abide Tiridates: this is but love of thyself; thou shalt be ashamed to look upon him afterwards; this is but fear of shame, and love of thyself; thou shalt want him as much then; this is but love of thyself: he shall be married; if he be well, why should that grieve thee, but for love of thyself? no, no, pronounce these words if thou can’st, “let Antiphilus die.”’ Then the images of each side stood before her understanding; one time she thought she saw Antiphilus dying, another time she thought Antiphilus saw her by Tiridates enjoyed; twenty times calling for a servant to carry message of yielding, but before he came the mind was altered. She blushed when she considered the effect of granting; she was pale, when she remembered the fruits of denying. For weeping, sighing, wringing her hands, and tearing her hair, were indifferent of both sides. Easily she would have agreed to have broken all disputations with her own death, but that the fear of Antiphilus’s further torments, stayed her. At length, even the evening before the day appointed for his death, the determination of yielding prevailed, especially, growing upon a message of Antiphilus, who with all the conjuring terms he could devise, besought her to save {195} his life, upon any conditions. But she had no sooner sent her messenger to Tiridates, but her mind changed, and she went to the two young princes, Pyrocles and Musidorus, and falling down at their feet, desired them to try some way for her deliverance, showing herself resolved not to over-live Antiphilus, nor yet to yield to Tiridates.

“They that knew not what she had done in private, prepared that night accordingly: and as sometimes it falls out that what is inconstancy seems cunning, so did this change indeed stand in as good stead as a witty dissimulation. For it made the king as reckless as them diligent, so that in the dead time of the night, the princes issued out of the town; with whom she would needs go, either to die herself, or rescue Antiphilus, having no armour, or weapon, but affection. And I cannot tell you how, or by what device, though Plangus at large described it, the conclusion was, the wonderful valour of the two princes so prevailed, that Antiphilus was succoured, and the king slain. Plangus was then the chief man left in the camp; and therefore seeing no other remedy, conveyed in safety into her country Artaxia, now Queen of Armenia, who with true lamentations, made known to the world that her new greatness did no way comfort her in respect of her brother’s loss, whom she studied by all means possible to revenge upon every one of the occasioners, having, as she thought, overthrown her brother by a most abominable treason. Insomuch, that being at home she proclaimed great rewards to any private man, and herself in marriage to any prince that would destroy Pyrocles and Musidorus. But thus was Antiphilus redeemed, and, though against the consent of all her nobility, married to Erona; in which case the two Greek princes, being called away by another adventure, left them.

“But now methinks, as I have read some poets, who when they intend to tell some horrible matter, they bid men shun the hearing of it, so if I do not desire you to stop your ears from me, yet may I well desire a breathing time, before I am to tell the execrable treason of Antiphilus that brought her to this misery, and withal wish you all, that from all mankind indeed you stop your ears. O most happy were we, if we did set our loves one upon another.” And as she spake that word, her cheeks in red letters writ more than her tongue did speak. “And therefore since I have named Plangus, I pray you, sister,” said she, “help me with the rest, for I have held the stage long enough; and if it please you to make his fortune known, as I have done Erona’s, I will after take heart again to go on with his falsehood; and so between us both, my Lady Zelmane shall understand both the cause and parties of this lamentation.” “Nay, I beshrew me then,” said Miso, {196} “I will none of that, I promise you, as long as I have the government, I will first have my tale, and then my Lady Pamela, my Lady Zelmane, and my daughter Mopsa (for Mopsa was then returned from Amphialus) may draw cuts, and the shortest cut speak first. For I tell you, and this may be suffered, when you are married, you will have first and last word of your husbands.”

The ladies laughed to see with what an eager earnestness she looked, having threatened not only in her ferret eyes, but while she spoke her nose seeming to threaten her chin, and her shaking limbs one to threaten another. But there was no remedy, they must obey, and Miso, sitting on the ground with her knees up, and her hands upon her knees, tuning her voice with many a quavering cough, thus discoursed unto them. “I tell you true,” said she, “whatsoever you think of me, you will one day be as I am; and I, simple though I sit here, thought once my penny as good silver, as some of you do: and if my father had not played the hasty fool, it is no lie I tell you, I might have had another-gains husband than Dametas. But let that pass, God amend him; and yet I speak it not without good cause. You are full in your tittle-tattlings of Cupid, here is Cupid and there is Cupid. I will tell you now what a good old woman told me, what an old wise man told her, what a great learned clerk told him, and gave it him in writing: and here I have it in my prayer-book.” “I pray you,” said Philoclea, “let us see it and read it.” “No haste, but good,” said Miso, “you shall first know how I came by it. I was a young girl of seven and twenty years old, and I could not go through the street of our village, but I might hear the young men talk: O the pretty little eyes of Miso: O the fine thin lips of Miso: O the goodly fat hands of Miso: besides, how well a certain wrying in my neck became me. Then the one would wink with one eye, and the other cast daisies at me. I must confess, seeing so many amorous, it made me set up my peacock’s tail with the highest. Which when this good old woman perceived, O the good old woman, well may the bones rest of the good old woman, she called me to her into her house. I remember full well it stood in the lane as you go to the barber’s shop; all the town knew her, there was a great loss of her: she called me to her, and taking first a sop of wine to comfort her heart, it was of the same wine that comes out of Candia, which we pay so dear for now-a-days, and in that good world was very good cheap, she called me to her: ‘Minion,’ said she, indeed I was a pretty one in those days, though I say it, ‘I see a number of lads that love you, well,’ said she, ‘I say no more; do you know what love is?’ With that she brought me into a corner, where there was painted a foul fiend I trow, for he had a pair of horns like a bull, his feet cloven, as many {197} eyes upon his body as my grey mare hath dapples, and for all the world so placed. This monster sat like a hangman upon a pair of gallows; in his right hand he was painted holding a crown of laurel; in his left hand a purse of money; and out of his mouth hung a lace of two fair pictures of a man and a woman, and such a countenance he showed as if he would persuade folks by those allurements to come thither and be hanged. I, like a tender-hearted wench, shrieked out for fear of the devil: ‘Well,’ said she, ‘this same is even love; therefore do what thou list with all those fellows one after another, and it recks not much what they do to thee, so it be in secret; but upon my charge, never love none of them.’ ‘Why mother,’ said I, ‘could such a thing come from the belly of fair Venus? for a few days before, our priest, between him and me, had told me the whole story of Venus.’ ‘Tush,’ said she, ‘they are all deceived;’ and therewith gave me this book which she said a great maker of ballads had given to an old painter, who, for a little pleasure, had bestowed both book and picture of her. ‘Read there,’ said she, ‘and thou shalt see that his mother was a cow, and the false Argus his father.’ And so she gave me this book, and there now you may read it.” With that the remembrance of the good old woman, made her make such a face to weep, as if it were not sorrow, it was the carcass of sorrow that appeared there. But while her tears came out, like rain falling upon dirty furrows, the latter end of her prayer-book was read among these ladies, which contained this:

The ladies made sport at the description and story of Cupid. But Zelmane could scarce suffer those blasphemies, as she took them, to be read, but humbly besought Pamela she should perform her sister’s request of the other part of the story. “Noble lady,” answered she, beautifying her face with a sweet smiling, and the sweetness of her smiling with the beauty of her face, “since I am born a prince’s daughter, let me not give example of disobedience. My governess will have us draw cuts, and therefore I pray you let us do so: and so perhaps it will light upon you to entertain this company with some story of your own; and it is reason our ears should be willinger to hear, as your tongue is abler to deliver.” “I will think,” answered Zelmane, “excellent princess, my tongue of some value if it can procure your tongue thus much to favour me.” But Pamela pleasantly persisting to have fortune their judge, they set hands, and Mopsa (though at the first for squeamishness going up and down with her head like a boat in a storm,) put to her golden gols[1] among them, and blind fortune, that saw not the colour of them, gave her the pre-eminence: and so being her time {199} to speak, wiping her mouth, as there was good cause, she thus tumbled into her matter.

“In time past,” said she, “there was a king, the mightiest man in all his country, that had by his wife the fairest daughter that ever ate pap. Now this king did keep a great house, that everybody might come and take their meat freely. So one day as his daughter was sitting in her window, playing upon a harp as sweet as any rose, and combing her head with a comb all of precious stones, there came in a knight into the court, upon a goodly horse, one hair of gold, and the other of silver; and so the knight casting up his eyes to the window, did fall into such love with her, that he grew not worth the bread he ate; till many a sorry day going over his head, with daily diligence and griefly groans, he won her affection, so that they agreed to run away together. And so in May, when all true hearts rejoice, they stole out of the castle without staying so much as for their breakfast. Now forsooth, as they went together, often fall to kissing one another, the knight told her, he was brought up among the water-nymphs, who had so bewitched him that if he were ever ask’d his name, he must presently vanish away, and therefore charged her upon his blessing, never to ask him what he was, not whether he would. And so a great while she kept his commandment; till once, passing through a cruel wilderness, as dark as pitch, her mouth so watered, that she could not choose but ask him the question. And then, he making the grievousest complaints that would have melted a tree to have heard them, vanish’d quite away: and she lay down, casting forth as pitiful cries as any shriek-owl. But having lain so, wet by the rain, and burnt by the sun, five days and five nights, she got up and went over many a high hill, and many a deep river, till she came to an aunt’s house of hers, and came and cried to her for help: and she for pity gave her a nut, and bid her never open her nut till she was come to the extremest misery that ever tongue could speak of; and so she went, and she went, and never rested the evening, where she went in the morning, till she came to a second aunt, and she gave her another nut.”

“Now good Mopsa,” said the sweet Philoclea, “I pray thee at my request keep this tale till my marriage-day, and I promise thee that the best gown I wear that day shall be thine.” Mopsa was very glad of that bargain, especially that it should grow a festival tale: so that Zelmane, who desired to find the uttermost what these ladies understood touching herself, and having understood the danger of Erona, of which before she had never heard, purposing with herself, as soon as this pursuit she now was in was brought to any effect, to succour her, entreated again, that she might know as well the story of Plangus, as of Erona. Philoclea referred it to {200} her sister’s perfecter remembrance, who with so sweet a voice, and so winning a grace, as in themselves were of most forcible eloquence to procure attention, in this manner to their earnest request soon condescended.

“The father of this prince Plangus as yet lives, and is king of Iberia: a man, if the judgment of Plangus may be accepted, of no wicked nature, nor willingly doing evil, without himself mistake the evil, seeing it disguised under some form of goodness. This prince being married at the first to a princess, who both from her ancestors, and in herself was worthy of him, by her had this son Plangus. Not long after whose birth, the queen, as though she had performed the message for which she was sent into the world, returned again unto her maker. The king, sealing up all thoughts of love under the image of her memory, remained a widower many years after; recompensing the grief of that disjoining from her, in conjoining in himself both a fatherly and motherly care toward her only child Plangus, who being grown to man’s age, as our own eyes may judge, could not but fertilely requite his father’s fatherly education.

“This prince, while yet the errors in his nature were excused by the greenness of his youth which took all the fault upon itself, loved a private man’s wife of the principal city of that kingdom, if that may be called love, which he rather did take into himself willingly than by which he was taken forcibly. It sufficeth that the young man persuaded himself he loved her: she being a woman beautiful enough, if it be possible, that the only outside can justly entitle a beauty. But finding such a chase as only fled to be caught, the young prince brought his affection with her to that point, which ought to engrave remorse in her heart, and to paint shame upon her face. And so possessed he his desire without any interruption; he constantly favouring her, and she thinking that the enamelling of a prince’s name, might hide the spots of a broken wedlock. But as I have seen one that was sick of a sleeping disease could not be made wake, but with pinching of him, so out of his sinful sleep his mind, unworthy so to be lost, was not to be called to itself, but by a sharp accident. It fell out, that his many times leaving of the court, in undue times, began to be noted; and, as prince’s ears be manifold, from one to another came unto the king, who, careful of his only son, sought and found by his spies, the necessary evil servants to a king, what it was, whereby he was from his better delights so diverted. Whereupon, the king, to give his fault the greater blow, used such means by disguising himself, that he found them, her husband being absent, in her house together, which he did to make them the more feelingly ashamed of it. And that way he took, laying threatenings upon her, and upon him {201} reproaches. But the poor young prince, deceived with that young opinion, that if it be ever lawful to lie, it is for one’s lover, employed all his wit to bring his father into a better opinion. And because he might bend him from that, as he counted it, crooked conceit of her, he wrested him, as much as he could possibly, to the other side, not sticking with prodigal protestations to set forth her chastity; not denying his own attempt, but thereby the more extolling her virtue. His sophistry prevailed, his father believed, and so believed, that ere long, though he were already stepped into the winter of his age, he found himself warm in those desires which were in his son far more excusable. To be short, he gave himself over unto it, and, because he would avoid the odious comparison of a young rival, sent away his son with an army, to the subduing of a province lately rebelled against him, which he knew could not be less work than of three or four years. Wherein he behaved himself so worthily, as even to this country the fame thereof came, long before his own coming: while yet his father had a speedier success, but in a far more unnobler conquest. For while Plangus was away, the old man, growing only in age and affection, followed his suit with all means of unhonest servants, large promises, and each thing else that might help to countervail his own unloveliness.

“And she, whose husband about that time died, forgetting the absent Plangus, or at least not hoping of him to obtain so aspiring a purpose, left no art unused, which might keep the line from breaking, whereat the fish was already taken, not drawing him violently, but letting him play himself upon the hook which he had so greedily swallowed. For, accompanying her mourning garments with a doleful countenance, yet neither forgetting handsomeness in her mourning garments, nor sweetness in her doleful countenance, her words were ever seasoned with sighs, and any favour she showed, bathed in tears, that affection might see cause of pity, and pity might persuade cause of affection. And being grown skilful in his humours, she was no less skilful in applying his humours; never suffering his fear to fall to despair, nor his hope to hasten to an assurance: she was content he should think that she loved him; and a certain stolen look should sometimes, as though it were against her will, betray it: but if thereupon he grew bold, he straight was encountered with a mask of virtue. And that which seemeth most impossible unto me, for as near as I can repeat it, as Plangus told it, she could not only sigh when she would, as all can do, and weep when she would, as, they say, some can do; but, being most impudent in her heart, she could when she would, teach her cheeks blushing, and make shamefacedness the cloak of shamelessness. In sum, to leave out many particularities, which he recited, she did not only use so the spur {202} that his desire ran on, but so the bit, that it ran on even in such a career as she would have it; that within a while the king, seeing with no other eyes but such as she gave him, and thinking on no other thoughts but such as she taught him; having at first liberal measures of favours, then shortened of them, when most his desire was inflamed, he saw no other way but marriage to satisfy his longing, and her mind, as he thought, loving, but chastely loving: so that by the time Plangus returned from being notably victorious over the rebels, he found his father not only married, but already a father of a son and a daughter by this woman. Which though Plangus, as he had every way just cause, was grieved at; yet did his grief never bring forth either contemning of her or repining at his father. But she, who besides that was grown a mother, and a step-mother, did read in his eyes her own fault, and made his conscience her guiltiness, thought still that his presence carried her condemnation; so much the more, as that she, unchastely attempting his wonted fancies, found, for the reverence of his father’s bed, a bitter refusal, which breeding rather spite than shame in her, or if it were a shame, a shame not of the fault, but of the repulse, she did not only, as hating him, thirst for a revenge, but, as fearing harm from him, endeavoured to do harm unto him. Therefore did she try the uttermost of her wicked wit, how to overthrow him in the foundation of his strength, which was in the favour of his father: which because she saw strong both in nature and desert, it required the more cunning how to undermine it. And therefore, shunning the ordinary trade of hireling Sycophants, she made her praises of him to be accusations; and her advancing him to be his ruin. For first, with words, nearer admiration than liking, she would extol his excellencies, the goodliness of his shape, the power of his wit, the valiantness of his courage, the fortunateness of his successes, so as the father might find in her a singular love towards him: nay she shunned not to kindle some few sparks of jealousy in him: thus having gotten an opinion in his father that she was far from meaning mischief to the son, then fell she to praise him with no less vehemency of affection, but with much more cunning of malice. For then she sets forth the liberty of his mind, the high flying of his thoughts, the fitness in him to bear rule, the singular love the subjects bear him, that it was doubtful whether his wit were greater in winning their favours, or his courage in employing their favours; that he was not born to live a subject life, each action of his bearing in it majesty; such a kingly entertainment, such a kingly magnificence, such a kingly heart for enterprises; especially remembering those virtues, which in a successor are no more honoured by the subjects than suspected of the princes. Then would she, by putting off objections, bring {203} in objections to her husband’s head, already infected with suspicion. ‘Nay,’ would she say, ‘I dare take it upon my death, that he is no such son, as many like might have been, who loved greatness so well as to build their greatness upon their father’s ruin. Indeed ambition, like love, can abide no lingering, and ever urgeth on his own successes; hating nothing, but what may stop them. But the gods forbid, we should ever once dream of any such thing in him, who perhaps might be content that you and the world should know what he can do: but the more power he hath to hurt, the more admirable is his praise, that he will not hurt.’ Then ever remembering to strengthen the suspicion of his estate with private jealousy of her love, doing him excessive honour when he was in presence, and repeating his pretty speeches and graces in his absence, besides, causing him to be employed in all such dangerous matters, as either he should perish in them, or, if he prevailed, they should increase his glory, which she made a weapon to wound him; until she found that suspicion began already to speak for itself, and that her husband’s ears were grown hungry of rumours, and his eyes prying into every accident.

“Then took she help to her of a servant near about her husband, whom she knew to be of a hasty ambition, and such a one, who, wanting true sufficiency to raise him, would make a ladder of any mischief. Him she useth to deal more plainly in alleging causes of jealousy, making him know the fittest times when her husband already was stirred that way. And so they two, with divers ways, nourished one humour, like musicians, that singing divers parts, make one music. He sometimes with fearful countenance would desire the king to look to himself, for that all the court and city were full of whisperings and expectation of some sudden change, upon what ground himself knew not. Another time he would counsel the king to make much of his son, and hold his favour, for that it was too late now to keep him under. Now seeming to fear himself, because, he said, Plangus loved none of them that were great about his father. Lastly, breaking with him directly, making a sorrowful countenance, and an humble gesture bear false witness for his true meaning, that he found not only soldiery, but people weary of his government, and all their affection bent upon Plangus; both he and the queen concurring in strange dreams, and each thing else, that in a mind already perplexed might breed astonishment: so that within a while, all Plangus’s actions began to be translated into the language of suspicion. Which though Plangus found, yet could he not avoid, even contraries being driven to draw one yoke of argument. If he were magnificent, he spent much with an aspiring intent, if he spared, he heaped much with an aspiring intent; if he spoke courteously, he angled the people’s {204} hearts; if he were silent, he mused upon some dangerous plot. In sum, if he could have turned himself to as many forms as Proteus, every form should have been made hideous.

“But so it fell out, that a mere trifle gave them occasion of further proceeding. The king one morning, going to a vineyard that lay along the hill whereupon his castle stood: he saw a vine-labourer, that finding a bough broken, took a branch of the same bough for want of another thing and tied it about the place broken. The king asking the fellow what he did, ‘Marry,’ said he, ‘I make the son bind the father.’ This word, finding the king already superstitious through suspicion, amazed him straight, as a presage of his own fortune, so that, returning and breaking with his wife how much he misdoubted his estate; she made such gainsaying answers as while they strove, strove to be overcome. But even while the doubts most boiled, she thus nourished them.

“She under-hand dealt with the principal men of that country, that at the great parliament, which was then to be held, they should in the name of all the estates persuade the king, being now stepped deeply into old age, to make Plangus his associate in government with him, assuring them that not only she would join with them, but that the father himself would take it kindly, charging them not to acquaint Plangus withal, for that perhaps it might be harmful unto him, if the king should find that he were a party. They (who thought they might do it, not only willingly, because they loved him; and truly, because such indeed was the mind of the people; but safely, because she who ruled the king, was agreed thereto) accomplished her counsel; she indeed keeping promise of vehement persuading the same: which the more she and they did, the more she knew her husband would fear, and hate the cause of his fear. Plangus found this, and humbly protested against such desire or will to accept. But the more he protested, the more his father thought he dissembled, accounting his integrity to be but a cunning face of falsehood: and therefore delaying the desire of his subjects, attended some fit occasion to lay hands upon his son, which his wife brought thus to pass.

“She caused the same minister of hers to go unto Plangus, and, enabling his words with great show of faith, and endearing them with desire of secrecy, to tell him, that he found his ruin conspired by his stepmother, with certain of the noblemen of that country, the king himself giving his consent, and that few days should pass before the putting it in practice; withal discovering the very truth indeed, with what cunning his step-mother had proceeded. This agreeing with Plangus his own opinion, made him give the better credit; yet not so far, as to fly out of his country, according to the naughty fellow’s persuasion, but to attend, and to see further. {205} Whereupon the fellow, by the direction of his mistress, told him one day, that the same night, about one of the clock, the king had appointed to have his wife, and those noblemen together to deliberate of their manner of proceeding against Plangus, and therefore offered him, that if himself would agree, he would bring him into a place where he should hear all that passed and so have the more reason both to himself and to the world, to seek his safety. The poor Plangus, being subject to that only disadvantage of honest hearts, credulity, was persuaded by him; and arming himself, because of his late going, was closely conveyed into the place appointed. In the meantime, his step-mother, making all her gestures cunningly counterfeit a miserable affliction, she lay almost grovelling on the floor of her chamber, not suffering anybody to comfort her, until they calling for her husband, and he held off with long enquiry, at length she told him, even almost crying out of every word, that she was weary of her life, since she was brought to that plunge, either to conceal her husband’s murder, or accuse her son, who had ever been more dear than a son unto her. Then with many interruptions and exclamations she told him, that her son Plangus, soliciting her in the old affection between them, had besought her to put to her helping hand to the death of the king, assuring her that, though all the laws in the world were against it, he would marry her when he were king.

“She had not fully said thus much, with many pitiful digressions, when in comes the same fellow that brought Plangus: and running himself out of breath, fell at the king’s feet, beseeching him to save himself, for that there was a man with a sword drawn in the next room. The king affrighted, went out, and called his guard, who entering the place, found indeed Plangus with his sword in his hand, but not naked, yet standing suspiciously enough to one already suspicious. The king, thinking he had put up his sword because of the noise, never took leisure to hear his answer, but made him prisoner, meaning the next morning to put him to death in the market-place.

“But the day had no sooner opened the eyes and ears of his friends and followers, but that there was a little army of them who came, and by force delivered him; although numbers on the other side, abused with the fine framing of their report, took arms for the king. But Plangus, though he might have used the force of his friends to revenge his wrong, and get the crown, yet the natural love of his father, and hate to make their suspicion seem just, caused him rather to choose a voluntary exile than to make his father’s death the purchase of his life: and therefore went he to Tiridates, whose mother was his father’s sister, living in his court eleven or twelve years, ever hoping by his intercession, and his {206} own desert, to recover his father’s grace. At the end of which time, the war of Erona happened, which my sister, with the cause thereof, discoursed unto you.

“But his father had so deeply engraven the suspicion in his heart that he thought his flight rather to proceed of a fearful guiltiness than of an humble faithfulness, and therefore continued his hate with such vehemency that he did even hate his nephew Tiridates, and afterwards his niece Artaxia, because in his court he received countenance, leaving no means unattempted of destroying his son; among other, employing that wicked servant of his, who undertook to empoison him. But his cunning disguised him not so well but that the watchful servants of Plangus did discover him, whereupon the wretch was taken, and, before his well-deserved execution, by tortures forced to confess the particularities of this, which in general I have told you.

“Which confession authentically set down, though Tiridates with solemn embassage sent to the king, wrought no effect. For the king having put the reins of the government into his wife’s hand, never did so much as read it, but sent it straight by her to be considered. So as they rather heaped more hatred on Plangus, for the death of their servant. And now finding, that his absence, and their reports, had much diminished the wavering people’s affection towards Plangus, with advancing fit persons for faction, and granting great immunities to the commons, they prevailed so far as to cause the son of the second wife, called Palladius, to be proclaimed successor, and Plangus quite excluded: so that Plangus was driven to continue his serving Tiridates, as he did in the war against Erona, and brought home Artaxia, as my sister told you; when Erona by the treason of Antiphilus——”

But at that word she stopped. For Basilius, not able longer to abide their absence, came suddenly among them, and with smiling countenance, telling Zelmane he was afraid she had stolen away his daughters, invited them to follow the sun’s counsel in going then to their lodging, for indeed the sun was ready to set. They yielded, Zelmane meaning some other time to understand the story of Antiphilus’s treason, and Erona’s danger, whose cause she greatly tendered. But Miso had no sooner espied Basilius, but as spitefully as her rotten voice could utter, she set forth the sauciness of Amphialus. But Basilius only attended what Zelmane’s opinion was, who though she hated Amphialus, yet the nobility of her courage prevailed over it, and she desired he might be pardoned that youthful error, considering the reputation he had to be one of the best knights in the world; so as hereafter he governed himself, as one remembering his fault. Basilius giving the infinite terms of praises to Zelmane’s both valour in conquering, and pitifulness in {207} pardoning, commanded no more words to be made of it, since such he thought was her pleasure.

So brought he them up to visit his wife, where, between her and him, the poor Zelmane received a tedious entertainment; oppressed with being loved, almost as much, as with loving. Basilius not so wise in covering his passion, could make his tongue go almost no other pace, but to run into those immoderate praises which the foolish lover thinks short of his mistress, though they reach far beyond the heavens. But Gynecia, whom womanly modesty did more outwardly bridle, yet did sometimes use the advantage of her sex in kissing Zelmane, as she sat upon her bed-side by her, which was but still more and more sweet incense to cast upon the fire wherein her heart was sacrificed. Once Zelmane could not stir, but that, as if they had been poppets, whose motion stood only upon her pleasure, Basilius with serviceable steps, Gynecia with greedy eyes, would follow her. Basilius’s mind Gynecia well knew, and could have found in her heart to laugh at, if mirth could have born any proportion with her fortune. But all Gynecia’s actions were interpreted by Basilius, as proceeding from jealously of his amorousness. Zelmane betwixt both, like the poor child, whose father, while he beats him, will make him believe it is for love; or like the sick man, to whom the physician swears the ill-tasting wallowish medicine he proffers is of a good taste: their love was hateful, their courtesy troublesome, their presence cause of her absence thence, where not only her light, but her life consisted. Alas! thought she to herself, dear Dorus, what odds is there between thy destiny and mine? For thou hast to do, in thy pursuit but with shepherdish folks, who trouble thee with a little envious care, and affected diligence; but I, besides that I have now Miso, the worst of thy devils, let loose upon me, am waited on by princes, and watched by the two wakeful eyes of love and jealousy. Alas! incomparable Philoclea, thou ever seest me, but dost never see me as I am: thou hearest willingly all that I dare say, and I dare not say that which were most fit for thee to hear. Alas! who ever but I was imprisoned in liberty, and banished being still present? to whom but me have lovers been jailors, and honour a captivity?

But the night coming on with her silent steps upon them, they parted each from other, if at least they could be parted, of whom every one did live in another, and went about to flatter sleep in their beds, that disdained to bestow itself liberally upon such eyes, which by their will would ever be looking, and in least measure upon Gynecia. Who, when Basilius after long tossing was gotten asleep, and the cheerful comfort of the lights removed from her, kneeling up in her bed, began with a soft voice, and swollen heart, to renew the curses of her birth; and then in a manner embracing {208} her bed: “Ah chastest bed of mine,” said she, “which never heretofore could’st accuse me of one defiled thought, how can’st thou now receive this disastered changeling? happy, happy, be they only which be not; and thy blessedness only in this respect thou mayest feel that thou hast no feeling.” With that she furiously tore off great part of her fair hair: “Take care, O forgotten virtue,” said she, “this miserable sacrifice; while my soul was clothed with modesty, that was a comely ornament: now why should nature crown that head, which is so wicked, as her only desire is she cannot be enough wicked?” more she would have said, but that Basilius, awaked with the noise, took her in his arms, and began to comfort her, the good man thinking it was all for a jealous love of him, which humour if she would a little have maintained, perchance it might have weakened his new-conceived fancies. But he, finding her answers wandering from the purpose, left her to herself (glad the next morning to take the advantage of a sleep, which a little before day overwatched with sorrow, her tears had as it were sealed up in her eyes) to have the more conference with Zelmane, who baited on this fashion by those two lovers, and ever kept from any mean to declare herself, found in herself a daily increase of her violent desires; like a river, the more swelling, the more his current is stopped.

The chief recreation she could find in her anguish, was sometime to visit that place, where first she was so happy as to see the cause of her unhap. There would she kiss the ground, and thank the trees, bless the air, and do dutiful reverence to everything that she thought did accompany her at their first meeting: then return again to her inward thoughts; sometimes despair darkening all her imaginations, sometimes the active passion of love cheering and clearing her invention, how to unbar that cumbersome hindrance of her two ill-matched lovers. But this morning Basilius himself gave her good occasion to go beyond them. For having combed and tricked himself more curiously than any time forty winters before, coming where Zelmane was, he found her given over to her musical muses, to the great pleasure of good old Basilius, who retired himself behind a tree, while she with a most sweet voice did utter those passionate verses.

Basilius made no great haste from beyond the trees, till he perceived she had fully ended her music. But then loth to lose the precious fruit of time, he presented himself unto her, falling down upon both his knees, and holding up his hands, as the old governess of Danae is painted, when she suddenly saw the golden shower, “O heavenly woman, or earthly goddess,” said he, “let not my presence be odious unto you, nor my humble suit seem of small weight in your ears. Vouchsafe your eyes to descend upon this miserable old man, whose life hath hitherto been maintained but to serve as an increase of your beautiful triumphs. You only have overthrown me, and in my bondage consists my glory. Suffer not your own work to be despised of you, but look upon him with pity, whose life serves for your praise.” Zelmane, keeping a countenance askance she understood him not, told him it became her evil to suffer such excessive reverence of him, but that it worse became her to correct him, to whom she owed duty; that the opinion she had of his wisdom was such as made her esteem greatly of his words; but that the words themselves sounded so, that she could not imagine what they might intend. “Intend,” said Basilius, proud that that was brought in question, “what may they intend but a refreshing of my soul, and assuaging of my heart, and enjoying those your excellencies, wherein my life is upheld, and my death threatened?” Zelmane lifting up her face as if she had received a mortal injury of him, “and is this the devotion your ceremonies have been bent to?” said she: “is it the disdain of my estate, or the opinion of my lightness that have emboldened such base fancies towards me? enjoying quoth you? now little joy come to them that yield to such enjoying.”

Poor Basilius was so appalled that his legs bowed under him; his eyes looked as though he would gladly hide himself, and his old blood going to his heart, a general shaking all over his body possessed him. At length, with a wan mouth, he was about to give a stammering answer, when it came into Zelmane’s head by this device, to make her profit of his folly; and therefore with a relented countenance, thus said unto him, “Your words, mighty Prince, were unfit either for me to hear, or you to speak, but yet the large testimony I see of your affection makes me willing to suppress a great number of errors. Only thus much I think good {210} to say, that the same words in my lady Philoclea’s mouth, as from one woman to another, so as there were no other body by, might have had a better grace, and perchance have found a gentler receipt.”

Basilius, whose senses by desire were held open, and conceit was by love quickened, heard scarcely half her answer out, but that, as if speedy flight might save his life, he turned away, and ran with all the speed his body would suffer him towards his daughter Philoclea, whom he found at that time dutifully watching by her mother, and Miso curiously watching her, having left Mopsa to do the like service to Pamela. Basilius forthwith calling Philoclea aside, with all the conjuring words which desire could indite and authority utter, besought her she would preserve his life, in whom her life was begun, she would save his grey hairs from rebuke, and his aged mind from despair; that if she were not cloyed with his company, and that she thought not the earth over-burdened with him, she would cool his fiery grief, which was to be done but by her breath: that in fine, whatsoever he was, he was nothing but what it pleased Zelmane; all the powers of his spirit depending of her, that if she continued cruel he could no more sustain his life than the earth remain fruitful in the sun’s continual absence. He concluded, she should in one payment requite all his deserts; and that she needed not to disdain any service, though never so mean, which was warranted by the sacred name of father. Philoclea more glad than ever she had known herself that she might, by this occasion, enjoy the private conference of Zelmane, yet had so sweet a feeling of virtue in her mind, that she would not suffer a vile colour to be cast over fair thoughts, but with humble grace answered her father: that there needed neither promise nor persuasion to her, to make her do her uttermost for her father’s service; that for Zelmane’s favour, she would in all virtuous sort seek it towards him: and that as she would not pierce further into his meaning, than himself should declare, so would she interpret all his doings to be accomplished in goodness: and therefore desired, if otherwise it were, that he would not impart it to her, who then should be forced to begin, by true obedience, a show of disobedience: rather performing his general commandment, which had ever been to embrace virtue than any new particular sprung out of passion, and contrary to the former. Basilius content to take that, since he could have no more, thinking it a great point, if, by her means, he could get but a more free access unto Zelmane, allowed her reasons, and took her proffer thankfully, desiring only a speedy return of comfort. Philoclea was parting, and Miso straight behind her, like Alecto following Proserpina. But Basilius forced her to stay, though with much ado, she being {211} sharp set upon the fulfilling of a shrewd office in over-looking Philoclea; and said to Basilius that she did as she was commanded, and could not answer it to Gynecia, if she were any whit from Philoclea, telling him true, that he did evil to take her charge from her. But Basilius, swearing he would put out her eyes, if she stirred a foot to trouble his daughter, gave her a stop for that while.

So away departed Philoclea, with a new field of fancies for her travailing mind: for well she saw her father was grown her adverse party, and yet her fortune such, as she must favour her rival; and the fortune of that fortune such, as neither that did hurt her, nor any contrary mean help her.

But she walked but a little on, before she saw Zelmane lying upon a bank, with her face so bent over Ladon, that, her tears falling into the water, one might have thought that she began meltingly to be metamorphosed to the under-running river. But by and by with speech she made known, as well that she lived, as that she sorrowed. “Fair streams,” said she, “that do vouchsafe in your clearness to represent unto me, my blubbered face, let the tribute offer of my tears unto you, procure your stay a while with me, that I may begin yet at last to find something that pities me; and that all things of comfort and pleasure do not fly away from me. But if the violence of your spring command you to haste away, to pay your duties to your great prince, the sea, yet carry with you those few words, and let the uttermost ends of the world know them. A love more clear than yourselves, dedicated to a love, I fear, more cold than yourselves, with the clearness lays a night of sorrow upon me, and with the coldness inflames a world of fire within me.” With that she took a willow stick, and wrote in a sandy bank those few verses.

And as soon as she had written them, a new swarm of thoughts stinging her mind, she was ready with her feet to give the new-born letters both death and burial. But Philoclea, whose delight of hearing and seeing was before a stay from interrupting her, gave herself to be seen unto her, with such a lightening beauty upon Zelmane, that neither she could look on, nor would look off. At last Philoclea, having a little mused how to cut the thread even between her own hopeless affection and her father’s unbridled hope, with eyes, cheeks, and lips, whereof each sang their part to make up the harmony of bashfulness, began to say, “My father, to whom I owe myself;” and therefore when Zelmane (making a womanish habit to be the armour of her boldness, giving up her life to the lips of Philoclea, and taking it again by the sweetness of those kisses) humbly besought her to keep her speech for a while within the paradise of her mind. For well she knew her father’s errand, who should soon receive a sufficient answer. But now she demanded leave not to lose this long sought-for commodity of time, to ease her heart thus far, that if in her agonies her destiny was to be condemned by Philoclea’s mouth; at least Philoclea might know, whom she had condemned. Philoclea easily yielded to grant her own desire, and so making the green bank the situation, and the river the prospect of the most beautiful buildings of nature, Zelmane doubting how to begin, though her thoughts already had run to the end, with a mind fearing the unworthiness of every word that should be presented to her ears, at length brought it forth in this manner.

“Most beloved lady, the incomparable excellencies of yourself, waited on by the greatness of your estate, and the importance of the thing whereon my life consisted, doth require both many ceremonies before the beginning, and many circumstances in the uttering my speech, both bold and fearful. But the small opportunity of envious occasion, by the malicious eye hateful love doth cast upon me, and the extreme bent of my affection, which will either break out in words, or break my heart, compel me not only to embrace the smallest time, but to pass by the respects due unto you, in respect of your poor caitiff’s life, who is now, or never to be preserved. I do therefore vow unto you, hereafter never more to omit all dutiful form, do you only now vouchsafe to hear the matter {213} of a mind most perplexed, if ever the sound of love have come to your ears, or if ever you have understood what force it hath had to conquer the strongest hearts and change the most settled estates, receive here an example of those strange tragedies; one, that in himself containeth the particularities of all those misfortunes, and from henceforth believe that such a thing may be, since you shall see it is. You shall see, I say, a living image, and a present story of what love can do when he is bent to ruin.

“But alas! whither goest thou my tongue? or how doth my heart consent to adventure the revealing his nearest touching secret? but peace fear, thou comest too late, when already the harm is taken. Therefore I say again, O only princess attend here a miserable miracle of affection. Behold here before your eyes Pyrocles, prince of Macedon, whom you only have brought to this game of fortune, and unused Metamorphosis, whom you only have made neglect his country, forget his father, and lastly forsake to be Pyrocles: the same Pyrocles who, you heard, was betrayed by being put in a ship, which being burned, Pyrocles was drowned. O most true presage! for these traitors, my eyes, putting me into a ship of desire, which daily burneth, those eyes, I say, which betrayed me, will never leave till they have drowned me. But be not, be not, most excellent lady, you that nature hath made to be the load-star of comfort, be not the rock of shipwreck: you whom virtue hath made the princess of felicity, be not the minister of ruin: you whom my choice hath made the goddess of my safety. O let not, let not, from you be poured upon me destruction; your fair face hath many tokens in it of amazement at my words: think then what his amazement is, from whence they come, since no words can carry with them the life of the inward feeling, I desire that my desire may be weighed in the balances of honour, and let virtue hold them. For if the highest love in no base person may aspire to grace, then may I hope your beauty will not be without pity, if otherwise you be, alas! but let it not be so resolved, yet shall not my death be comfortless, receiving it by your sentence.”

The joy which wrought into Pygmalion’s mind, while he found his beloved image was softer and warmer in his folded arms, till at length it accomplished his gladness with a perfect woman’s shape, still beautified with the former perfections, was even such, as by each degree of Zelmane’s words creepingly entered into Philoclea, till her pleasure was fully made up with the manifesting of his being, which was such as in hope did overcome hope. Yet doubt would fain have played his part in her mind and called in question, how she should be assured that Zelmane was Pyrocles. But love straight stood up and deposed that a lie could not come from the mouth of Zelmane. Besides, a certain spark of honour, which rose {214} in her well-disposed mind, made her fear to be alone with him, with whom alone she desired to be, withal the other contradictions growing in those minds, which neither absolutely climb the rock of virtue, nor freely sink into the sea of vanity, but that spark soon gave place, or at least gave no more light in her mind than a candle doth in the sun’s presence. But even sick with a surfeit of joy, and fearful of she knew not what, as he that newly finds huge treasures, doubts whether he sleep or no; or like a fearful deer, which then looks most about when he comes to the best feed, with a shrugging kind of tremor through all her principal parts, she gave those affectionate words for answer.

“Alas! how painful a thing it is to a divided mind to make a well-joined answer? how hard it is to bring inward shame to outward confession? and what handsomeness, trow you, can be observed in that speech which is made one knows not to whom? Shall I say, ‘O Zelmane’? alas! your words be against it. Shall I say ‘Prince Pyrocles’? wretch that I am, your show is manifest against it. But this, this I may well say; if I had continued as I ought, Philoclea, you had either never been, or ever been Zelmane: you had either never attempted this change, set on with hope, or never discovered it, stopped with despair. But I fear me, my behaviour ill governed, gave you the first comfort: I fear me, my affection ill hid, hath given you this last assurance: I fear indeed, the weakness of my government before, made you think such a mask would be grateful unto me; and my weaker government since makes you pull off the visor. What should I do then? shall I seek far-fetched inventions? shall I labour to lay marble colours over my ruinous thoughts? or rather, though the pureness of my virgin mind be stained, let me keep the true simplicity of my word. True it is, alas! too true it is, O Zelmane, for so I love to call thee, since in that name my love first began, and in the shade of that name my love shall best lie hidden, that even while so thou wert, what eye bewitched me I know not, my passions were fitter to desire than to be desired. Shall I say then, I am sorry, or that my love must be turned to hate, since thou art turned to Pyrocles? How may that well be? since when thou wert Zelmane, the despair thou mightest not be thus did most torment me. Thou hast then the victory, use it with virtue. Thy virtue won me; with virtue preserve me. Dost thou love me? keep me then still worthy to be loved.”

Then held she her tongue, and cast down a self-accusing look, finding that in herself she had, as it were, shot out of the bow of her affection, a more quick opening of her mind than she minded to have done. But Pyrocles so carried up with joy that he did not envy the god’s felicity, presented her with some jewels of right princely value, as some little tokens of his love and quality: and {215} withal showed her letters from his father King Euarchus, unto him, which even in the sea had amongst his jewels been preserved. But little needed those proofs to one, who would have fallen out with herself rather than make any contrary conjectures to Zelmane’s speeches; so that with such embracements, as it seemed their souls desired to meet, and their hearts to kiss as their mouths did, they passed the promise of marriage, which fain Pyrocles would have sealed with the chief arms of his desire, but Philoclea commanded the contrary.

And then at Philoclea’s entreaty, who was willing to purloin all occasions of remaining with Zelmane, she told her the story of her life, from the time of their departing from Erona; for the rest she had already understood of her sister. “For,” said she, “I have understood how you first, in the company of your noble cousin Musidorus, parted from Thessalia, and of divers adventures, which with no more danger than glory you passed through, till your coming to the succour of the queen Erona; and the end of that war, you might perceive by myself, I had understood of prince Plangus. But what since was the course of your doings, until you came, after so many victories, to make a conquest of poor me, that I know not; the fame thereof having rather showed it by pieces, than delivered any full form of it. Therefore, dear Pyrocles, for what can my ears be so sweetly fed with, as to hear you of you, be liberal unto me of those things which have made you indeed precious to the world; and now doubt not to tell of your perils, for since I have you here out of them, even the remembrance of them is pleasant.”

Pyrocles easily perceived she was content with kindness to put off occasion of further kindness, wherein love showed himself a cowardly boy that durst not attend for fear of offending. But rather love proved himself valiant, that durst with the sword of reverent duty gain-stand the force of so many enraged desires. But so it was, that though he knew this discourse was to entertain him from a more straight parley, yet he durst not but kiss his rod, and gladly make much of that entertainment which she allotted unto him: and therefore with a desirous sigh chastening his breast for too much desiring, “Sweet princess of my life,” said he, “what trophies, what triumph, what monuments, what histories might ever make my fame yield so sweet a music to my ears, as that it pleaseth you to lend your mind to the knowledge of any thing touching Pyrocles, only therefore of value, because he is your Pyrocles? and therefore grow I now so proud as to think it worth the hearing, since you vouchsafe to give it the hearing. Therefore only height of my hope, vouchsafe to know, that after the death of Tiridates, and settling Erona in her government, for {216} settled we left her; howsoever since, as I perceived by your speech the last day, the ungrateful treason of her ill-chosen husband overthrew her, a thing, in truth, never till this time by me either heard, or suspected: for who could think, without having such a mind as Antiphilus, that so great a beauty as Erona’s, indeed excellent, could not have held his affection? so great goodness could not have bound gratefulness? and so high advancement could not have satisfied his ambition? but therefore true it is, that wickedness may well be compared to a bottomless pit, into which it is far easier to keep one’s self from falling than being fallen, to give one’s self any stay from falling infinitely. But for my cousin and me, upon this cause we parted from Erona.

“Euardes, the brave and mighty prince, whom it was my fortune to kill in the combat for Erona, had three nephews, sons to a sister of his; all three set among the foremost ranks of fame for great minds to attempt, and great force to perform what they did attempt, especially the eldest, by name Anaxius, to whom all men would willingly have yielded the height of praise, but that his nature was such as to bestow it upon himself before any could give it. For of so unsupportable a pride he was, that where his deeds might well stir envy, his demeanour did rather breed disdain. And if it be true that the giants ever made war against heaven, he had been a fit ensign-bearer for that company. For nothing seemed hard to him, though impossible; and nothing unjust, while his liking was his justice. Now he in these wars had flatly refused his aid, because he could not brook that the worthy prince Plangus was by his cousin Tiridates preferred before him. For allowing no other weights but the sword and spear in judging of desert, how much he esteemed himself before Plangus in that, so much would he have had his allowance in his service.

“But now that he understood that his uncle was slain by me, I think rather scorn that any should kill his uncle, than any kindness, an unused guest to an arrogant soul, made him seek his revenge, I must confess in manner gallant enough. For he sent a challenge unto me to meet him at a place appointed, in the confines of the kingdom of Lycia, where he would prove upon me, that I had by some treachery overcome his uncle, whom else many hundreds such as I, could not have withstood. Youth and success made me willing enough to accept any such bargain, especially because I had heard that your cousin Amphialus, who for some years hath borne universally the name of the best knight in the world, had divers times fought with him, and never been able to master him, but so had left him, that every man thought Anaxius in that one virtue of courtesy far short of him, in all other his match; Anaxius still deeming himself for his superior. Therefore {217} to him I would go, and I would needs go alone, because so I understood for certain, he was; and, I must confess, desirous to do something without the company of the incomparable prince Musidorus, because in my heart I acknowledge that I owed more to his presence than to anything in myself, whatever before I had done. For of him indeed, as of any worldly cause, I must grant, as received, whatever there is or may be good in me. He taught me by word, and best by example, giving me in him so lively an image of virtue, that ignorance could not cast such a mist over mine eyes, as not to see, and to love it; and all with such dear friendship and care, as, O heaven, how can my life ever requite to him? which made me indeed find in myself such a kind of depending upon him, as without him I found a weakness, and a mistrustfulness of myself, as one stayed from his best strength, when at any time I missed him. Which humour perceiving to over-rule me, I strove against it: not that I was unwilling to depend upon him in judgment, but by weakness I would not; which though it held me to him, made me unworthy of him. Therefore I desired his leave and obtained it, such confidence he had in me, preferring my reputation before his own tenderness, and so privately went from him, he determining, as after I knew, in secret manner, not to be far from the place where we appointed to meet, to prevent any foul play that might be offered unto me. Full loth was Erona to let us depart from her, as it were, fore-feeling the harms which after fell to her. But I, rid fully from those cumbers of kindness, and half a day’s journey in my way towards Anaxius, met an adventure, which, though in itself of small importance, I will tell you at large, because by the occasion thereof I was brought to as great cumber and danger, as lightly any might escape.

“As I passed through a land, each side whereof was so bordered both with high timber trees, and copses of far more humble growth, that it might easily bring a solitary mind to look for no other companions than the wild burgesses of the forest, I heard certain cries, which, coming by pauses to mine ears from within the wood of the right hand, made me well assured by the greatness of the cry, it was the voice of a man, though it were a very unmanlike voice, so to cry. But making mine ears my guide, I left not many trees behind me before I saw at the bottom of one of them a gentleman, bound with many garters hand and foot, so as well he might tumble and toss, but neither run nor resist he could. Upon him, like so many eagles upon an ox, were nine gentlewomen, truly such as one might well enough say, they were handsome. Each of them held bodkins in their hands, wherewith continually they pricked him, having been before hand unarmed of any defence {218} from the waist upward, but only of his shirt: so as the poor man wept and bled, cried and prayed while they sported themselves in his pain, and delighted in his prayers as the arguments of their victory.

“I was moved to compassion, and so much the more that he straight called to me for succour, desiring me at least to kill him, to deliver him from those tormentors. But before myself could resolve, much less any other tell what I would resolve, there came in choleric haste towards me about seven or eight knights, the foremost of which, willed me to get away, and not to trouble the ladies while they were taking their due revenge; but with so over-mastering a manner of pride, as truly my heart could not brook it; and therefore, answering them, that how I would have defended him from the ladies I knew not, but from them I would, I began to combat first with him particularly, and after his death with the others that had less good manners, jointly. But such was the end of it, that I kept the field with the death of some, and flight of others. Insomuch as the women, afraid, what angry victory would bring forth, ran all away, saving only one, who was so fleshed in malice that neither during, nor after the fight, she gave any truce to her cruelty, but still used the little instrument of her great spite, to the well-witnessed pain of the impatient patient: and was now about to put out his eyes, which all this while were spared, because they should do him the discomfort of seeing who prevailed over him. When I came in, and after much ado brought her to some conference, for some time it was before she would hearken, more before she would speak, and most before she would in her speech leave off the sharp remembrance of her bodkin, but at length when I pulled off my head-piece, and humbly entreated her pardon, or knowledge why she was cruel, out of breath more with choler, which increased in his own exercise, than with the pain she took, much to this purpose, she gave her grief unto my knowledge.

“‘Gentlemen,’ said she, ‘much it is against my will to forbear any time the executing of my just revenge upon this naughty creature, a man in nothing but in deceiving women. But because I see you are young, and like enough to have the power, if you would have the mind, to do much more mischief than he, I am content upon this bad subject to read a lecture to your virtue. This man called Pamphilus, in birth I must confess is noble, but what is that to him, if it shall be a stain to his dead ancestors to have left such an offspring, in shape as you see, not uncomely, indeed the fit mask of his disguised falsehood, in conversation wittily pleasant, and pleasantly gamesome; his eyes full of merry simplicity, his words, of hearty companionableness: and such an {219} one, whose head one would not think so stayed as to think mischievously; delighted in all such things, which by imparting the delight to others, makes the user thereof welcome, as, music, dancing, hunting, feasting, riding, and such like. And to conclude, such an one, as who can keep him at arm’s-end, need never wish a better companion. But under these qualities lies such a poisonous adder, as I will tell you. For by those gifts of nature and fortune, being in all places acceptable, he creeps, nay, to say, truly, he flies so into the favour of poor silly women, that I would be too much ashamed to confess, if I had not revenge in my hand as well as shame in my cheeks. For his heart being wholly delighted in deceiving us, we could never be warned, but rather one bird caught, served for a stale to bring in more. For the more he got, the more still he showed that he, as it were, gave way to his new mistress when he betrayed his promises to the former. The cunning of his flattery, the readiness of his tears, the infiniteness of his vows, were but among the weakest threads of his net. But the stirring our own passions, and by the entrance of them, to make himself lord of our forces, there lay his master’s part of cunning, making us now jealous, now envious, now proud of what he had, desirous of more; now giving one the triumph, to see him that was prince of many, subject to her; now with an estranged look, making her fear the loss of that mind, which indeed could never be had: never ceasing humbleness and diligence, till he had embarked us in some such disadvantage that we could not return dry-shod; and then suddenly a tyrant, but a crafty tyrant. For so would he use his imperiousness, that we had a delightful fear, and an awe, which made us loth to lose our hope. And, which is strangest, when sometimes with late repentance I think of it, I must confess, even in the greatest tempest of my judgment was I never driven to think him excellent; and yet so could set my mind, both to get and keep him, as though therein had laid my felicity: like them I have seen play at the ball, grow extremely earnest, who should have the ball, and yet every one knew it was but a ball. But in the end the bitter farce of the sport was, that we had either our hearts broken with sorrow, or our estates spoiled with being at his direction, or our honours for ever lost, partly by our own faults, but principally by his faulty using of our faults. For never was there man that could with more scornful eyes behold her at whose feet he had lately lain, nor with a more unmanlike bravery use his tongue to her disgrace, which lately had sung sonnets of her praises, being so naturally inconstant, as I marvel his soul finds not some way to kill his body, whereto it had been so long united. For so hath he dealt with us, unhappy fools, as we could never tell whether he made greater haste after he once liked, to enjoy, or after he once {220} enjoyed, to forsake. But making a glory of his own shame, it delighted him to be challenged of unkindness, it was a triumph to him to have his mercy called for: and he thought the fresh colours of his beauty were painted in nothing so well as in the ruins of his lovers: yet so far had we engaged ourselves, unfortunate souls, that we listed not complain, since our complaints could not but carry the greatest occasion to ourselves. But every of us, each for herself, laboured all means how to recover him, while he rather daily sent us companions of our deceit, than ever returned in any sound and faithful manner. Till at length he concluded all his wrongs with betrothing himself to one, I must confess, worthy to be liked if any worthiness might excuse so unworthy a changeableness, leaving us nothing but remorse for what was past, and despair of what might follow. Then indeed the common injury made us all join in fellowship, who till that time had employed our endeavours one against the other, for we thought nothing was a more condemning of us, than the justifying of his love to her by marriage: then despair made fear valiant, and revenge gave shame countenance: whereupon, we, that you saw here, devised how to get him among us alone: which he, suspecting no such matter of them whom he had by often abuses, he thought made tame to be still abused, easily gave us opportunity to do.

“‘And a man may see, even in this, how soon rulers grow proud, and in their pride foolish: he came with such an authority among us, as if the planets had done enough for us, that by us once he had been delighted. And when we began in courteous manner, one after the other, to lay his unkindness unto him, he, seeing himself confronted by so many, like a resolute orator, went not to denial, but to justify his cruel falsehood, and all with such jests and disdainful passages, that if the injury could not be made greater, yet were our conceits made the apter to apprehend it.

“‘Among other of his answers, forsooth, I shall never forget, how he would prove it was no inconstancy to change from one love to another, but a great constancy, and contrary, that which we call constancy, to be most changeable. “For,” said he, “I ever loved my delight, and delighted always in what was lovely: and wheresoever, I found occasion to obtain that, I constantly followed it. But these constant fools you speak of, though their mistress grow by sickness foul, or by fortune miserable, yet still will love her, and so commit the absurdest inconstancy that may be, in changing their love from fairness to foulness, and from loveliness to his contrary; like one not content to leave a friend, but will straight give over himself, to his mortal enemy: where I, whom you call inconstant, am ever constant to beauty, in others, and delight myself.” And so in this jolly scoffing bravery he went over us all, saying he {221} left one, because she was over-wayward; another, because she was too soon won; a third, because she was not merry enough; a fourth, because she was over gamesome; the fifth, because she was grown with grief subject to sickness; the sixth, because she was so foolish as to be jealous of him; the seventh, because she had refused to carry a letter from him to another that he loved; the eighth, because she was not secret; the ninth, because she was not liberal: but to me, who am named Dido, and indeed have met with a false Aeneas: to me I say, O the ungrateful villain, he could find no other fault to object, but that, perdy, he met with many fairer.

“‘But when he had thus played the careless prince, we, having those servants of ours in readiness, whom you lately so manfully overcame, laid hold of him, beginning at first but that trifling revenge, in which you found us busy; but meaning afterwards to have mangled him so as should have lost his credit for ever abusing more. But as you have made my fellows fly away, so for my part the greatness of his wrong overshadows, in my judgment, the greatness of any danger. For was it not enough for him to have deceived me, and through the deceit abused me, and after the abuse forsaken me, but that he must now, of all the company, and before all the company, lay want of beauty to my charge? many fairer, I trow even in your judgment, sir, if your eyes do not beguile me, not many fairer; and I know, whosoever says the contrary, there are not many fairer. And of whom should I receive this reproach, but of him who hath best cause to know there are not many fairer? and therefore howsoever my fellows pardon his injuries, for my part I will ever remember, and remember to revenge his scorn of all scorns.’ With that she to him afresh; and surely would have put out his eyes, who lay mute for shame, it he did not sometimes cry for fear, if I had not leapt from my horse and mingling force with entreaty, stayed her fury.

“But while I was persuading her to meekness, comes a number of his friends, to whom he forthwith cried, that they should kill that woman, that had thus betrayed and disgraced him. But then I was fain to forsake the ensign under which I had before served, and to spend my uttermost force in the protecting of the lady: which so well prevailed for her, that in the end there was a faithful peace promised of all sides. And so I leaving her in a place of security, as she thought, went on my journey towards Anaxius, for whom I was forced to stay two days in the appointed place, he disdaining to wait for me, till he were sure I was there.

“I did patiently abide his angry pleasure, till about that space of time he came, indeed, according to promise, alone: and that I may not say too little, because he is wont to say too much, like a {222} man whose courage is apt to climb over any danger. And as soon as ever he came near me, in fit distance for his purpose, he with much fury, but with fury skilfully guided, ran upon me, which I, in the best sort I could, resisted, having kept myself ready for him, because I had understood that he observed few compliments in matter of arms, but such as a proud anger did indite unto him. And so, putting our horses into a full career, we hit each other upon the head with our lances: I think he felt my blow; for my part, I must confess, I never received the like: but I think, though my senses were astonished, my mind forced them to quicken themselves, because I had learned of him how little favour he is wont to show in any matter of advantage. And indeed he was turned and coming upon me with his sword drawn, both our staves having been broken, at that encounter, but I was so ready to answer him, that truly I know not who gave the first blow. But whosoever gave the first, was quickly seconded by the second. And indeed, excellentest lady, I must say true, for a time it was well fought between us; he undoubtedly being of singular valour, I would God, it were not abased by his too much loftiness: but as, by the occasion of the combat, winning and losing ground, we changed places, his horse, happened to come upon the point of the broken spear, which, fallen to the ground, chanced to stand upward, so as it lightning upon his heart the horse died. He driven to dismount, threatened, if I did not the like, to do as much for my horse as fortune had done for his. But whether for that, or because I would not be beholden to fortune for any part of the victory, I descended. So began our foot-fight in such sort, that we were well entered to blood on both sides, when there comes by that inconstant Pamphilus, whom I had delivered, easy to be known, for he was bare-faced, with a dozen armed men after him; but before him he had Dido, that lady, who had most sharply punished him, riding upon a palfrey, he following her with most unmanlike cruelty, beating her with wands he had in his hand, she crying for sense of pain, or hope of succour: which was so pitiful a sight unto me, that it moved me to require Anaxius to defer our combat till another day, and now to perform the duties of knighthood in helping this distressed lady. But he that disdains to obey anything but his passion, which he calls his mind, bid me leave off that thought; but when he had killed me, he would then perhaps, go to her succour. But I well finding the fight would be long between us, longing in my heart to deliver the poor Dido, giving him so great a blow as somewhat stayed him, to term it aright, I flatly ran away from him toward my horse, who trotting after the company in mine armour I was put to some pain, but that use made me nimble unto it. But as I followed my horse, Anaxius followed me; but this proud heart did {223} so disdain that exercise, that I quickly over-ran him, and overtaken my horse, being, I must confess, ashamed to see a number of country folks, who happened to pass thereby, who halloed and hooted after me, as at the arrantest coward that ever showed his shoulders to his enemy. But when I had leapt on my horse, with such speedy agility that they all cried, ‘O see how fear gives him wings,’ I turned to Anaxius, and aloud promised him to return thither again as soon as I had relieved the injured lady. But he railing at me, with all the base words angry contempt could indite; I said no more but ‘Anaxius assure thyself, I neither fear thy force, nor thy opinion;’ and so using no weapon of a knight at that time but my spurs, I ran in my knowledge after Pamphilus, but in all their conceits from Anaxius, which as far as I could hear, I might well hear testified with such laughters and games, that I was some few times moved to turn back again.

“But the lady’s misery over-balanced my reputation, so that after her I went, and with six hours’ hard riding, through so wild places, as it was rather the cunning of my horse sometimes than of myself, so rightly to hit the way, I overgat them a little before night, near to an old ill-favoured castle, the place where I perceived they meant to perform their unknightly errand. For there they began to strip her of her clothes, when I came in among them, and running through the first with a lance, the justness of the cause so enabled me against the rest, false-hearted in their own wrong doing, that I had in as short time almost as I had been fighting with only Anaxius, delivered her from those injurious wretches, most of whom carried news to the other world, that amongst men secret wrongs are not always left unpunished. As for Pamphilus, he having once seen, and as it should seem, remembered me, even from the beginning began to be in the rearward, and before they had left fighting, he was too far off to give them thanks for their pains. But when I had delivered to the lady a full liberty, both in effect and in opinion, for some time it was before she could assure herself she was out of their hands, who had laid so vehement apprehensions of death upon her, she then told me, how as she was returning towards her father’s, weakly accompanied, as too soon trusting to the falsehood of reconcilement, Pamphilus had set upon her and, killing those that were with her, carried herself by such force, and with such manner as I had seen, to this place, where he meant in cruel and shameful manner to kill her, in the sight of her own father, to whom he had already sent word of it, that out of his castle window, for this castle, she said, was his, he might have the prospect of his only child’s destruction in my coming, whom, she said, he feared as soon as he knew me by the armour, had not warranted her from that near approaching cruelty. I was glad I had done so good a deed for a {224} gentlewoman not unhandsome, whom before I had in like sort helped. But the night beginning to persuade some retiring place, the gentlewoman, even out of countenance before she began her speech, much after this manner invited me to lodge that night with her father.

“‘Sir,’ said she, ‘how much I owe you, can be but abased by words, since the life I have, I hold it now the second time, of you: and therefore need not offer service unto you, but only to remember you, that I am your servant: and I would my being so, might any way yield any small contentment unto you. Now only I can but desire you to harbour yourself this night in this castle, because the time requires it, and in truth this country is very dangerous for murdering thieves, to trust a sleeping life among them. And yet I must confess that as the love I bear you makes me thus invite you, so the same love makes me ashamed to bring you to a place where you shall be so, not spoken by ceremony, but by truth, miserably entertained.’

“With that she told me, that though she spoke of her father, whom she named Chremes, she would hide no truth from me; which was in sum, that he was of all that region the man of greatest possessions and riches, so was he either by nature, or an evil received opinion, given to sparing in so unmeasurable sort, that he did not only bar himself from the delightful, but almost from the necessary use thereof, scarcely allowing himself fit sustenance of life, rather than he would spend of those goods for whose sake only he seemed to joy in life. Which extreme dealing, descending from himself upon her, had driven her to put herself with a great lady of that country, by which occasion she had stumbled upon such mischances as were little for the honour either of her, or her family. But so wise had he showed himself therein, as while he found his daughter maintained without his cost, he was content to be deaf to any noise of infamy, which though it had wronged her much more than she deserved, yet she could not deny but she was driven thereby to receive more than decent favours. She concluded, that there at least I should be free from injuries, and should be assured to her-ward to abound as much in the true causes of welcomes, as I should find wants of the effects thereof.

“I, who had acquainted myself to measure the delicacy of food and rest by hunger and weariness, at that time well stored of both, did not abide long entreaty, but went with her to the castle, which I found of good strength, having a great moat round about it, the work of a noble gentleman, of whose unthrifty son he had bought it; the bridge drawn up, where we were fain to cry a good while before we could have answer, and to dispute a good while before {225} answer would be brought to acceptance. At length a willingness, rather than a joy to receive his daughter whom he had lately seen so near death, and an opinion brought into his head by course, because he heard himself called father, rather than any kindness that he found in his own heart, made him take us in; for my part by that time grown so weary of such entertainment that no regard of myself, but only the importunity of his daughter, made me enter. Where I was met with this Chremes, a driveling old fellow, lean, shaking both of head and hands, already half earth, and yet then most greedy of earth: who scarcely would give me thanks for what I had done, for fear, I suppose, that thankfulness might have an introduction of reward; but with a hollow voice, giving me a false welcome, I might perceive in his eye to his daughter, that it was hard to say whether the displeasure of her company did not overweigh the pleasure of her own coming. But on he brought me into so bare a house, that it was the picture of miserable happiness, and rich beggary (served only by a company of rustical villains, full of sweat and dust, not one of them other than a labourer) in sum, as he counted it, profitable drudgery; and all preparations both for food and lodging such as would make one detest niggardness, it is so sluttish a vice. His talk of nothing but of his poverty, for fear, belike, lest I should have proved a young borrower. In sum, such a man, as any enemy would not wish him worse than to be himself. But there that night bid I the burden of being a tedious guest to a loathsome host; over-hearing him sometimes bitterly warn his daughter of bringing such costly mates under his roof, which she grieved at, desired much to know my name, I think partly of kindness, to remember who had done something for her, and partly, because she assured herself I was such a one as would make even his miser-mind contented with that he had done. And accordingly, she demanded my name and estate, with such earnestness, that I, whom love had not as then so robbed me of myself, as to be other than I am, told her directly my name and condition: whereof she was no more glad than her father, as I might well perceive by some ill-favoured cheerfulness, which then first began to wrinkle itself in his face.

“But the causes of their joys were far different; for as the shepherd and the butcher both may look upon one sheep with pleasing conceits, but the shepherd with mind to profit himself by preserving, the butcher with killing him, so she rejoiced to find that mine own benefits had made me to be her friend, who was a prince of such greatness, and lovingly rejoiced. But his joy grew, as I to my danger after perceived, by the occasion of the queen Artaxia’s setting my head to sale for having slain her brother Tiridates, which being the sum of an hundred thousand crowns, to {226} whosoever brought me alive into her hands, that old wretch, who had over-lived all good nature, though he had lying idly by him much more than that, yet above all things loving money, for money’s own sake, determined to betray me, so well deserving of him, for to have that which he was determined never to use. And so knowing that the next morning I was resolved to go to the place where I had left Anaxius, he sent in all speed to a captain of a garrison near by, which though it belonged to the king of Iberia, yet knowing the captain’s humour to delight so in riotous spending, that he cared not how he came by the means to maintain it, doubted not that to be half with him in the gain, he would play his quarter part in the treason. And therefore that night agreeing of the fittest places where they might surprise me in the morning, the old caitiff was grown so ceremonious, that he would needs accompany me some miles in my way, a sufficient token to me, if nature had made me apt to suspect; since a churl’s courtesy rarely comes, but either for gain or falsehood. But I suffered him to stumble into that point of good manners: to which purpose he came out with all his clowns, horsed upon such cart-jades, and so furnished, as in good faith I thought with myself, if that were thrift, I wish none of my friends or subjects ever to thrive. As for his daughter, the gentle Dido, she would also, but in my conscience with a far better mind, prolong the time of farewell, as long as he.

“And so we went on together: he so old in wickedness, that he could look me in the face, and freely talk with me, whose life he had already contracted for: till coming into the falling of a way which led us into a place, of each side whereof men might easily keep themselves undiscovered, I was encompassed suddenly by a great troop of enemies, both of horse and foot, who willed me to yield myself to the queen Artaxia. But they could not have used worse eloquence to have persuaded my yielding than that; I knowing the little goodwill Artaxia bare me. And therefore making necessity and justice my best sword and shield, I used the other weapons I had as well as I could; I am sure to the little ease of a good number, who trusting to their number more than to their valour, and valuing money higher than equity, felt that guiltiness is not always with ease oppressed. As for Chremes, he withdrew himself, so gilding his wicked conceits with his hope of gain, that he was content to be a beholder how I should be taken to make his prey.

“But I was grown so weary that I supported myself more with anger than strength, when the most excellent Musidorus came to my succour, who having followed my trace as well as he could, after he found I had left the fight with Anaxius, came to the niggard’s castle, where he found all burned and spoiled by the {227} country people, who bare mortal hatred to that covetous man, and now took the time when the cattle was left almost without guard, to come in and leave monuments of their malice therein: which Musidorus not staying either to further, or impeach, came upon the spur after me, because with one voice many told him, that if I were in his company, it was for no good meant unto me, and in this extremity found me. But when I saw that cousin of mine, methought my life was doubled, and where I before thought of a noble death, I now thought of a noble victory. For who can fear that hath Musidorus by him? who, what he did there for me, how many he killed, not stranger for the number than for the strange blows wherewith he sent them to a well-deserved death, might well delight me to speak of, but I should so hold you too long in every particular. But in truth, there if ever, and ever, if ever any man, did Musidorus show himself second to none in able valour.

“Yet what the unmeasurable excess of their number would have done in the end, I know not, but the trial thereof was cut off by the chanceable coming thither of the king of Iberia, that same father of the worthy Plangus, whom it hath pleased you sometimes to mention, who, not yielding over to old age his country delights, especially of hawking, was at that time following a merlin, brought to see this injury offered unto us, and having great numbers of courtiers waiting upon him, was straight known by the soldiers that assaulted us, to be their king, and so most of them withdrew themselves.

“He, by his authority, knowing of the captain’s own constrained confession, what was the motive of this mischievous practice; misliking much such violence should be offered in his country to men of our rank, but chiefly disdaining it should be done in respect of his niece, whom, I must confess wrongfully, he hated, because he interpreted that her brother and she had maintained his son Plangus against him, caused the captain’s head presently to be stricken off, and the old bad Chremes to be hanged, though truly for my part, I earnestly laboured for his life, because I had eaten of his bread. But one thing was notable for a conclusion of his miserable life, that neither the death of his daughter, who, alas! poor gentlewoman, was by chance slain among his clowns, while she over-boldly for her weak sex sought to hold them from me, nor yet his own shameful end was so much in his mouth as he was led to execution, as the loss of his goods, and burning of his house which often, with more laughter than tears of the hearers, he made pitiful exclamations upon.

“This justice thus done, and we delivered, the king indeed, in royal sort invited us to his court, not far thence: in all point entertaining us so, as truly I must ever acknowledge a beholdingness {228} unto him; although the stream of it fell out not to be so sweet as the spring. For after some days being there, curing ourselves of such wounds as we had received, while I, causing diligent search to be made for Anaxius, could learn nothing, but that he was gone out of the country, boasting in every place how he had made me run away, we were brought to receive the favour of acquaintance with the Queen Andromana, whom the princess Pamela did in so lively colours describe the last day, as still methinks the figure thereof possesseth mine eyes, confirmed by the knowledge myself had.

“And therefore I shall need the less to make you know what kind of woman she was; but this only, that first with the reins of affection, and after with the very use of directing, she had made herself so absolute a master of her husband’s mind, that a while he would not, and after, he could not tell how to govern without being governed by her: but finding an ease in not understanding, let loose his thoughts wholly to pleasure, entrusting to her the entire conduct of all his royal affairs. A thing that may luckily fall out to him that hath the blessing to match with some heroical-minded lady. But in him it was neither guided by wisdom, nor followed by fortune, but thereby was slipped insensibly into such an estate that he lived at her indiscreet discretion: all his subjects having by some years learned so to hope for good, and fear of harm, only from her, that it should have needed a stronger virtue than his to have unwound so deeply an entered vice. So that either not striving, because he was contented, or contented because he would not strive, he scarcely knew what was done in his own chamber, but as it pleased her instruments to frame the relation.

“Now we being brought known unto her, the time that we spent in curing some very dangerous wounds, after once we were acquainted, and acquainted we were sooner than ourselves expected, she continually almost haunted us, till, and it was not long a doing, we discovered a most violent bent of affection, and that so strangely that we might well see an evil mind in authority doth not only follow the sway of the desires already within it, but frames to itself new desires, not before thought of. For, with equal ardour she affected us both; and so did her greatness disdain shamefacedness that she was content to acknowledge it to both. For, having many times torn the veil of modesty, it seemed, for a last delight, that she delighted in infamy, which often she had used to her husband’s shame, filling all men’s ears, but his, with his reproach; while he, hoodwinked with kindness, least of all men knew who struck him. But her first decree was, by setting forth her beauties, truly in nature not to be misliked, but as much advanced to the eye as abased to the judgment by art, thereby to {229} bring us, as willingly caught fishes, to bite at her bait. And thereto had she that scutcheon of her desires supported by certain badly diligent ministers, who often cloyed our ears with her praises, and would needs teach us a way of felicity by seeking her favour. But when she found that we were as deaf to them as dumb to her, then she listed no longer stay in the suburbs of her foolish desires, but directly entered upon them, making herself an impudent suitor, authorizing herself very much with making us see that all favour and power in that realm so depended upon her, as now, being in her hands, we were either to keep or lose our liberty at her discretion; which yet awhile she so tempered, as that we might rather suspect than she threaten. But when our wounds grew so as that they gave us leave to travel, and that she found we were purposed to use all means we could to depart thence, she, with more and more importunateness, craved, which in all good manners was either of us to be desired, or not granted. Truly, most fair and every way excellent lady, you would have wondered to have seen how before us she would confess the contention in her own mind between that lovely, indeed most lovely brownness of Musidorus’s face, and this colour of mine, which she, in the deceivable style of affection would entitle beautiful: but her eyes wandered like a glutton at a feast, from the one to the other; and how her words would begin half of the sentence to Musidorus, and end the other half to Pyrocles, not ashamed, seeing the friendship between us, to desire either of us to be a mediator to the other, as if we should have played one request at tennis between us: and often wishing that she might be the angle where the lines of our friendship might meet, and be the knot which might tie our hearts together. Which proceeding of hers I do the more largely set before you, most dear lady, because by the foil thereof, you may see the nobleness of my desire to you and the warrantableness of your favour to me.”

At that Philoclea smiled with a little nod. “But,” said Pyrocles, “when she perceived no hope by suit to prevail, then, persuaded by the rage of affection, and encouraged by daring to do anything, she found means to have us accused to the King, as though we went about some practice to overthrow him in his own state, which, because of the strange successes we had had in the kingdoms of Phrygia, Pontus and Galatia, seemed not unlikely to him, who, but skimming anything that came before him, was disciplined to leave the thorough-handling of all to his gentle wife, who forthwith caused us to be put in prison, having, while we slept, deprived us of our arms: a prison, indeed injurious, because a prison, but else well testifying affection, because in all respects as commodious as a prison might be: and indeed so placed, as she might at all hours, {230} not seen by many, though she cared not much how many had seen her, come unto us. Then fell she to sauce her desires with threatenings, so that we were in a great perplexity, restrained to so unworthy a bondage, and yet restrained by love, which I cannot tell how, in noble minds, by a certain duty, claims an answering. And how much that love might move us, so much, and more that faultiness of her mind removed us; her beauty being balanced by her shamelessness. But that which did, as it were, tie us in a captivity, was, that to grant had been wickedly injurious to him that had saved our lives; and to accuse a lady that loved us, of her love unto us, we esteemed almost as dishonourable: and but by one of those ways we saw no likelihood of going out of that place, where the words would be injurious to your ears, which would express the manner of her suit: while yet many times earnestness dyed her cheeks with the colour of shamefacedness, and wanton languishing borrowed of her eyes the down-cast look of modesty. But we in the meantime far from loving her, and often assuring her that we would not so recompense her husband’s saving of our lives; to such a ridiculous degree of trusting her, she had brought him, that she caused him to send us word, that upon our lives we should do whatsoever she commanded us: good man not knowing any other but that all her pleasures were directed to the preservation of his estate. But when that made us rather pity than obey his folly, then fell she to servile entreating us, as though force could have been the school of love, or that an honest courage would not rather strive against, than yield to injury. All which yet could not make us accuse her, though it made us almost pine away for spite to lose any of our time in so troublesome an idleness.

“But while we were thus full of weariness of what was past, and doubt of what was to follow, love, that I think in the course of my life hath a sport sometimes to poison me with roses, sometimes to heal me with wormwood, brought forth a remedy unto us: which though it helped me out of that distress, alas, the conclusion was such that I must ever while I live think it worse than a wreck so to have been preserved. This king by his queen had a son of tender age, but of great expectation, brought up in the hope of themselves, and already acceptation of the inconstant people, as successor of his father’s crown, whereof he was as worthy, considering his parts, as unworthy in respect of the wrong was thereby done against the most noble Plangus, whose great deserts now either forgotten, or ungratefully remembered; all men set their sails with the favourable wind, which blew on the fortune of this young prince, perchance not in their hearts, but surely in their mouths, now giving Plangus, {231} who some years before was their only champion, the poor comfort of calamity, pity. This youth therefore accounted prince of that region, by name Palladius, did with vehement affection love a young lady brought up in his father’s court, called Zelmane, daughter to that mischievously unhappy prince Plexirtus, of whom already I have, and sometimes must make, but never honourable mention, left there by her father, because of the intricate changeableness of his estate, he, by the mother’s side, being half brother to this queen Andromana, and therefore the willinger committing her to her care. But as love, alas! doth not always reflect itself, so fell it out that this Zelmane, though truly reason there was enough to love Palladius, yet could not ever persuade her heart to yield thereunto: with that pain to Palladius, as they feel that feel an unloved love. Yet loving indeed, and therefore constant, he used still the intercession of diligence and faith, ever hoping, because he would not put himself into that hell to be hopeless: until the time of our being come, and captived there, brought forth this end, which truly deserves of me a further degree of sorrow than tears.

“Such was therein my ill destiny, that this young lady Zelmane, like some unwisely liberal, that more delight to give presents than pay debts, she chose, alas more the pity, rather to bestow her love, so much undeserved as not desired, upon me, than to recompense him, whose love, besides many other things, might seem, even in the court of honour, justly to claim it of her. But so it was; alas that so it was! whereby it came to pass, that as nothing doth more naturally follow this cause than care to preserve, and benefit doth follow unfeigned affection, she felt with me what I felt of my captivity, and straight laboured to redress my pain, which was her pain; which she could do by no better means than by using the help therein of Palladius, who, true lover considering what, and not why, in all her commandments; and indeed she concealing from him her affection, which she entitled, compassion, immediately obeyed to employ his uttermost credit to relieve us; which though as great as a beloved son with a mother, faulty otherwise, but not hard-hearted toward him, yet it could not prevail to procure us liberty. Wherefore he sought to have that by practice which he could not by prayer. And so being allowed often to visit us, for indeed our restraints were more or less, according as the ague of her passion was either in the fit or intermission, he used the opportunity of a fit time thus to deliver us.

“The time of the marrying that queen was, every year, by the extreme love of her husband, and the serviceable love of the courtiers, made notable by some public honours, which did, as it were, proclaim to the world, how dear she was to that people. {232} Among other, none was either more grateful to the beholders, or more noble in itself, than jousts, both with sword and lance, maintained for seven nights together; wherein that nation doth so excel, both for comeliness and ableness, that from neighbour-countries they ordinarily come, some to strive, some to learn, some to behold.

“This day it happened that divers famous knights came thither from the court of Helen Queen of Corinth; a lady whom fame at that time was so desirous to honour that she borrowed all men’s mouths to join with the sound of her trumpet. For as her beauty hath won the prize from all women that stand in degree of comparison, for as for the two sisters of Arcadia, they are far beyond all conceit of comparison, so hath her government been such as hath been no less beautiful to men’s judgments than her beauty to the eyesight. For being brought by right of birth, a woman, a young woman, a fair woman, to govern a people in nature mutinously proud, and always before so used to hard governors, that they knew not how to obey without the sword were drawn, could she for some years so carry herself among them, that they found cause in the delicacy of her sex, of admiration, not of contempt: and which was not able, even in the time that many countries about her were full of wars, which for old grudges to Corinth were thought still would conclude there, yet so handled she the matter, that the threatened ever smarted in the threateners; she using so strange, and yet so well succeeding a temper that she made her people by peace warlike; her courtiers by sports, learned; her ladies by love, chaste. For by continual martial exercises without blood, she made them perfect in that bloody art. Her sports were such as carried riches of knowledge upon the stream of delight: and such the behaviour both of herself and her ladies, as builded their chastity not upon waywardness, but choice of worthiness: so as it seemed that court to have been the marriage-place of love and virtue, and that herself was a Diana apparelled in the garments of Venus. And this which fame only delivered unto me, for yet I have never seen her, I am the willinger to speak of to you, who, I know, know her better, being your near neighbour, because you may see by her example, in herself wise, and of others beloved, that neither folly is the cause of vehement love, nor reproach the effect. For never, I think, was there any woman that with more unremovable determination gave herself to the counsel of love, after she had once set before her mind the worthiness of your cousin Amphialus, and yet is neither her wisdom doubted of, nor honour blemished. For, O God, what doth better become wisdom, than to discern what is worthy the loving? what more agreeable to goodness, than to love it so {233} discerned? and what to greatness of heart, than to be constant in it once loved? but at that time that love of hers was not so publicly known as the death of Philoxenus, and her search of Amphialus hath made it: but then seemed to have such leisure to send thither divers choice knights of her court, because they might bring her, at least the knowledge, perchance the honour of that triumph. Wherein so they behaved themselves, that for three days they carried the prize; which being come from so far a place to disgrace her servants, Palladius, who himself had never used arms, persuaded the queen Andromana to be content for the honour sake of her court, to suffer us two to have our horse and armour, that he with us might undertake the recovery of their lost honour; which she granted, taking our oath to go no further than her son, nor ever to abandon him. Which she did not more for saving him, than keeping us: and yet not satisfied with our oath, appointed a band of horsemen to have an eye that we should not go beyond appointed limits. We were willing to gratify the young prince, who, we saw, loved us. And so the fourth day of that exercise we came into the field: where, I remember, the manner was, that the forenoon they should run a tilt, one after the other; the afternoon in a broad field in manner of a battle, till either the strangers, or that country knights won the field.

“The first that ran was a brave knight, whose device was to come in all chained, with a nymph leading him. Against him came forth an Iberian, whose manner of entering was with bagpipes instead of trumpets; a shepherd’s boy before him for a page, and by him a dozen apparelled like shepherds for the fashion, though rich in stuff, who carried his lances, which though strong to give a lancely blow indeed, yet so were they coloured with hooks near the mourn, that they prettily represented sheephooks. His own furniture was dressed over with wool, so enriched with jewels artificially placed, that one would have thought it a marriage between the lowest and the highest. His impresa was a sheep marked with pitch, with those words, ‘Spotted to be known.’ And because I may tell you out his conceit, though that were not done, till the running of that time was ended, before the ladies’ departure from the windows, among whom there was one, they say, that was the Star whereby his course was only directed, the shepherds attending upon Philisides went among them, and sang an eclogue; one of them answering another, while the other shepherds pulling out recorders, which possessed the place of pipes, accorded their music to the others’ voice. The eclogue had great praise: I only remember six verses, while having questioned one with the other of their fellow-shepherd’s sudden growing a man of arms, and the cause of his doing, they thus said:

“Thus I have digressed, because his manner liked me well, but when he began to run against Lelius, it had near grown, though great love had ever been betwixt them, to a quarrel. For Philisides breaking his staves with great commendation, Lelius, who was known to be second to none in the perfection of that art, ran ever over his head, but so finely to the skilful eyes, that one might well see he showed more knowledge in missing, than others did in hitting. For if so gallant a grace his staff came swimming close over the crest of the helmet, as if he would represent the kiss, and not the stroke of Mars. But Philisides was much moved with it, while he thought Lelius would show a contempt of his youth: till Lelius, who therefore would satisfy him, because he was his friend, made him know that to such bondage he was for so many courses tied by her, whose disgraces to him were graced by her excellency, and whose injuries he could never otherwise return, than honours.

“But so by Lelius’s willing missing was the odds of the Iberian side, and continued so in the next by the excellent running of a knight, though fostered so by the Muses, as many times the very rustic people left both their delights and profits to hearken to his songs, yet could he so well perform all armed sports, as if he had never had any other pen than a lance in his hand. He came in like a wild man, but such a wildness as showed his eyesight had tamed him, full of withered leaves, which though they fell not, still threatened falling. His impresa was a mill-horse still bound to go in one circle; with those words, ‘Data fata secutus.’ But after him the Corinthian knights absolutely prevailed, especially a great nobleman of Corinth, whose device was to come without any device, all in white like a new knight, as indeed he was, but so new, as his newness shamed most of the others’ long exercise. Then another, from whose tent I remember a bird was made fly, with such art to carry a written embassage among the ladies, that one might say, if a live bird, how so taught? if a dead bird, how so made? then he, who hidden, man and horse in a great figure lively representing the Phoenix, the fire took so artificially as it consumed the bird, and left him to rise as it were, out of the ashes thereof. Against whom was the fine frozen knight, frozen in despair; but his armour so naturally representing ice, and all his {235} furniture so lively answering thereto, as yet did I never see anything that pleased me better.

“But the delight at those pleasing sights have carried me too far into an unnecessary discourse. Let it then suffice, most excellent lady! that you know, the Corinthians that morning in the exercise, as they had done the days before, had the better; Palladius neither suffering us nor himself, to take in hand the party till the afternoon, when we were to fight in troops, not differing otherwise from earnest, but that the sharpness of the weapons was taken away. But in the trial, Palladius, especially led by Musidorus, and somewhat aided by me, himself truly behaving himself nothing like a beginner, brought the honour to rest itself that night on the Iberian side, and the next day, both morning and afternoon being kept by our party. He, that saw the time fit for the delivery he intended, called unto us to follow him, which we both bound by oath, and willing by goodwill, obeyed, and so the guard not daring to interrupt us, he commanding passage, we went after him upon the spur, to a little house in a forest near by; which he thought would be the fittest resting place, till we might go further from his mother’s fury, whereat he was no less angry and ashamed, than desirous to obey Zelmane.

“But his mother, as I learned since, understanding by the guard her son’s conveying us away, forgetting her greatness, and resigning modesty to more quiet thoughts, flew out from her place, and cried to be accompanied, for she herself would follow us. But what she did, being rather with vehemency of passion that conduct of reason, made her stumble while she ran, and by her own confusion hinder her own desires. For so impatiently she commanded, as a good while nobody knew what she commanded, so as we had gotten so far the start, as to be already past the confines of her kingdom before she overtook us: and overtake us she did in the kingdom of Bithynia, not regarding shame, or danger of having entered into another’s dominions, but, having with her about threescore horsemen, straight commanded to take us alive, and not to regard her son’s threatening therein, which they attempted to do, first by speech, and then by force. But neither liking their eloquence, nor fearing their might, we esteemed few words in a just defence, able to resist many unjust assaulters. And so Musidorus’s incredible valour, beating down all lets, made both me, and Palladius, so good way, that we had little to do to overcome weak wrong.

“And now had we the victory in effect without blood, when Palladius, heated with the fight, and angry with his mother’s fault, so pursued our assailers, that one of them, who as I heard since, had before our coming been a special minion of Andromana’s, and {236} hated us for having dispossessed him of her heart, taking him to be one of us, with a traitorous blow slew his young prince, who falling down before our eyes, whom he especially had delivered; judge, sweetest lady, whether anger might not be called justice in such a case: once, so it wrought in us, that many of his subjects’ bodies we left there dead, to wait on him more faithfully to the other world.

“All this while disdain, strengthened by the fury of a furious love, made Andromana stay to the last of the combat; and when she saw us light down to see what help we might do to the helpless Palladius, she came running madly unto us, then no less threatening, when she had no more power to hurt. But when she perceived it was her only son that lay hurt, and that his hurt was so deadly, as that already his life had lost the use of reasonable, and almost sensible part, then only did misfortune lay his own ugliness upon her fault, and make her see what she had done, and to what she was come; especially finding in us rather detestation than pity, considering the loss of that young prince, and resolution presently to depart, which still she laboured to stay. But deprived of all comfort, with eyes full of death, she ran to her son’s dagger, and before we were aware of it, who else would have stayed it, struck herself a mortal wound. But then her love, though not her person, awaked pity in us, and I went to her, while Musidorus laboured about Palladius. But the wound was past the cure of a better surgeon than myself, so as I could but receive some few of her dying words, which were cursings of her ill-set affection, and wishing unto me many crosses and mischances in my love, whensoever I should love, wherein I fear, and only fear that her prayer is from above granted. But the noise of this fight, and issue thereof being blazed by the country people to some noblemen thereabouts; they came thither, and finding the wrong offered us, let us go on our journey, we having recommended those royal bodies unto them to be conveyed to the king of Iberia.”

With that Philoclea seeing the tears stand in his eyes with remembrance of Palladius, but much more of that which thereupon grew, she would needs drink a kiss from those eyes, and he suck another from her lips; whereat she blushed, and yet kissed him again to hide her blushing, which had almost brought Pyrocles into another discourse, but that she with so sweet a rigour forbade him, that he durst not rebel, though he found it a great war to keep that peace, but was fain to go on in his story; but so she absolutely bade him, and he durst not know how to disobey.

“So,” said he, “parting from that place before the sun had much abased himself of his greatest height, we saw sitting upon the dry sands, which yielded, at that time, a very hot reflection, a fair {237} gentlewoman, whose gesture accused her of much sorrow, and every way showed she cared not what pain she put her body to, since the better part, her mind, was laid under so much agony: and so was she dulled, withal, that we could come so near as to hear her speeches, and yet she not perceive the hearers of her lamentation. But well we might understand her at times say, ‘Thou doest kill me with thy unkind falsehood: and it grieves me not to die, but it grieves me that thou art the murderer: neither doth mine own pain so much vex me, as thy error. For God knows, it would not trouble me to be slain for thee, but much it torments me to be slain by thee; thou art untrue, Pamphilus, thou art untrue, and woe is me therefore. How oft did’st thou swear unto me that the sun should lose his light, and the rocks run up and down like little kids, before thou would’st falsify thy faith to me? sun therefore put out thy shining, and rocks run mad for sorrow; for Pamphilus is false. But alas! the sun keeps his light, though thy faith be darkened; the rocks stand still, though thou change like a weather-cock. O fool that I am, that thought I could grasp water, and bind the wind. I might well have known thee by others, but I would not; and rather wished to learn poison by drinking it myself, while my love helped thy words to deceive me. Well, yet I would thou had’st made a better choice when though did’st forsake thy unfortunate Leucippe. But it is no matter, Baccha, thy new mistress, will revenge my wrongs. But do not Baccha, let Pamphilus live happy, though I die.’

“And much more to such like phrase she spoke, but that I, who had occasion to know something of that Pamphilus, stepped to comfort her: and though I could not do that, yet I got thus much knowledge of her, that this being the same Leucippe, to whom the unconstant Pamphilus had betrothed himself, which had moved the other ladies to such indignation as I told you: neither her worthiness, which in truth was great, nor his own suffering for her, which is wont to endear affection, could fetter his fickleness, but that before his marriage day appointed, he had taken to wife that Baccha, of whom she complained, one that in divers places I had heard before placed, as the most impudently unchaste woman of all Asia, and withal of such an imperiousness therein, that she would not stick to employ them whom she made unhappy with her favour, to draw more companions of their folly: in the multitude of whom she did no less glory, than a captain would do of being followed by brave soldiers: waywardly proud; and therefore bold, because extremely faulty: and yet having no good thing to redeem both these, and other unlovely parts, but a little beauty, disgraced with wandering eyes, and unweighed speeches, yet had Pamphilus, for her, left Leucippe, and withal, {238} left his faith; Leucippe, of whom one look, in a clear judgment, would have been more acceptable than all her kindnesses so prodigally bestowed. For myself, the remembrance of his cruel handling Dido, joined to this, stirred me to seek some revenge upon him, but that I thought it should be again for him to lose his life, being so matched: and therefore, leaving him to be punished by his own election, we conveyed Leucippe to a house thereby, dedicated to Vestal nuns, where she resolved to spend all her years, which her youth promised should be many, in bewailing the wrong, and yet praying for the wrong-doer.

“But the next morning, we, having striven with the sun’s earliness, were scarcely beyond the prospect of the high turrets of that building, when there overtook us a young gentleman, for so he seemed to us: but indeed, sweet lady, it was the fair Zelmane, Plexirtus’s daughter, whom unconsulting affection, unfortunately born to me-wards, had made borrow so much of her natural modesty, as to leave her more decent raiments, and taking occasion of Andromana’s tumultuous pursuing us, had apparelled herself like a page, with a pitiful cruelty cutting off her golden hair, leaving nothing, but the short curls, to cover that noble head, but that she wore upon it a fair headpiece, a shield at her back, and a lance in her hand, else disarmed. Her apparel of white, wrought upon with broken knots, her horse, fair and lusty; which she rid so, as might show a fearful boldness, daring to do that which she knew that she knew not how to do: and the sweetness of her countenance did give such a grace to what she did that it did make handsome the unhandsomeness, and make the eye force the mind to believe that there was a praise in that unskilfulness. But she straight approached me, and with few words, which borrowed the help of her countenance to make themselves understood, she desired me to accept her into my service, telling me she was a nobleman’s son of Iberia, her name Diaphantus, who having seen what I had done in that court, had stolen from her father, to follow me. I enquired the particularities of the manner of Andromana’s following me, which by her I understood, she hiding nothing but her sex from me. And still methought I had seen that face, but the great alteration of her fortune, made her far distant from my memory: but liking very well the young gentleman, such I took her to be, admitted this Diaphantus about me, who well showed there is no service like his, that serves because he loves. For though born of princes’ blood, brought up with tenderest education, unapt to service, because a woman, and full of thoughts, because in a strange estate, yet love enjoined such diligence, that no apprentice, no, no bondslave could ever be by fear more ready at all commandments than that young {239} princess was. How often, alas! did her eyes say unto me that they loved? and yet, I not looking for such a matter, had not my conceit open to understand them: how often would she come creeping to me, between gladness to be near me, and fear to offend me? truly I remember, that then I marvelled to see her receive my commandments with sighs, and yet do them with cheerfulness: sometimes answering me in such riddles, as then I thought a childish inexperience, but since returning to my remembrance they have come more clear unto my knowledge: and pardon me, only dear lady, that I use many words, for her affection to me, deserves of me an affectionate speech.

“But in such sort did she serve me in that kingdom of Bithynia, for two months space: in which time we brought to good end a cruel war long maintained between the king of Bithynia and his brother. For my excellent cousin, and I, dividing ourselves to either side, found means, after some trial we had made of ourselves, to get such credit with them, as we brought them to as great peace between themselves as love toward us for having made the peace. Which done, we intended to return through the kingdom of Galatia, called Thrace, to ease the care of our father and mother, who, we were sure, first with the shipwreck, and then with the other dangers we daily passed, should have little rest in their thoughts till they saw us. But we were not entered into that kingdom, when by the noise of a great fight we were guided to a pleasant valley, which like one of those circuses, which in great cities somewhere doth give a pleasant spectacle of running horses, so of either side, stretching itself in a narrow length, was it hemmed in by woody hills, as if indeed nature had meant therein to make a place for beholders. And there we beheld one of the cruellest fights between two knights that ever hath adorned the most martial story. So as I must confess, a while we stood bewondered, another while delighted with the rare beauty thereof; till seeing such streams of blood, as threatened a drowning of life, we galloped toward them to part them. But we were prevented by a dozen armed knights, or rather villains, who using this time of their extreme feebleness, altogether set upon them. But common danger broke off particular discord, so that, though with a dying weakness, with a lively courage they resisted, and by our help drove away, or slew those murdering attemptors: among whom we happened to take alive the principal. But going to disarm those two excellent knights, we found, with no less wonder to us than astonishment to themselves, that they were the two valiant, and indeed famous brothers, Tydeus and Telenor, whose adventure, as afterward we made that ungracious wretch confess, had thus fallen out.

“After the noble prince Leonatus had by his father’s death, succeeded in the kingdom of Galatia, he forgetting all former injuries, had received that naughty Plexirtus into a strange degree of favour, his goodness being as apt to be deceived, as the other’s craft was to deceive; till by plain proof, finding that the ungrateful man went about to poison him, yet would he not suffer his kindness to be overcome, not by justice itself; but calling him to him, used words to this purpose; ‘Plexirtus,’ said he, ‘this wickedness is found by thee; no good deeds of mine have been able to keep it down in thee: all men counsel me to take away thy life, likely to bring forth nothing but as dangerous as wicked effects; but I cannot find it in my heart, remembering what father’s son thou art: but since it is the violence of ambition which perchance pulls thee from thine own judgment, I will see whether the satisfying that, may quiet the ill-working of thy spirits. Not far hence is the great city of Trebizond; which, with the territory about it, anciently pertained unto this crown; now unjustly possessed, and as unjustly abused by those who have neither title to hold it, nor virtue to rule it. To the conquest of that for thyself I will lend thee force, and give thee my right: go therefore, and, with less unnaturalness glut thy ambition there; and that done, if it be possible, learn virtue.’

“Plexirtus, mingling foresworn excuses with false-meant promises, gladly embraced the offer: and hastily sending back for those two brothers, who at that time were with us succouring the gracious queen Erona, by their virtue chiefly, if not only, obtained the conquest of that goodly dominion. Which indeed, done by them, gave them such an authority, that though he reigned, they in effect ruled, most men honouring them because they only deserved honour, and many thinking therein to please Plexirtus, considering how much he was bound unto them: while they likewise, with a certain sincere boldness of self-warranting friendship, accepted all openly and plainly, thinking nothing should ever by Plexirtus be thought too much in them, since all they were was his.

“But he, who by the rules of his own mind, could construe no other end of men’s doings but self-seeking, suddenly feared what they could do, and as suddenly suspected what they would do, and as suddenly hated them, as having both might and mind to do. But dreading their power, standing so strongly in their own valour, and others’ affection, he durst not take open way against them, and as hard it was to take a secret, they being so continually followed by the best, and every way ablest of that region: and therefore used this devilish slight which I will tell you, not doubting, most wicked man, to turn their own friendship toward him to {241} their own destruction. He, knowing that they well knew there was no friendship between him and the new king of Pontus, never since he succoured Leonatus, and us, to his overthrow, gave them to understand, that of late there had passed secret defiance between them, to meet privately at a place appointed. Which though not so fit a thing for men of their greatness, yet was his honour so engaged, as he could not go back. Yet feigning to find himself weak, by some counterfeit infirmity, the day drawing near, he requested each of them to go in his stead, making either of them swear to keep the matter secret, even each from other, delivering the self-same particularities to both; but that he told Tydeus, the king would meet him in a blue armour; and Telenor that it was a black armour: and with wicked subtlety, as if it had been so appointed, caused Tydeus to take a black armour, and Telenor a blue; appointing them ways how to go, so that he knew they should not meet till they came to the place appointed, where each promised to keep silence, lest the king should discover it was not Plexirtus; and there in a wait had he laid those murderers, that who overlived the other should by them be dispatched: he not daring trust no more than those with that enterprise, and yet thinking them too few till themselves, by themselves, were weakened.

“This we learned chiefly by the chief of those way-beaters, after the death of those two worthy brothers, whose love was no less than their valour: but well we might find much thereof by their pitiful lamentation, when they knew their mismeeting, and saw each other, in despite of the surgery we could do unto them, striving who should run fastest to the goal of death: each bewailing the other, and more dying in the other, than in himself; cursing their own hands for doing, and their breasts for not sooner suffering; detesting their unfortunately-spent time in having served so ungrateful a tyrant, and accusing their folly in having believed he could faithfully love, who did not love faithfulness; wishing us to take heed how we placed our goodwill upon any other ground than proof of virtue: since length of acquaintance, mutual secrecies, nor heat of benefits could bind a savage heart; no man being good to other, that is not good in himself. Then, while any hope was, beseeching us to leave the care of him that besought, and only look to the other. But when they found by themselves, and us, no possibility, they desired to be joined; and so embracing and craving that pardon each of other which they denied to themselves, they gave us a most sorrowful spectacle of their death; leaving few in the world behind them, their matches in anything, if they had soon enough known the ground and limits of friendship. But with woeful hearts we caused those bodies to {242} be conveyed to the next town of Bithynia, where we learning thus much, as I have told you, caused the wicked historian to conclude his story with his own well-deserved death.

“But then, I must tell you, I found such woeful countenances in Daiphantus, that I could not much marvel, finding them continue beyond the first assault of pity, how the case of strangers, for further I did not conceive, could so deeply pierce. But the truth indeed is, that partly with the shame and sorrow she took of her father’s faultiness, partly with the fear that the hate I conceived against him, would utterly disgrace her in my opinion, whensoever I should know her, so vehemently perplexed her, that her fair colour decayed, and daily and hastily grew into the very extreme working of sorrowfulness, which oft I sought to learn, and help. But she as fearful as loving, still concealed it: and so decaying still more and more in the excellency of her fairness, but that whatsoever weakness took away, pity seemed to add: yet still she forced herself to wait on me with such care and diligence, as might well show had been taught in no other school but love.

“While we, returning again to embark ourselves for Greece, understood that the mighty Otanes, brother to Barzanes, slain by Musidorus in the battle of the six princes, had entered upon the kingdom of Pontus, partly upon the pretences he had to the crown, but principally, because he would revenge upon him whom he knew we loved, the loss of his brother, thinking, as indeed he had cause, that wheresoever we were, hearing of his extremity, we would come to relieve him; in spite whereof he doubted not to prevail, not only upon the confidence of his own virtue and power, but especially because he had in his company two mighty giants, sons to a couple whom we slew in the same realm; they having been absent at their father’s death, and now returned, willingly entered into his service, hating more than he, both us and that king of Pontus. We therefore with all speed went thitherward, but by the way this fell out, which whensoever I remember without sorrow, I must forget withal, all humanity.

“Poor Diaphantus fell extreme sick, yet would needs conquer the delicacy of her constitution, and force herself to wait on me: till one day going toward Pontus, we met one who in great haste went seeking for Tydeus and Telenor, whose death as yet was not known unto the messenger; who, being their servant, and knowing how dearly they loved Plexirtus, brought them word, how since their departing, Plexirtus was in present danger of a cruel death, if by the valiantness of one of the best knights of the world, he were not rescued: we enquired no further of the matter, being glad he should now to his loss find what an unprofitable treason it had been unto him, to dismember himself of two such friends, {243} and so let the messenger part, not sticking to make him know his master’s destruction by the falsehood of Plexirtus.

“But the grief of that, finding a body already brought to the last degree of weakness, so overwhelmed the little remnant of the spirits left in Daiphantus, that she fell suddenly into deadly swoonings; never coming to herself, but that withal she returned to make most pitiful lamentations; most strange unto us, because we were far from guessing the ground thereof. But finding her sickness such as began to print death in her eyes, we made all haste possible to convey her to the next town: but before we could lay her on a bed, both we, and she might find in herself, that the harbingers of over-hasty death had prepared his lodging in that dainty body, which she undoubtedly feeling, with a weak cheerfulness showed comfort therein, and then desiring us both to come near her, and that nobody else might be present; with pale, and yet, even in paleness, lovely lips: ‘Now or never, and never indeed but now it is time for me,’ said she, ‘to speak: and I thank death which gives me leave to discover that, the suppressing whereof perchance hath been the sharpest spur that hath hasted my race to this end. Know then my lords, and especially you my lord and master Pyrocles, that your page Daiphantus is the unfortunate Zelmane, who for your sake caused my, as unfortunate, lover and cousin Palladius, to leave his father’s court, and consequently, both him and my aunt, his mother, to lose their lives. For your sake myself have become, of a princess, a page, and for your sake have put off the apparel of a woman, and, if you judge not more mercifully, the modesty.’ We were amazed at her speech, and then had, as it were, new eyes given us to perceive that which before had been a present stranger to our minds: for indeed forthwith we knew it to be the face of Zelmane, whom before we had known in the court of Iberia. And sorrow and pity laying her pain upon me, I comforted her the best I could by the tenderness of goodwill, pretending indeed better hope than I had of her recovery.

“But she that had inward ambassadors from the tyrant that shortly would oppress her: ‘No, my dear master,’ said she, ‘I neither hope nor desire to live. I know you would never have loved me,’ and with that word she wept, ‘nor, alas! had it been reason you should, considering many ways my unworthiness. It sufficeth me that the strange course I have taken, shall to your remembrance witness my love; and yet this breaking of my heart, before I would discover my pain will make you, I hope, think that I was not altogether unmodest. Think of me so, dear master, and that thought shall be my life;’ and with that languishingly looking upon me; ‘and I pray you,’ said she, ‘even by those dying eyes of {244} mine, which are only sorry to die because they shall lose your sight, and by those polled locks of mine which, while they were long, were the ornament of my sex, now in their short curls, the testimony of my servitude, and by the service I have done you, which God knows hath been full of love, think of me after my death with kindness, though you cannot with love. And whensoever ye shall make any other lady happy with your well-placed affection, if you tell her my folly, I pray you speak of it, not with scorn, but with pity.’ I assure you, dear princess, of my life (for how could it be otherwise) her words and her manner, with the lively consideration of her love, so pierced me, that though I had divers griefs before, yet methought I never felt till then how much sorrow infeebleth all resolution: for I could not choose but yield to the weakness of abundant weeping; in truth with such grief, that I could willingly at that time have changed lives with her.

“But when she saw my tears, ‘O God,’ said she, ‘how largely am I recompensed for my losses? why then,’ said she, ‘I may take boldness to make some requests unto you.’ I besought her to do, vowing the performance, though my life were the price thereof. She showed great joy. ‘The first,’ said she, ‘is this, that you will pardon my father the displeasure you have justly received against him, and for this once succour him out of the danger wherein he is: I hope he will amend: and I pray you, whensoever you remember him to be the faulty Plexirtus, remember withal that he is Zelmane’s father. The second is, that when you come once into Greece, you will take unto yourself this name, though unlucky, of Daiphantus, and vouchsafe to be called by it: for so shall I be sure you shall have cause to remember me, and let it please your noble cousin to be called Palladius, that I may do that right to that poor prince, that his name yet may live upon the earth in so excellent a person: and so between you, I trust sometimes your unlucky page shall be, perhaps with a sigh, mentioned; lastly, let me be buried here obscurely, not suffering my friends to know my fortune (till, when you are safely returned to your own country) you cause my bones to be conveyed thither, and, laid I beseech you, in some place where yourself vouchsafe sometimes to resort.’ Alas! small petitions for such a suitor; which yet she so earnestly craved that I was fain to swear the accomplishment. And then kissing me, and often desiring me not to condemn her of lightness, in mine arms, she delivered her pure soul to the purest place, leaving me as full of agony as kindness, pity, and sorrow could make an honest heart. For I must confess for true, that if my stars had not only reserved me for you, there else perhaps I might have loved, and, which had been most strange, begun my love after death: whereof let it be the less marvel, because somewhat {245} she did resemble you, though as far short of your perfection as herself dying, was of herself flourishing: yet something there was, which, when I saw a picture of yours, brought again her figure into my remembrance, and made my heart as apt to receive the wound, as the power of your beauty with unresistable force to pierce.

“But we in woeful, and yet private, manner burying her, performed her commandment: and then enquiring of her father’s estate, certainly learned that he was presently to be succoured, or by death to pass the need of succour. Therefore we determined to divide ourselves; I, according to my vow, to help him, and Musidorus toward the king of Pontus, who stood in no less need than immediate succour: and even ready to depart one from the other, there came a messenger from him, who after some enquiry found us, giving us to understand that he, trusting upon us two, had appointed the combat between him and us, against Otanes and the two giants. Now the day was so accorded, as it was impossible for me both to succour Plexirtus, and be there, where my honour was not only so far engaged, but, by the strange working of unjust fortune, I was to leave the standing by Musidorus, whom better than myself I loved, to go save him, whom for just causes, I hated. But my promise given, and given to Zelmane, and to Zelmane dying, prevailed more with me than my friendship to Musidorus, though certainly I may affirm, nothing had so great rule in my thoughts as that. But my promise carried me the easier, because Musidorus himself would not suffer me to break it. And so with heavy minds, more careful each of other’s success than of our own, we parted; I toward the place, where I understood Plexirtus was prisoner to an ancient lord, absolutely governing a goodly castle, with a large territory about it, whereof he acknowledged no other sovereign but himself, whose hate to Plexirtus grew for a kinsman of his whom he maliciously had murdered, because in the time that he reigned in Galatia, he found him apt to practice for the restoring of his virtuous brother Leonatus. This old knight still thirsting for revenge, used as the way to it a policy, which this occasion, I will tell you prepared for him. Plexirtus in his youth had married Zelmane’s mother, who dying of that only childbirth, he a widower and not yet a king, haunted the court of Armenia, where, as he was cunning to win favour, he obtained great good liking of Artaxia; which he pursued: till, being called home by his father, he falsely got his father’s kingdom: and then neglected his former love: till, thrown out of that by our means, before he was deeply rooted in it, and by and by again placed in Trebizond, understanding that Artaxia by her brother’s death was become queen of Armenia, he was hotter {246} than ever in that pursuit, which being understood by this old knight, he forged such a letter, as might be written from Artaxia, entreating his present, but very private, repair thither, giving him faithful promise of present marriage: a thing far from her thought, having faithfully and publicly protested that she would never marry any, but some such prince who would give sure proof that by his means we were destroyed. But he no more witty to frame, than blind to judge hopes, bit hastily at the bait, and in private manner posted toward her, but by the way he was met by this knight, far better accompanied, who quickly laid hold of him, and condemned him to a death, cruel enough, if anything may be both cruel and just. For he caused him to be kept in a miserable prison, till a day appointed, at which time he would deliver him to be devoured by a monstrous beast of most ugly shape, armed like a rhinoceros, as strong as an elephant, as fierce as a lion, as nimble as a leopard, and as cruel as a tiger; whom he having kept in a strong place, from the first youth of it, now thought no fitter match than such a beastly monster with a monstrous tyrant; proclaiming yet withal, that if any so well loved him as to venture their lives against his beast for him, if they overcame, he should be saved: not caring how many they were, such confidence he had in that monstrous strength, but especially hoping to entrap thereby the great courages of Tydeus and Telenor, whom he no less hated, because they had been principal instruments of the other’s power.

“I dare say, if Zelmane had known what danger I should have passed, she would rather have let her father to perish, than me to have bidden that adventure. But my word was past; and truly the hardness of the enterprise was not so much a bit as a spur unto me, knowing well that the journey of high honour lies not in plain ways. Therefore going thither, and taking sufficient security that Plexirtus should be delivered if I were victorious, I undertook the combat: and to make short, excellent lady, and not to trouble your ears with recounting a terrible matter, so was my weakness blessed from above that, without dangerous wounds, I slew that monster, which hundreds durst not attempt; to so great admiration of many, who from a safe place might look on that there was order given, to have the fight both by sculpture and picture, celebrated in most parts of Asia. And the old nobleman so well liked me that he loved me; only bewailing my virtue had been employed to save a worse monster than I killed: whom yet, according to faith given, he delivered, and accompanied me to the kingdom of Pontus, whither I would needs in all speed go, to see whether it were possible for me, if perchance the day had been delayed, to come to the combat: but that, before I came, had been thus finished.

“The virtuous Leonatus understanding two so good friends of his were to be in that danger, would perforce be one himself; where he did valiantly, and so did the king of Pontus. But the truth is, that both they being sore hurt, the incomparable Musidorus finished the combat by the death of both the giants, and the taking of Otanes prisoner. To whom as he gave his life, so he got a noble friend, for so he gave his word to be, and he is well known to think himself greater in being subject to that, than in the greatness of his principality.

“But thither, understanding of our being there, flocked great multitudes of many great persons, and even of princes, especially those whom we had made beholding unto us: as, the kings of Phrygia, Bithynia, with those two hurt of Pontus and Galatia, and Otanes the prisoner, by Musidorus set free; and thither came Plexirtus of Trebizond, and Antiphilus then king of Lycia; with as many more great princes, drawn either by our reputation, or by willingness to acknowledge themselves obliged unto us for what we had done for the others. So as in those parts of the world, I think, in many hundreds of years there was not seen so royal an assembly, where nothing was let pass to do us the highest honours; which such persons, who might command both purses and inventions, could perform: all from all sides bringing unto us right royal presents, which we, to avoid both unkindness and importunity, liberally received; and not content therewith, would needs accept as from us their crowns, and acknowledge to hold them of us: with many other excessive honours, which would not suffer the measure of this short leisure to describe unto you.

“But we quickly aweary thereof, hasted to Greece-ward, led thither partly with the desire of our parents, but hastened principally because I understood that Anaxius with open mouth of defamation had gone thither to seek me, and was now come to Peloponnesus, where from court to court he made enquiry of me, doing yet himself so noble deeds as might hap to authorize an ill opinion of me. We therefore suffered but short delays, desiring to take this country in our way, so renowned over the world that no prince could pretend height, nor beggar lowness, to bar him from the sound thereof: renowned indeed, not so much for the ancient praises attributed thereunto, as for the having in it Argalus and Amphialus, two knights of such rare prowess, as we desired especially to know, and yet by far, not so much for that, as without suffering of comparison for the beauty of you and your sister, which makes all indifferent judges that speak thereof, account this country as a temple of deities. But those causes indeed moving us to come by this land, we embarked ourselves in the next port, whither all those princes (saving Antiphilus, who {248} returned, as he pretended, not able to tarry longer from Erona) conveyed us. And there found we a ship most royally furnished by Plexirtus, who had made all things so proper, as well for our defence, as ease, that all the other princes greatly commended him for it, who seeming a quite altered man, had nothing but repentance in his eyes, friendship in his gesture, and virtue in his mouth: so that we, who had promised the sweet Zelmane to pardon him, now not only forgave, but began to favour, persuading ourselves with a youthful credulity that perchance things were not so evil as we took them, and as it were, desiring our own memory that it might be so. But so were we licensed from those princes, truly not without tears, especially of the virtuous Leonatus, who with the king of Pontus would have come with us, but that we, in respect of the one’s young wife, and both their new settled kingdoms, would not suffer it. Then would they have sent whole fleets to guard us; but we that desired to pass secretly into Greece, made them leave that motion when they found that more ships than one would be displeasing unto us. But so committing ourselves unto the uncertain discretion of the wind, we (then determining as soon as we came to Greece to take the names of Daiphantus and Palladius, as well for our own promises to Zelmane, as because we desired to come unknown into Greece) left the Asian shore full of princely persons, who even upon their knees recommended our safeties to the devotion of their chief desires, among whom none had been so officious, though I dare affirm, all quite contrary to his unfaithfulness, as Plexirtus.

“And so having failed almost two days, looking for nothing, but when we might look upon the land, a grave man, whom we had seen of great trust with Plexirtus, and was sent as our principal guide, came unto us, and with a certain kind manner mixed with shame, and repentance, began to tell us that he had taken such a love unto us, considering our youth and fame, that though he were a servant, and a servant of such trust about Plexirtus, as that he had committed unto him even those secrets of his heart, which abhorred all other knowledge, yet he rather chose to reveal at this time a most pernicious counsel, than by concealing it bring to ruin those whom he could not choose but honour. So went he on, and told us, that Plexirtus (in hope thereby to have Artaxia, endowed with the great kingdom of Armenia, to his wife) had given him order, when we were near Greece, to find some opportunity to murder us, bidding him to take us asleep, because he had seen what we could do waking. ‘Now, Sirs,’ said he, ‘I would rather a thousand times lose my life than have my remembrance, while I live, poisoned with such a mischief: and therefore if it were only I, that knew herein the king’s order, then should my disobedience {249} be a warrant of your safety. But to one more,’ said he, ‘namely the captain of the ship, Plexirtus hath opened so much touching the effect of murdering you, though I think laying the cause rather upon an old grudge, than his hope of Artaxia. And myself, before the consideration of your excellencies had drawn love and pity into my mind, imparted it to such, as I thought fittest for such a mischief: therefore I wish you to stand upon your guard, assuring you that what I can do for your safety, you shall see, if it come to the push, by me performed.’ We thanked him, as the matter indeed deserved, and from that time would no more disarm ourselves, nor the one sleep without his friend’s eyes waked for him; so that it delayed the going forward of their bad enterprise, while they thought it rather chance, than providence, which made us so behave ourselves.

“But when we came within half a day’s sailing of the shore, so that they saw it was speedily, or not at all to be done; then, and I remember it was about the first watch in the night, came the captain and whispered the counsellor in the ear: but he, as it would seem, dissuaded him from it: the captain, who had been a pirate from his youth, and often blooded in it, with a loud voice swore that if Plexirtus bade him, he would not stick to kill God himself. And therewith called his mates, and in the King’s name willed them to take us alive or dead, encouraging them with the spoil of us, which he said, and indeed was true, would yield many exceeding rich jewels. But the counsellor, according to his promise, commanded them they should not commit such a villainy, protesting that he would stand between them and the king’s anger therein. Wherewith the captain enraged: ‘Nay,’ said he, ‘then we must begin with this traitor himself,’ and therewith gave him a sore blow upon the head, who honestly did the best he could to revenge himself.

“But then we knew it time rather to encounter, than wait for mischief. And so against the captain we went, who straight was environed with most part of the soldiers and mariners. And yet the truth is, there were some, whom either the authority of the counsellor, doubt of the king’s mind, or liking of us, made draw their swords of our side, so that quickly it grew a most confused fight. For the narrowness of the place, the darkness of time, and the uncertainty in such a tumult how to know friends from foes, made the rage of the swords rather guide than be guided by their masters. For my cousin and me, truly I think we never performed less in any place, doing no other hurt than the defence of ourselves, and succouring them who came, for it, drove us to: for not discerning perfectly, who were for, or against us, we thought it less evil to spare a foe, than spoil a friend. But from the highest {250} to the lowest part of the ship there was no place left, without cries of murdering, and murdered persons. The captain I happened a while to fight withal, but was driven to part with him by hearing the cry of the counsellor, who received a mortal wound, mistaken of one of his own side.

“Some of the wiser would call to parley, and wish peace: but while the words of peace were in their mouths, some of their evil auditors gave them death for their hire. So that no man almost could conceive hope of living, but by being last alive: and therefore every one was willing to make himself room, by dispatching almost any other: so that the great number in the ship was reduced to exceeding few, when of those few the most part weary of those troubles, leapt into the boat, which was fast to the ship; but while they that were first were cutting off the rope that tied it, others came leaping in so disorderly that they drowned both the boat and themselves.

“But while even in that little remnant, like the children of Cadmus, we continued still to slay one another, a fire, which, whether by the desperate malice of some, or intention to separate, or accidentally, while all things were cast up and down, it should seem had taken a good while before, but never heeded of us; who only thought to preserve or revenge, now violently burst out in many places and began to master the principal parts of the ship. Then necessity made us see, that a common enemy sets one at a civil war: for that little all we are, as if we had been waged by some man to quench a fire, straight went to resist that furious enemy by all art and labour: but it was too late, for already it did embrace and devour from the stern to the waist of the ship: so as labouring in vain, we were driven to get up to the prow of the ship, by the work of nature seeking to preserve life as long as we could; while truly it was a strange and ugly sight to see so huge a fire, as it quickly grew to be in the sea; and in the night, as if it had come to light as to death. And by and by it had burned off the mast, which all this while had proudly borne the sail, the wind, as might seem, delighted to carry fire and blood in his mouth, but now it fell overboard, and the fire growing nearer us, it was not only terrible in respect of what we were to attend, but insupportable through the heat of it.

“So that we were constrained to bide it no longer, but disarming and stripping ourselves, and laying ourselves upon such things as we thought might help our swimming to the land, too far for our strength to bear us, my cousin and I threw ourselves into the sea. But I had swam a very little way when I felt, by reason of a wound I had, that I should not be able to abide the travel: and therefore seeing the mast, whose tackling had been burnt off, float {251} clear from the ship, I swam unto it, and getting on it, I found mine own sword, which by chance, when I threw it away, caught by a piece of canvas, had hung to the mast. I was glad because I loved it well, but gladder, when I saw at the other end the captain of the ship, and of all this mischief, who having a long pike, belike had borne himself up with that till he had set himself upon the mast. But when I perceived him, ‘Villain,’ said I, ‘dost thou think to over-live so many honest men whom thy falsehood hath brought to destruction?’ with that bestriding the mast, I got by little and little towards him after such a manner as boys are wont, if ever you saw that sport, when they ride the wild mare. And he perceiving my intention, like a fellow that had much more courage than honesty, set himself to resist: but I had in short space gotten within him, and, giving him a sound blow, sent him to feed fishes. But there myself remained, until by pirates I was taken up, and among them again taken prisoner, and brought into Laconia.”

“But what,” said Philoclea, “became of your cousin Musidorus?” “Lost,” said Pyrocles. “Ah, my Pyrocles,” said Philoclea, “I am glad I have taken you. I perceive you lovers do not always say truly: as though I knew not your cousin Dorus the shepherd?” “Life of my desires,” said Pyrocles, “what is mine, even to my soul, is yours, but the secret of my friend is not mine. But if you know so much, then I may truly say, he is lost since he is no more his own. But I perceive your noble sister and you are great friends, and well doth it become you so to be.” “But go forward, dear Pyrocles, I long to hear out till your meeting me: for there to me-ward is the best part of your story.” “Ah sweet Philoclea,” said Pyrocles, “do you think I can think so precious leisure as this well spent in talking? are your eyes a fit book, think you, to read a tale upon? is my love quiet enough to be an historian? dear princess, be gracious unto me.” And then he fain would have remembered to have forgot himself. But she with a sweetly disobeying grace, desired him that her desire once for ever might serve, that no spot might disgrace that love which shortly she hoped should be to the world warrantable. Fain he would not have heard, till she threatened anger; and then the poor lover durst not, because he durst not. “Nay, I pray thee, dear Pyrocles,” said she, “let me have my story.” “Sweet princess,” said he, “give my thoughts a little respite: and if it please you, since this time must be so spoiled, yet it shall suffer the less harm if you vouchsafe to bestow your voice, and let me know how the good queen Erona was betrayed into such danger, and why Plangus sought me. For indeed I should pity greatly any mischance fallen to that princess.” “I will,” said Philoclea, smiling, “so you {252} give me your word your hands shall be quiet auditors.” “They shall,” said he, “because subject.”

Then began she to speak, but with so pretty and delightful a majesty, when she set her countenance to tell the matter, that Pyrocles could not choose but rebel so far as to kiss her. She would have pulled her head away, and spoke, but while she spoke, he kissed, and it seemed he fed upon her words; but she got away. “How will you have your discourse,” said she, “without you let my lips alone?” He yielded, and took her hand. “On this,” said he, “will I revenge my wrong;” and so began to make much of that hand, when her tale, and his delight were interrupted by Miso, who taking her time, while Basilius’s back was turned, came unto them, and told Philoclea, she deserved she knew what for leaving her mother, being evil at ease, to keep company with strangers. But Philoclea telling her that she was there by her father’s commandment, she went away muttering that though her back and her shoulders and her neck were broken, yet as long as her tongue would wag, it should do her errand to her mother; and so went up to Gynecia, who was at that time miserably vexed with this manner of dream. It seemed unto her to be in a place full of thorns, which so molested her that she could neither abide standing still, nor tread safely going forward. In this case she thought Zelmane being upon a fair hill, delightful to the eye, and easy in appearance, called her thither, whither with such anguish being come, Zelmane was vanished and she found nothing but a dead body like unto her husband, which seeming at the first with a strange smell to infect her, as she was ready likewise within a while to die; the dead body, she thought, took her in his arms, and said, “Gynecia, leave all, for here is thy only rest.”

But remembering herself, and seeing Basilius by (her guilty conscience more suspecting than being suspected) she turned her call, and called for Philoclea. Miso forthwith like a valiant shrew, looking at Basilius, as though she would speak though she died for it, told Gynecia that her daughter had been a whole hour together in secret talk with Zelmane. “And,” said she, “for my part I could not be heard, your daughters are brought up in such awe, though I told her of your pleasure sufficiently.” Gynecia as if she had heard her last doom pronounced against her, with a side look and changed countenance, “O my lord,” said she, “what mean you to suffer those young folks together?” Basilius, that aimed nothing at the mark of her suspicion, smiling, took her in his arms: “Sweet wife,” said he, “I thank you for your care of your child; but they must be youths of other metal than Zelmane that can endanger her.” “O but——,” cried Gynecia, and therewith {253} she stayed, for then indeed she did suffer a right conflict betwixt the force of love, and rage of jealousy. Many times was she about to satisfy the spite of her mind, and tell Basilius how she knew Zelmane to be far otherwise than the outward appearance. But those many times were all put back by the manifold objections of her vehement love. Fain she would have barred her daughter’s hap, but loth she was to cut off her own hope. But now, as if her life had been set upon a wager of quick rising, as weak as she was, she got up; though Basilius (with a kindness flowing only from the fountain of unkindness, being indeed desirous to win his daughter as much time as might be) was loth to suffer it, swearing he saw sickness in her face, and therefore was loth she should adventure the air.

But the great and wretched lady Gynecia, possessed with those devils of love and jealousy, did rid herself from her tedious husband: and taking nobody with her, going toward them; “O jealousy,” said she, “the frenzy of wise folks, the well-wishing spite, and unkind carefulness, the self-punishment for other’s faults, and self-misery in other’s happiness, the cousin of envy, daughter of love, and mother of hate, how could’st thou so quietly get thee a seat in the unquiet heart of Gynecia! Gynecia,” said she sighing, “thought wise and once virtuous! alas! it is thy breeder’s power which plants thee there: it is the flaming agony of affection, that works the chilling access of thy fever, in such sort, that nature gives place; the growing of my daughter seems the decay of myself; the blessings of a mother turn to the curses of a competitor; and the fair face of Philoclea appears more horrible in my sight than the image of death.” Then remembered she this song, which she thought took a right measure of her present mind.

But her unleisured thoughts ran not over the ten first words; but going with a pace not so much too fast for her body, as slow for her mind, she found them together, who after Miso’s departure had left their tale, and determined what to say to Basilius. But full abashed was poor Philoclea, whose conscience now began to know cause of blushing, for first salutation, receiving an eye from her mother, full of the same disdainful scorn which Pallas showed to poor Arachne that durst contend with her for the price of well weaving: yet did the force of love so much rule her that, though for Zelmane’s sake she did detest her, yet for Zelmane’s sake she used no harder words to her than to bid her go home, and accompany her solitary father.

Then began she to display to Zelmane the store-house of her deadly desires, when suddenly the confused rumour of a mutinous multitude gave just occasion to Zelmane to break off any such conference, for well she found they were not friendly voices they heard, and to retire with as much diligence as conveniently they could towards the lodge. Yet before they could win the lodge by twenty paces, they were overtaken by an unruly sort of clowns, and other rebels, which like a violent flood, were carried, they themselves knew not whither. But as soon as they came within perfect discerning those ladies, like enraged beasts, without respect of their estates, or pity of their sex, they began to run against them, as right villains thinking ability to do hurt to be a great advancement; yet so many as they were, so many almost were their minds, all knit together only in madness. Some cried, “take;” some, “kill;” some, “save.” But even they that cried “save,” ran for company with them that meant to kill. Everyone commanded, none obeyed, he only seemed chief captain, that was most rageful.

Zelmane, whose virtuous courage was ever awake, drew out her sword, which upon those ill-armed churls giving as many wounds as blows, and as many deaths almost as wounds, lightning courage, and thundering smart upon them, kept them at a bay, while the two ladies got themselves into the lodge, out of the which Basilius, having put on an armour long untried, came to prove his authority among his subjects, or at least, to adventure his life with his dear mistress, to whom he brought a shield, while the ladies trembling attended by the issue of this dangerous adventure. But Zelmane made them perceive the odds between an eagle and a kite, with such nimble steadiness, and assured nimbleness, that while one was running back for fear, his fellow had her sword in his guts.

And by and by was her heart and her help well increased by the coming in of Dorus, who having been making of hurdles for {255} his master’s sheep, heard the horrible cries of this mad multitude, and having straight represented before the eyes of his careful love, the peril wherein the soul of his soul might be, he went to Pamela’s lodge, but found her in a cave hard by, with Mopsa and Dametas, who at that time would not have opened the entry to his father. And therefore leaving them there, as in a place safe, both for being strong and unknown, he ran as the noise guided him. But when he saw his friend in such danger among them, anger and contempt, asking no counsel but of courage, made him run among them, with no other weapon but his sheep-hook, and with that overthrowing one of the villains, took away a two-hand sword from him, and withal helped him from ever being ashamed of losing it. Then lifting up his brave head, and flashing terror into their faces, he made arms and legs go complain to the earth, how evil their masters had kept them. Yet the multitude still growing, and the very killing wearying them, fearing lest in long fight they should be conquered with conquering, they drew back towards the lodge; but drew back in such sort, that still their terror went forward like a valiant mastiff, whom, when his master pulls back by the tail from the bear, with whom he had already interchanged a hateful embracement, though his pace be backward, his gesture is forward, his teeth and his eyes threatening more in the retiring than they did in the advancing: so guided they themselves homeward, never stepping step backward, but that they proved themselves masters of the ground where they stepped.

Yet among the rebels there was a dapper fellow, a tailor by occupation, who fetching his courage only from their going back, began to bow his knees, and very fencer-like to draw near to Zelmane. But as he came within her distance, turning his sword very nicely about his crown, Basilius, with a side blow, struck off his nose, he (being suitor to a seamster’s daughter, and therefore not a little grieved for such a disgrace) stooped down, because he had heard that if it were fresh put to, it would cleave on again. But as his hand was on the ground to bring his nose to his head, Zelmane with a blow sent his head to his nose. That saw a butcher, a butcherly chuff indeed, who that day was sworn brother to him in a cup of wine, and lifted up a great leaver, calling Zelmane all the vile names of a butcherly eloquence. But she letting slip the blow of the leaver, hit him so surely upon the side of the face that she left nothing but the nether jaw, where the tongue still wagged, as willing to say more if his master’s remembrance had served. “O!” said a miller that was half drunk, “see the luck of a good-fellow,” and with that word ran with a pitchfork at Dorus; but the nimbleness of the wine carried his head so fast that it made it {256} over-run his feet, so that he fell withal just between the legs of Dorus, who setting his foot on his neck, though he offered two milch kine and four fat hogs for his life, thrust his sword quite through, from one ear to the other; which took it very unkindly, to feel such news before they heard of them, instead of hearing, to be put to such feeling. But Dorus, leaving the miller to vomit his soul out in wine and blood, with his two-hand sword struck off another quite by the waist, who the night before had dreamed he was grown a couple, and, interpreting it that he should be married, had bragged of his dream that morning among his neighbours. But that blow astonished quite a poor painter, who stood by with a pike in his hands. This painter was to counterfeit the skirmish between the Centaurs and Lapithes, and had been very desirous to see some notable wounds, to be able the more lively to express them; and this morning, being carried by the stream of this company, the foolish fellow was even delighted to see the effect of blows. But this last, happening near him, so amazed him that he stood stock still, while Dorus, with a turn of his sword, struck off both his hands. And so the painter returned, well skilled in wounds, but with never a hand to perform his skill.

In this manner they recovered the lodge, and gave the rebels a face of wood of the outside. But they then, though no more furious, yet more outrageous when they saw no resister, went about with pickaxe to the wall, and fire to the gate, to get themselves entrance. Then did the two ladies mix fear with love, especially Philoclea, who ever caught hold of Zelmane, so, by the folly of love, hindering the succour which she desired. But Zelmane seeing no way of defence, nor time to deliberate (the number of those villains still increasing, and their madness still increasing with their number) thought it the only means, to go beyond their expectation with an unused boldness, and with danger to avoid danger, and therefore opened again the gates; and Dorus and Basilius standing ready for her defence, she issued again among them. The blows she had dealt before, though all in general were hasty, made each of them in particular take breath, before they brought them suddenly over-near her, so that she had time to get up to the judgment-seat of the prince, which, according to the guess of that country, was before the court gate. There she paused a while, making sign with her hand unto them, and withal, speaking aloud that she had something to say unto them that would please them. But she was answered a while with nothing but shouts and cries; and some beginning to throw stones at her, not daring to approach her. But at length a young farmer, who might do most among the country sort, and was caught in a little affection towards Zelmane, hoping by his kindness to have some {257} good of her, desired them if they were honest men, to hear the woman speak. “Fie fellows, fie,” said he, “what will all the maids in our town say if so many tall men shall be afraid to hear a fair wench? I swear unto you, by no little ones, I had rather give my team of oxen than we should show ourselves so uncivil wights. Besides, I tell you true, I have heard it of old men counted wisdom, to hear much, and say little.” His sententious speech so prevailed, that the most part began to listen. Then she, with such efficacy of gracefulness, and such a quiet magnanimity represented in her face in this uttermost peril, that the more the barbarous people looked, the more it fixed their looks upon her, in this sort began unto them.

“It is no small comfort unto me,” said she, “having to speak something unto you for your own behoofs, to find that I have to deal with such a people, who show indeed in themselves the right nature of valour: which as it leaves no violence unattempted, while the choler is nourished with resistance, so when the subject of their wrath doth of itself unlooked-for offer itself into their hands, it makes them at least take a pause before they determine cruelties. Now then first, before I come to the principal matter, have I to say unto you; that your prince Basilius himself in person is within this lodge, and was one of the three, whom a few of you went about to fight withal:” and (this she said, not doubting but they knew it well enough, but because she would have them imagine that the prince might think that they did not know it) “by him I am sent unto you, as from a prince to his well-approved subjects, nay as from a father to beloved children, to know what it is that hath bred just quarrel among you, or who they be that have any way wronged you; what it is with which you are displeased, or of which you are desirous? This he requires, and indeed, for he knows your faithfulness, he commands you presently to set down and choose among yourselves, someone, who may relate your griefs or demands unto him.”

This, being more than they hoped for from their prince, assuaged well their fury, and many of them consented, especially the young farmer helping on, who meant to make one of the demands that he might have Zelmane for his wife, but when they began to talk of their griefs, never bees made such a confused humming: the town dwellers demanding putting down of imposts; the country fellows laying out of commons: some would have the prince keep his court in one place, some in another: all cried out to have new counsellors; but when they should think of any new, they liked them as well as any other that they could remember, especially they would have the treasure so looked unto, as that he should never need to take any more subsidies. At length they {258} fell to direct contrarieties. For the artisans they would have corn and wine set at a lower price, and bound to be kept so still: the ploughmen, vine-labourers, and the farmers would none of that. The countrymen demanded that every man might be free in the chief towns; that could not the burgesses like of. The peasants would have all the gentlemen destroyed, the citizens, especially such as cooks, barbers, and those other that lived most on gentlemen, would but have them reformed. And of each side were like divisions, one neighbourhood beginning to find fault with another; but no confusion was greater than of particular men’s likings and dislikings: one dispraising such a one, whom another praised, and demanding such a one to be punished, whom the other would have exalted. No less ado was there about choosing him, who should be their spokesman. The finer sort of burgesses, as merchants, prentices, and cloth-workers, because of their riches, disdaining the baser occupations; and they because of their number, as much disdaining them; all they scorning the countrymen’s ignorance, and the countrymen suspecting as much their cunning: so that Zelmane (finding that their united rage was now grown, not only to dividing, but to a crossing of one another, and that the mislike grown among themselves did well allay the heat against her) made tokens again unto them, as though she took great care of their well-doing, and were afraid of their falling out, that she would speak unto them. They now grow jealous one of another, the stay having engendered division, and division having manifested their weakness, were willing enough to hear, the most part striving to show themselves willinger than their fellows: which Zelmane, by the acquaintance she had had with such kind of humours soon perceiving, with an angerless bravery, and an unabashed mildness, in this manner spoke unto them.

“An unused thing it is, and I think not heretofore seen, O Arcadians, that a woman should give public counsel to men, a stranger to the country people, and that lastly in such a presence by a private person, the regal throne should be possessed. But the strangeness of your action makes that used for virtue, which your violent necessity imposeth. For certainly a woman may well speak to such men, who have forgotten all man-like government; a stranger may with reason instruct such subjects that neglect due points of subjection; and is it marvel this place is entered into by another, since your own prince, after thirty years’ government, dare not show his face unto faithful people? hear therefore, O Arcadians, and be ashamed; against whom hath this zealous rage been stirred? whither have been bent those manful weapons of yours? in this quiet harmless lodge there be harboured no Argians, your ancient enemies; nor Laconians, your now {259} feared neighbours. Here be neither hard landlords, nor biting usurers. Here lodge none, but such, as either you have great cause to love, or no cause to hate: here being none, besides your prince, princess, and their children, but myself. Is it I then, O Arcadians, against whom your anger is armed? am I the mark of your vehement quarrel? if it be so, that innocency shall not be stopped for fury; if it be so, that the law of hospitality, so long and holily observed among you, may not defend a stranger fled to your arms for succour: if in fine, it be so, that so many valiant men’s courages can be inflamed to the mischief of one silly woman; I refuse not to make my life a sacrifice to your wrath. Exercise on me your indignation, so it go no further; I am content to pay the great favours I have received among you, with my life not ill-deserving: I present here unto you, O Arcadians, if that may satisfy you; rather than you, called over the world the wise and quiet Arcadians, should be so vain, as to attempt that alone, which all the rest of your country will abhor; than you shall show yourselves so ungrateful as to forget the fruit of so many years peaceable government; or so unnatural, as not to have with the holy name of your natural prince, any fury overmastered. For such a hellish madness, I know, did never enter into your hearts as to attempt anything against his person; which no successor, though never so hateful, will ever leave, for his own sake, unrevenged. Neither can your wonted valour be turned to such a baseness, as instead of a prince, delivered unto you by so many royal ancestors, to take the tyrannous yoke of your fellow subject, in whom the innate means will bring forth ravenous covetousness and the newness of his estate suspectful cruelty. Imagine, what could your enemies more wish unto you than to see your own estate with your own hands undermined? O what would your forefathers say if they lived at this time, and saw their offspring defacing such an excellent principality, which they with much labour and blood so wisely have established? do you think them fools, that saw you should not enjoy your vines, your cattle, no not your wives and children without government? and that there could be no government without a magistrate, and no magistrate without obedience, and no obedience where everyone upon his own private passion may interpret the doings of the rulers? let your wits make your present example a lesson to you. What sweetness, in good faith, find you in your present condition; what choice of choice find you, if you had lost Basilius? under whose ensign would you go, if your enemies should invade you? if you cannot agree upon one to speak for you, how will you agree upon one to fight for you? but with this fear of I cannot tell what one is troubled, and with that past wrong another is {260} grieved. And I pray you did the sun ever bring you a fruitful harvest but that it was more hot than pleasant? have any of you children that be not sometimes cumbersome? have any of you fathers that be not sometimes wearish? what, shall we curse the sun, hate our children, or disobey our fathers—but what need I use those words, since I see in your countenances, now virtuously settled, nothing else but love and duty to him, by whom for your only sakes, the government is embraced. For all that is done, he doth not only pardon you, but thank you; judging the action by the minds, and not the minds by the action. Your griefs, and desires whatsoever, and whensoever you list, he will consider of, and to his consideration it is reason you should refer them. So then, to conclude; the uncertainty of his estate made you take arms; now you see him well; with the same love lay them down. If now you end, as I know you will, he will make no other account of this matter, but as of a vehement, I must confess, over vehement affection, the only continuance might prove a wickedness. But it is not so, I see very well, you began with zeal, and will end with reverence.”

The action Zelmane used, being beautified by nature and apparelled with skill, her gestures being such, that, as her words did paint out her mind, so they served as a shadow to make the picture more lively and sensible, with the sweet clearness of her voice, rising and falling kindly as the nature of the word and efficacy of the matter required, altogether in such an admirable person, whose incomparable valour they had well felt, whose beauty did pierce through the thick dullness of their senses, gave such a way unto her speech through the rugged wilderness of their imaginations, who, besides they were stricken in admiration of her, as of more than a human creature, where cooled with taking breath, and had learned doubts out of leisure that instead of roaring cries there was now heard nothing but a confused muttering, whether her saying were to be followed: betwixt fear to pursue, and loathness to leave, most of them could have been content it had never been begun, but how to end it, each afraid of his companion, they knew not, finding it far easier to tie, than to loose knots. But Zelmane thinking it no evil way in such mutinies, to give the mutinous some occasion of such service as they might think, in their own judgment, would countervail their trespass, withal to take the more assured possession of their minds, which she feared might begin to waver.

“Loyal Arcadians,” said she, “now do I offer unto you the manifesting of your duties: all those that have taken arms for the prince’s safety, let them turn their backs to the gate, with their weapons bent again such as would hurt his sacred person.” “O {261} weak trust of the many-headed multitude, whom inconstancy only doth guide to well-doing, who can set confidence there where company takes away shame, and each may lay the fault on his fellow?” So said a crafty fellow among them, named Clinias, to himself, when he saw the word no sooner out of Zelmane’s mouth, but there were some shouts of joy, with, “God save Basilius,” and divers of them with much jollity grown to be his guard that but little before meant to be his murderers.

This Clinias in his youth had been a scholar so far as to learn rather words than manners, and of words rather plenty than order; and often had used to be an actor in tragedies, where he had learned, besides a slidingness of language, acquaintance with many passions, and to frame his face to bear the figure of them: long used to the eyes and ears of men, and to reckon no fault but shamefac’dness in nature; a most notable coward, and yet more strangely than rarely venturous in privy practices.

This fellow was become of near trust to Cecropia, Amphialus’s mother, so that he was privy to all the mischievous devices wherewith she went about to ruin Basilius and his children, for the advancing of her son, and though his education had made him full of tongue, yet his love to be doing, taught him in any evil to be secret, and had by his mistress been used ever since the strange retiring of Basilius, to whisper rumours in the people’s ears: and this time, finding great aptness in the multitude, was one of the chief that set them in the uproar, though quite without the consent of Amphialus, who would not for all the kingdoms of the world so have adventured the life of Philoclea. But now perceiving the flood of their fury begun to ebb, he thought in policy to take the first of the tide, so that no man cried louder than he upon Basilius. And some of the lustiest rebels not yet agreeing to the rest, he caused two or three of his mates that were at his commandment to lift him up, and then as if he had a prologue to utter, he began with nice gravity to demand audience. But few attending what he said, with vehement gesture, as if he would tear the stars from the skies he fell to crying out so loud that not only Zelmane, but Basilius might hear him. “O unhappy men, more mad than the giants that would have plucked Jupiter out of heaven, how long shall this rage continue? why do you not all throw down your weapons and submit yourselves to our good prince, our good Basilius, the Pelops of wisdom, and Minos of all good government? when will you begin to believe me, and other honest and faithful subjects, that have done all we could to stop your fury.”

The farmer that loved Zelmane could abide him no longer. For as the first he was willing to speak of conditions, hoping to have gotten great sovereignties, and among the rest Zelmane; so now {262} perceiving, that the people, once anything down the hill from their fury, would never stay till they came to the bottom of absolute yielding, and so that he should be nearer fears of punishment than hopes of such advancement, he was one of them that stood most against the agreement: and to begin withal, disdaining this fellow should play the preacher, who had been one of the chiefest makebates, struck him a great wound upon the face with his sword. The cowardly wretch fell down, crying for succour, and, scrambling through the legs of them that were about him, got to the throne, where Zelmane took him and comforted him, bleeding for that was past, and quaking for fear of more.

But as soon as the blow was given, as if Aeolus had broke open the door to let all his winds out, no hand was idle, each one killing him that was next, for fear he should do as much to him. For being divided in minds, and not divided in companies, they that would yield to Basilius were intermingled with them that would not yield. Those men thinking their ruin stood upon it; those men to get favour of their prince, converted their ungracious motion into their own bowels, and by a true judgment grew their own punishers. None were sooner killed than those that had been leaders in the disobedience: who by being so, had taught them, that they did lead disobedience to the same leaders. And many times it fell out that they killed them that were of their own faction, anger whetting, and doubt hastening their fingers. But then came down Zelmane; and Basilius with Dorus issued, and sometimes seeking to draw together those of their party, sometimes laying indifferently among them, made such havoc, among the rest Zelmane striking the farmer to the heart with her sword, as before she had done with her eyes, that in a while all they of the contrary side were put to flight, and fled to certain woods upon the frontiers, where feeding wildly, and drinking only water, they were disciplined for their drunken riots: many of them being slain in the chase, about a score only escaping. But when those late rebels, now soldiers, were returned from the chase, Basilius calling them together, partly for policy’s sake, but principally because Zelmane before had spoken it, which was to him more than a divine ordinance, he pronounced their general pardon, willing them to return to their houses, and hereafter be more circumspect in their proceedings, which they did most of them with sharp marks of their folly. But imagining Clinias to be one of the chief that had bred this good alteration, he gave him particular thanks, and withal willed him to make him know how this frenzy had entered into the people.

Clinias purposing indeed to tell him the truth of all; saving what did touch himself, or Cecropia, first dipping his hand in the {263} blood of his wound: “Now by this blood,” said he, “which is more dear to me than all the rest that is in my body, since it is spent for your safety: this tongue, perchance unfortunate, but never false, shall not now begin to lie unto my prince, of me most beloved.” Then stretching out his hand, and making vehement countenances the ushers to his speeches, in such manner of terms recounted this accident. “Yesterday,” said he, “being your birthday, in the goodly green two miles hence before the city of Enispus, to do honour to the day, where four or five thousand people, of all conditions, as I think, gathered together, spending all the day in dancing and other exercises, and when night came under tents and bows making great cheer, and meaning to observe a wassailing watch all that night for your sake. Bacchus, the learned say, was begot with thunder: I think, that made him ever since so full of stir and debate. Bacchus, indeed it was which sounded the first trumpet to this rude alarm. For that barbarous opinion being generally among them, to think with vice to do honour, and with activity in beastliness to show abundance of love, made most of them seek to show the depth of their affection in the depth of their draught. But being once well chafed with wine, having spent all the night, and some piece of the morning in such revelling, and emboldened by your absented manner of living, there was no matter their ears had ever heard of that grew not to be a subject of their winey conference. I speak it by proof: for I take witness of the gods, who never leave perjuries unpunished, that I often cried out against their impudency, and, when that would not serve, stopped mine ears because I would not be partaker of their blasphemies, till with buffets they forced me to have mine ears and eyes defiled. Public affairs were mingled with private grudges: neither was any man thought of wit, that did not pretend some cause of mislike. Railing was counted the fruit of freedom, and saying nothing had his uttermost praise in ignorance. At the length, your sacred person, alas! why did I live to hear it? alas! how do I breathe to utter it? But your commandment doth not only enjoin obedience, but give me force; your sacred person I say, fell to be their table-talk: a proud word swelling in their stomachs, and disdainful reproaches against so great a greatness, having put on the show of greatness in their little minds: till at length the very unbridled use of words having increased fire in their minds, which God wot thought their knowledge notable, because they had at all no knowledge to condemn their own want of knowledge, they descended, O never to be forgotten presumption, to a direct dislike of your living from among them. Whereupon it were tedious to remember their far-fetched constructions. But the sum was, you disdained them: and what were the pomps of {264} your estate, if their arms maintained you not? who would call you a prince, if you had not a people, when certain of them of wretched estates, and worse minds, whose fortunes’ change could not impair, began to say that your government was to be looked into; how the great treasures you had levied among them had been spent; why none but great men and gentlemen could be admitted into counsel, that the commons, forsooth, were too plain-headed to say their opinions: but yet their blood and sweat must maintain all. Who could tell whether you were not betrayed in this place where you lived? nay whether you did live or no? therefore that it was time to come and see; and if you were here, to know if Arcadia were grown loathsome in your sight, why you did not rid yourself of the trouble? there would not want those that would take so fair a cumber in good part. Since the country was theirs, and the government an adherent to the country, why should they not consider of the one as well as inhabit the other? ‘Nay rather,’ said they, ‘let us begin that, which all Arcadia will follow. Let us deliver our prince from danger of practices, and ourselves from want of a prince. Let us do that which all the rest think. Let it be said that we only are not astonished with vain titles which have their force but in our force.’ Lastly, to have said and heard so much was as dangerous as to have attempted: and to attempt they had the glorious name of liberty with them. Those words being spoken, like a furious storm, presently carried away their well inclined brains. What I, and some other of the honester sort could do was no more than if with a puff of breath, one should go about to make a sail go against a mighty wind, or, with one hand, stay the ruin of a mighty wall. So general grew this madness among them, there needed no drum, where each man cried, each spoke to other that spoke as fast to him, and the disagreeing sound of so many voices was the chief token of their unmeet agreement. Thus was their banquet turned to a battle, their winey mirths to bloody rages, and the happy prayers for your life to monstrous threatening of your estate; the solemnizing your birth-day, tended to have been the cause of your funeral. But as a drunken rage hath, besides his wickedness, that folly, that the more it seeks to hurt the less it considers how to be able to hurt: they never weighed how to arm themselves, but took up everything for a weapon that fury offered to their hands. Many swords, pikes, and bills there were; others took pitchforks and rakes, converting husbandry to soldiery: some caught hold of spits, things serviceable for life, to be the instruments of death. And there was some such one, who held the same pot wherein he drank your health, to use it, as he could, to your mischief. Thus armed, thus governed, forcing the unwilling, and heartening the {265} willing, adding fury to fury, and increasing rage with running, they came headlong towards this lodge: no man, I dare say, resolved in his own heart what was the uttermost he would do when he came thither. But as mischief is of such nature, that it cannot stand but with strengthening one evil by another, and so multiply in itself, till it come to the highest and then fall with his own weight: so to their minds one passed the bounds of obedience, more and more wickedness opened itself, so that they, who first pretended to preserve you, then to reform you (I speak it in my conscience, and with a bleeding heart) now thought no safety for them, without murdering you. So as if the gods, who preserve you for the preservation of Arcadia, had not showed their miraculous power; and that they had not used for instruments, both your own valour, not fit to be spoken of by so mean a mouth as mine, and some, I must confess, honest minds, whom alas! why should I mention, since what we did, reached not to the hundredth part of our duty? our hands, I tremble to think of it, had destroyed all that, for which we have cause to rejoice that we are Arcadians.”

With that the fellow did wring his hands, and wrung out tears, so, that Basilius, who was not the sharpest piercer into masked minds, took a good liking to him; and so much the more as he had tickled him with praise in the hearing of his mistress. And therefore pitying his wound, willed him to get him home and look well into it, and make the best search he could to know if there were any further depth in this matter, for which he should be well rewarded. But before he went away, certain of the shepherds being come, for that day was appointed for their pastorals, he sent one of them to Philanax, and another to other principal noblemen, and cities thereabouts, to make thorough inquiry of this uproar, and withal to place such garrisons in all the towns and villages near unto him, that he might thereafter keep his solitary lodge in more security, upon the making of a fire, or ringing of a bell, having them in readiness for him.

This Clinias, having his ear one way when his eye was another, had perceived, and therefore hastened away with mind to tell Cecropia that she was to take some speedy resolution, or else it were danger those examinations would both discover and ruin her; and so went his way, leaving that little company with embracements, and praising of Zelmane’s excellent proceeding, to show, that no decking sets forth anything so much as affection. For as, while she stood at the discretion of those indiscreet rebels, every angry countenance any of them made seemed a knife laid upon their own throats; so unspeakable was now their joy that they saw, besides her safety and their own, the same wrought, and safely wrought by her means, in whom they had placed all their {266} delights. What examples Greece could ever allege of wit and fortitude, were set in rank of trifles, being compared to this action.

But as they were in the midst of those unfeigned ceremonies, a cittern ill-played on, accompanied with a hoarse voice, who seemed to sing maugre the Muses, and to be merry in spite of fortune, made them look the way of the ill-noised song. The song was this

They had soon found it was Dametas, who came with no less lifted up countenance than if he had passed over the bellies of all his enemies: so wise a point he thought he had performed in using the natural strength of the cave. But never was it his doing to come so soon thence till the coast were more assuredly clear: for it was a rule with him, that after a great storm there ever fell a few drops before it be fully finished. But Pamela, who had now experienced how much care doth solicit a lover’s heart, used this occasion of going to her parents and sister, indeed as well for that cause, as being unquiet, till her eye might be assured how her shepherd had gone through the danger.

But Basilius with the sight of Pamela, of whom almost his head, otherwise occupied, had left the wanted remembrance, was suddenly stricken into a devout kind of admiration, remembering the oracle, which according to the fawning humour of false hope, he interpreted now his own to his own best, and with the willing blindness of affection, because his mind ran wholly upon Zelmane, he thought the gods in their oracles did principally mind her.

But as he was thinking deeply of the matter, one of the shepherds told him that Philanax was already come with an hundred horse in his company. For having by chance rode not far off the little desert, he had heard of this uproar, and so was come upon the spur, gathering a company of gentlemen, as fast as he could, to the succour of his master; Basilius was glad of it; but not willing to have him nor any other of the noblemen, see his mistress, he {267} himself went out of the lodge: and so giving order unto him of placing garrisons, and examining those matters; and Philanax with humble earnestness beginning to entreat him to leave off this solitary course, which already had been so dangerous unto him, “Well,” said Basilius, “it may be ere long I will condescend unto your desire. In the meantime, take you the best order you can to keep me safe in my solitariness. But,” said he, “do you remember, how earnestly you wrote unto me that I should not be moved by that oracle’s authority, which brought me to this resolution?” “Full well, Sir,” answered Philanax, “for though it pleased you not as then to let me know what the oracle’s words were, yet all oracles hold in, in my conceit, one degree of reputation, it sufficed me to know it was but an oracle which led you from your own course.” “Well,” said Basilius, “I will now tell you the words, which before I thought not good to do, because when all the events fall out, as some already have done, I may charge you with your incredulity.” So he repeated in this sort.

“For you, forsooth,” said he, “when I told you that some supernatural cause sent me strange visions, which being confirmed with presagious chances, I had gone to Delphos, and there received this answer, you replied unto me that the only supernatural causes were the humours of my body, which bred such melancholy dreams, and that both they framed a mind full of conceits, apt to make presages of things, which in themselves were merely chanceable: and withal, as I say, you remember what you wrote me touching the authority of the oracle: but now I have some notable trial of the truth thereof, which hereafter I will more largely communicate unto you. Only now, know that the thing I most feared is already performed; I mean, that a foreign state should possess my throne. For that hath been done by Zelmane, but not as I feared, to my ruin, but to my preservation.” But when he had once named Zelmane, that name was as good as a pulley, to make the clock of his praises run on in such sort that Philanax found was more exquisite than the only admiration of virtue breedeth: which his faithful {268} heart inwardly repining at, made him shrink away as soon as he could to go about the other matters of importance which Basilius had enjoined unto him.

Basilius returned into the lodge, thus by himself construing the oracle: that in that, he said, his elder care should by princely mean be stolen away from him, and yet not lost, it was now performed, since Zelmane had, as it were, robbed from him the care of his first begotten child, yet was it not lost, since in his heart the ground of it remained. That his younger should with nature’s bliss embrace the love of Zelmane, because he had so commanded her for his sake to do, yet should it be with as much hate of nature, for being so hateful an opposite to the jealousy he thought her mother had of him. The sitting in that seat he deemed by her already performed. But that which most comforted him was his interpretation of the adultery, which he thought he should commit with Zelmane, whom afterwards he should have to his wife. The point of his daughter’s marriage, because it threatened his death withal, he determined to prevent with keeping them while he lived, unmarried. But having, as he thought, gotten thus much understanding of the oracle, he determined for three days after to perform certain rites to Apollo: and even then began with his wife and daughters to sing this hymn, and by them yearly used.

As soon as he had ended his devotion (all the privileged shepherds being now come) knowing well enough he might lay all his care upon Philanax, he was willing to sweeten the taste of this past tumult with some rural pastimes. For which, while the shepherds prepared themselves in the best manner, Basilius took his daughter Philoclea aside, and with such haste, as if his ears hunted for words, {269} desired to know how she had found Zelmane. She humbly answered him according to the agreement betwixt them, that thus much for her sake Zelmane was content to descend from her former resolution, as to hear him whenever he would speak; and further than that she said, as Zelmane had not granted, so she neither did nor ever would desire. Basilius kissed her with more than fatherly thanks, and straight, like a hard-kept ward new come to his lands, would fain have used the benefit of that grant, in laying his sickness before his only physician. But Zelmane, that had not yet fully determined with herself how to bear herself toward him, made him in few words understand, that the time, in respect of the company, was unfit for such a parley; and therefore to keep his brains the busier, letting him understand what she had learned of his daughters, touching Erona’s distress, whom in her travel she had known and been greatly beholden to, she desired him to finish the rest, for so far as Plangus had told him; because, she said, and she said truly, she was full of care for that lady, whose desert, only except an over-base choice, was nothing agreeable to misfortune. Basilius glad that she would command him anything, but more glad that in executing the unfitness of that time, she argued an intention to grant a fitter, obeyed her in this manner.

“Madame,” said he, “it is very true that since years enabled me to judge what is or is not to be pitied, I never saw anything that more moved me to justify a vehement compassion on myself than the estate of that prince, whom strong against all his own afflictions, which yet were great as I perceive you have heard, yet true and noble love had so pulled down, as to lie under sorrow for another. Insomuch as I could not temper my long idle pen in that subject, which I perceive you have seen. But then to leave that unrepeated, which I find my daughters have told you, it may please you to understand, since it pleaseth you to demand, that Antiphilus being crowned, and so left by the famous princes Musidorus and Pyrocles (led thence by the challenge of Anaxius, who is now in those provinces of Greece, making a dishonourable inquiry after that excellent prince Pyrocles, already perished) Antiphilus I say, being crowned and delivered from the presence of those two, whose virtues, while they were present, like good schoolmasters, suppressed his vanities, he had not strength of mind enough in him to make long delay of discovering what manner of man he was. But straight like one carried up to so high a place that he loseth the discerning of the ground over which he is, so was his mind lifted so far beyond the level of his own discourse, that remembering only that himself was in the high seat of a king, he could not perceive that he was a king of reasonable creatures who would quickly scorn follies, and repine at injuries. But imagining {270} no so true property of sovereignty as to do what he listed, and to list whatsoever pleased his fancy, he quickly made his kingdom a tennis-court, where his subjects should be the balls, not in truth cruelly, but licentiously abusing them, presuming so far upon himself, that what he did was liked of everybody: nay, that his disgraces were favours, and all because he was a king. For in nature not able to conceive the bounds of great matters, suddenly borne into an unknown ocean of absolute power, he was swayed withal, he knew not how, as every wind of passion puffed him. Whereto nothing helped him better than that poisonous sugar of flattery, which some used, out of the innate baseness of their heart, straight like dogs fawning upon the greatest; others secretly hating him, and disdaining his great rising so suddenly, so undeservedly, finding his humour, bent their exalting him only to his overthrow, like the bird that carries the shell-fish high, to break him the easier with his fall. But his mind, being an apt matter to receive what form their amplifying speeches would lay upon it, danced so pretty a measure to their false music, that he thought himself the wisest and worthiest and best beloved that ever gave honour to royal title. And being but obscurely born, he had found out unblushing pedigrees that made him not only of the blood royal, but true heir, though unjustly dispossessed by Erona’s ancestors. And like the foolish bird, that when it so hides the head that it sees not itself, thinks nobody else sees it, so did he imagine that nobody knew his baseness, while he himself turned his eyes from it.

“Then vainness, a meagre friend to gratefulness, brought him so to despise Erona, as of whom he had received no benefit, that within half a year’s marriage he began to pretend barrenness, and making first an unlawful law of having more wives than one, he still keeping Erona under-hand, by messages sought Artaxia; who no less hating him than loving as unlucky a choice, the naughty king Plexirtus, yet to bring to pass what she purposed, was content to train him into false hopes, till already his imagination had crowned him king of Armenia, and had made that but the foundation of more and more monarchies, as if fortune had only gotten eyes to cherish him. In which time a great assembly of most part of all the princes of Asia, being to do honour to the never sufficiently praised Pyrocles and Musidorus, he would be one; not to acknowledge his obligation, which was as great as any of the others, but looking to have been young-mastered among those great estates as he was among his abusing underlings. But so many valorous princes, indeed far nearer to disdain him than otherwise, he was quickly, as standing upon no true ground, inwardly out of countenance with himself, till his seldom comfortless {271} flatterers, persuading him it was envy and fear of his expected greatness, made him haste away from that company, and without further delay, appointed the meeting with Artaxia, so incredibly blinded with the over-bright shining of his royalty that he could think such a queen would be content to be joined-patent with another to have such an husband. Poor Erona to all this obeyed, either vehemency of affection making her stoop to so over-base a servitude, or astonished with an unlooked-for fortune, dull to any behoveful resolution, or, as many times it falls out even in great hearts when they can accuse none but themselves, desperately bent to maintain it. For so went she on in that way of her love, that, poor lady, to be beyond all other examples of ill-set affection, she was brought to write to Artaxia, that she was content, for the public good to be a second wife, and yield the first place to her; nay to extol him, and even woo Artaxia for him.

“But Artaxia, mortally hating them both for her brother’s sake, was content to hide her hate till she had time to show it: and pretending that all her grudge was against the two paragons of virtue, Musidorus and Pyrocles, even met them half way in excusing her brother’s murder, as not being principal actors; and of the other side, driven to what they did by the ever-pardonable necessity; and so well handled the matter, as though she promised nothing, yet Antiphilus promised himself all that she would have him think. And so a solemn interview was appointed; but, as the poets say, Hymen had not there his saffron-coloured coat. For Artaxia laying men secretly, and easily they might be secret, since Antiphilus thought she over-ran him in love, when he came even ready to embrace her, showing rather a countenance of accepting than offering, they came forth, and, having much advantage both in number, valour, and fore-preparation, put all his company to the sword, but such as could fly away. As for Antiphilus, she caused him and Erona both to be put in irons, hastening back towards her brother’s tomb, upon which she meant to sacrifice them; making the love of her brother stand between her and all other motions of grace from which by nature she was alienated.

“But great diversity in those two quickly discovered itself for the bearing of that affliction: for Antiphilus, who had no greatness but outward, that taken away, was ready to fall faster than calamity could thrust him; with fruitless begging of life, where reason might well assure him his death was resolved, and weak bemoaning his fortune, to give his enemies a most pleasing music, with many promises and protestations, to as little purpose as from a little mind. But Erona, sad indeed, yet like one rather used, than new fallen to sadness, as who had the joys of her heart already broken {272} seemed rather to welcome than to shun that end of misery; speaking little, but what she spoke was for Antiphilus, remembering his guiltiness, being at that time prisoner to Tiridates, when the valiant princess slew him: to the disgrace of men, showing that there are women both more wise to judge what is to be expected, and more constant to bear it when it is happened.

“But her wit endeared by her youth, her affliction by her birth, and her sadness by her beauty, made this noble prince Plangus, who, never almost from his cousin Artaxia, was now present at Erona’s taking, to perceive the shape of loveliness more perfectly in woe than in joyfulness, as in a picture which receive greater life by the darkness of shadows than by more glittering colours, and seeing to like, and liking to love, and loving straight to feel the most incident effects of love, to serve and preserve. So borne by the hasty tide of short leisure, he did hastily deliver together his affection, and affectionate care. But she, as if he had spoken of a small matter, when he mentioned her life, to which she had not leisure to attend, desired him if he loved her, to show it, in finding some way to save Antiphilus. For her, she found the world but a wearisome stage unto her, where she played a part against her will: and therefore besought him not to cast his love in so unfruitful a place, as could not love itself: but for a testimony of constancy, and a suitableness to his word, to do so much comfort to her mind, as that for her sake Antiphilus were saved. He told me how much he argued against her tendering him who had so ungratefully betrayed her and foolishly cast away himself. But perceiving she did not only bend her very good wits to speak for him against herself, but when such a cause could be allied to no reason, yet love would needs make itself a cause, and bar her rather from hearing, than yield that she should yield to such arguments: he likewise, in whom the power of love, as they say of spirits, was subject to the love in her, with grief consented, and though backwardly, was diligent to labour the help of Antiphilus, a man whom he not only hated as a traitor to Erona, but envied as a possessor of Erona; yet love swore his heart, in spite of his heart, should make him become a servant to his rival. And so did he, seeking all the means of persuading Artaxia, which the authority of so near and so virtuous a kinsman could give unto him. But she, to whom the eloquence of hatred had given revenge the face of delight, rejected all such motions: but rather the more closely imprisoning them in her chief city, where she kept them, with intention at the birthday of Tiridates, which was very near, to execute Antiphilus, and at the day of his death, which was about half a year after, to use the same rigour towards Erona. Plangus much grieved, because much loving, attempted the {273} humours of the Lycians, to see whether they would come in with forces to succour their princess. But there the next inheritor to the crown, with the true play that is used in the game of kingdoms, had no sooner his mistress in captivity, but he had usurped her place, and making her odious to her people, because of the unfit election she had made, and so left no hope there: but, which is worse, had sent to Artaxia, persuading the justicing her, because that unjustice might give his title the name of justice. Wanting that way, Plangus practised with some dear friends of his, to save Antiphilus out of prison, whose day because it was much nearer than Erona’s, and that he well found she had twisted her life upon the same thread with his, he determined first to get him out of prison; and to that end having prepared all matters, as well as in such case he could, where Artaxia had set many of Tiridates’s old servants to have well-marking eyes, he conferred with Antiphilus, as, by the authority he had, he found means to do, and agreed with him of the time and manner how he should, by the death of some of his jailors, escape. But all being well ordered, and Plangus willingly putting himself into the greatest danger, Antiphilus, who like a bladder, swelled ready to break, while it was full of the wind of prosperity, that being out, was so abjected, as apt to be trod on by everybody, when it came to the point, that with some hazard he might be in apparent likelihood to avoid the uttermost harm, his heart fainted, and, weak fool, neither hoping nor fearing as he should, got a conceit, that with betraying this practice, he might obtain pardon: and therefore even a little before Plangus should have come unto him, opened the whole practice to him that had the charge, with unpitied tears idly protesting, he had rather die by Artaxia’s commandment than against her will escape; yet begging life upon any the hardest and wretchedest conditions that she would lay upon him. His keeper provided accordingly, so that when Plangus came, he was like himself to have been entrapped; but that finding, with a lucky insight, that it was discovered, he retired; and, calling his friends about him, stood upon his guard, as he had good cause. For Artaxia, accounting him most ungrateful, considering that her brother and she had not only preserved him against the malice of his father, but ever used him much liker his birth than his fortune, sent forces to apprehend him. But he among the martial men had gotten so great love that he could not only keep himself from her malice, but work in their minds a compassion of Erona’s adversity.

“But for the succour of Antiphilus he could get nobody to join with him, the contempt of him having not been able to qualify the hatred, so that Artaxia might easily upon him perform {274} her will, which was (at the humble suit of all the women of that city) to deliver him to their censure, who mortally hated him for having made a law of polygamy, after many tortures, forced him to throw himself from a high pyramid which was built over Tiridates’s tomb, and so to end his false-hearted life, which had planted no strong thought in him, but that he could be unkind.

“But Plangus well perceiving that Artaxia stayed only for the appointed day that the fair Erona’s body, consumed to ashes, should make a notorious testimony how deeply her brother’s death was engraven in her breast, he assembled good numbers of friends, whom his virtue, though a stranger, had tied unto him by force, to give her liberty. Contrariwise, Artaxia, to whom anger gave more courage than her sex did fear, used her regal authority, the most she could, to suppress that sedition, and have her will, which, she thought, is the most princely thing that may be. But Plangus, who indeed, as all men witness, is one of the best captains, both for policy and valour, that are trained in the school of Mars, in a conflict overthrew Artaxia’s power, though of far greater number; and there took prisoner a base son of her brother’s whom she dearly affected, and then sent her word, that he should run the same race of fortune, whatsoever it was, that Erona did; and happy was that threatening for her, for else Artaxia had hastened the day of her death, in respect of those tumults.

“But now, some principal noblemen of that country interposing themselves, it was agreed that all persons else fully pardoned, and all prisoners, except Erona, delivered, she should be put into the hands of a principal nobleman, who had a castle of great strength, by oath, if by the day two years from Tiridates’s death, Pyrocles and Musidorus did not in person combat and overcome two knights, whom she appointed to maintain her quarrel against Erona and them, of having by treason destroyed her brother, that then Erona should be that same day burned to ashes: but if they came, and had the victory, she should be delivered; but upon no occasion neither freed nor executed till that day. And hereto of both sides, all took solemn oath, and so the peace was concluded; they of Plangus’s party partly forcing him to agree, though he himself the sooner condescended, knowing the courtesy of those two excellent princes, not to refuse so noble a quarrel, and their power such, as two more, like the other two, were not able to resist. But Artaxia was more, and upon better ground, pleased with this action; for she had even newly received news from Plexirtus that upon the sea he had caused them both to perish, and therefore she held herself sure of the match.

“But poor Plangus knew not so much, and therefore seeing his {275} party, as most times it falls out in like case, hungry of any conditions of peace, accepted them: and then obtained leave of the lord that indifferently kept her to visit Erona, whom he found full of desperate sorrow, suffering neither his unworthiness, nor his wrongs, nor his death, which is the natural conclusion of all worldly acts, either to cover with forgetfulness, or diminish with consideration, the affection she had borne him: but even glorying in affliction, and shunning all comfort, she seemed to have no delight but in making herself the picture of misery. So that when Plangus came to her, she fell in deadly trances, as if in him she had seen the death of Antiphilus, because he had not succoured him: and yet, her virtue striving, she did at one time acknowledge herself bound, and profess herself injured; instead of allowing the conclusion they had made, or writing to the princes, as he wished her to do, craving nothing but some speedy death to follow her, in spite of just hate, beloved Antiphilus.

“So that Plangus having nothing but a ravished kiss from her hand at their parting, went away toward Greece; whitherward he understood the princes were embarked. But by the way it was his fortune to intercept letters, written by Artaxia to Plexirtus, wherein she signified her accepting him to her husband, whom she had ever favoured, so much the rather, as he had performed the conditions of her marriage, in bringing to their deserved end her greatest enemies: withal thanking the sea, in such terms as he might well perceive it was by some treason wrought in Plexirtus’s ship. Whereupon, to make more diligent search, he took ship himself, and came into Laconia, inquiring, and by his inquiry finding that such a ship was indeed with fight and fire perished, none, almost, escaping. But for Pyrocles and Musidorus, it was assuredly determined that they were cast away: for the name of such princes, especially in Greece, would quickly else have been a large witness to the contrary. Full of grief with that, for the loss of such who left the world poor of perfection, but more sorry for Erona’s sake, who now by them could not be relieved, a new advertisement from Armenia overtook him, which multiplied the force of his anguish. It was a message from the nobleman who had Erona in ward, giving him to understand that since his departure, Artaxia, using the benefit of time, had beseiged him in his castle, demanding present delivery of her, whom yet for his faith given, he would not before the day appointed, if possibly, he could resist; which he foresaw, long he should not do for want of victual, which he had not so wisely provided, because he trusted upon the general oath taken for two years’ space: and therefore willed him to make haste to his succour, and come with no small forces, for all they that were of his side in Armenia were consumed, {276} and Artaxia had increased her might by marriage of Plexirtus, who now crowned king there, sticked not to glory in the murder of Pyrocles and Musidorus, as having just cause thereto, in respect of the deaths of his sister Andromana, her son, his nephew and his own daughter Zelmane: all whose loss he unjustly charged them withal, and now openly sticked not to confess what a revenge his wit had brought forth, Plangus much astonished herewith, bethought himself what to do, for to return to Armenia was vain, since his friends there were utterly overthrown. Then thought he of going to his father; but he had already, even since the death of his stepmother and brother, attempted the recovering of his favour, but all in vain. For they that had before joined with Andromana to do him the wrong, thought now no life for them if he returned; and therefore kept him still, with new forged suspicions, odious to his father. So that Plangus reserving that for a work of longer time, than the saving of Erona could bear, determined to go to the mighty and good king Euarchus; who lately having, to his eternal fame, fully, not only conquered his enemies, but established good government in their countries, he hoped he might have present succour of him, both for the justness of the cause, and revenge of his children’s death, by so heinous a treason murdered. Therefore with diligence he went to him, and by the way (passing through my country) it was my hap to find him, the most overthrown man with grief that ever I hope to see again. For still it seemed he had Erona at a stake before his eyes, such an apprehension he had taken of her danger, which in despite of all the comfort I could give him, he poured out in such lamentations that I was moved not to let him pass till he had made a full declaration, which by pieces my daughters and I have delivered unto you. Fain he would have had succour of myself, but the course of my life being otherwise bent, I only accommodated him with some that might safely guide him to the great Euarchus. For my part having had some of his speeches so feelingly in my memory, that at an idle time, as I told you, I set them down dialogue-wise, in such manner as you have seen. And thus, excellent lady, I have obeyed you in this story; wherein if it will please you to consider what is the strange power of love, and what is due to his authority, you shall exercise therein the true nobleness of your judgment, and do the more right to the unfortunate historian.” Zelmane, sighing for Erona’s sake, yet inwardly comforted in that she assured herself Euarchus would not spare to take in hand the just delivering of her, joined with the just revenge of his children’s loss, having now what she desired of Basilius, to avoid his further discourses of affection, encouraged the shepherds to begin, whom she saw already ready for them.

THE SECOND ECLOGUES

The rude tumult of the Enispians gave occasion to the honest shepherds to begin their pastoral this day with a dance, which they called the skirmish betwixt reason and passion. For seven shepherds, which were named the reasonable shepherds, joined themselves, four of them making a square, and other two going a little wide of either side, like wings for the main battle, and the seventh man foremost, like the forlorn hope, to begin the skirmish. In like order came out the seven appassionated shepherds, all keeping the pace of their foot by their voice, and sundry consorted instruments they held in their arms. And first, the foremost of the reasonable side began to sing:

Then as they approached nearer, the two of reason’s side, as if they shot at the other, thus sang:

Then did the two square battles meet, and instead of fighting, embrace one another, singing thus:

Then embraced they one another, and came to the king, who framed his praises of them according to Zelmane’s liking; whose unrestrained parts, the mind and eye, had their free course to the delicate Philoclea, whose look was not short in well requiting it, although she knew it was a hateful sight to her jealous mother. But Dicus, that had in this time taken a great liking of Dorus for the good parts he found above his age in him, had a delight to taste the fruits of his wit, though in a subject which he himself most of all other despised; and so entered speech with him in the manner of this following eclogue.

When they had ended, to the good pleasing of the assistants, especially of Zelmane, who never forgot to give due commendations {282} to her friend Dorus, Basilius called for Lamon to end his discourse of Strephon and Claius, wherewith the other day he marked Zelmane to have been exceedingly delighted. But him sickness had stayed from that assembly; which gave occasion to Histor and Damon, two young shepherds, taking upon them the two friendly rivals’ names, to present Basilius with some other of their complaints eclogue-wise, and first with this double Sestine.

But as though all this had been but the taking of a taste of their wailings, Strephon again began this Dizain which was answered unto him in that kind of verse which is called the crown.

So well were those wailful complaints accorded to the passions of all the princely hearers, while every one made what he heard of another the balance of his own fortune, that they stood a long while stricken in sad and silent consideration of them. Which the old Geron no more marking than condemning in them, desirous to set forth what counsels the wisdom of age had laid up in store against such fancies, as he thought, follies of youth, yet so as it might not appear that his words respected them, bending himself to a young shepherd, named Philisides, who neither had danced nor sung with them, and had all this time lain upon the ground at the foot of a Cypress tree, leaning upon his elbow with so deep a melancholy, that his senses carried to his mind no delight from any of their objects, he struck him upon the shoulder with a right old man’s grace, that will seem livelier than his age will afford him. And thus began unto him this eclogue.

Geron was even out of countenance, finding the words, he thought were so wise, win so little reputation at this young man’s hands; and therefore sometimes looking upon an old acquaintance of his called Mastix, one of the repiningest fellows in the world, and that beheld nobody but with a mind of mislike, saying still the world was amiss, but how it should be amended he knew not, sometimes casting his eyes to the ground, even ashamed to see his grey hairs despised, at last he spied his two dogs, whereof the elder was called Melampus, and the younger Lelaps (indeed the jewels he ever had with him) one brawling with another; which occasion he took to restore himself to his countenance, and rating Melampus, he began to speak to his dogs, as if in them a man should find more obedience, than in unbridled young men.

And away with his dogs straight he went, as if he would be sure to have the last word, all the assembly laughing at the lustiness of the old fellow, who departed muttering to himself he had seen more in his days than twenty of them. But Basilius, who never before had heard Philisides, though having seldom appeared to be at those meetings, desired him he would begin some eclogue with some other of the shepherds, according to the accustomed guise. Philisides, though very unwilling, at the king’s commandment offered to sing with Thyrsis. But he directly refused him, seeing he should within few days be married to the fair Kala, and since he had gotten his desire he would sing no more. Then the king willed Philisides to declare the discourse of his own fortunes, unknown to them, as being a stranger in that country; but he prayed the king to pardon him, the time being far too joyful to suffer the rehearsal of his miseries. But to satisfy Basilius some way, he began an eclogue betwixt himself and the Echo, framing his voice so in those desert places, as what words he would have the Echo reply unto, those he would sing higher than the rest; and so kindly framed a disputation betwixt himself and it, which with those Hexameters in the following order he uttered.

Philisides was commended for the place of his echo; but little did he regard their praises, who had set the foundations of his honour there where he was most despised: and therefore returning again to the train of his desolate pensiveness. Zelmane seeing nobody offer to fill the stage, as if her long restrained conceits did now burst out of prison, she thus, desiring her voice should be accorded to nothing but to Philoclea’s ears, threw down the burden of her mind in Anacreon’s kind of verses.

Basilius, when she had fully ended her song, fell prostrate upon the ground, and thanked the gods they had preserved his life so long as to hear the very music they themselves used in an earthly body. And then with like grace to Zelmane, never left entreating her, till she had, taking a lyre Basilius held for her, sung those Phaleuciacks:

Dorus had long he thought kept silence, from saying somewhat which might tend to the glory of her, in whom all glory to his seeming was included, but now he broke it, singing those verses called Asclepiadiks.

The other shepherds were offering themselves to have continued the sports, but the night had so quietly spent the most part of herself among them that the king for that time licensed them to depart. And so bringing Zelmane to her lodging, who would much rather have done the same for Philoclea; of all sides they went to counterfeit a sleep in their beds, for a true one their agonies could not afford them. Yet there they lay, so might they be most solitary for the food of their thoughts, till it was near noon the next day, after which Basilius was to continue his Apollo devotions, and the other to meditate upon their private desires.

ARCADIA
BOOK III

This last day’s danger, having made Pamela’s love discern what a loss it should have suffered if Dorus had been destroyed, bred such tenderness of kindness in her toward him that she could no longer keep love from looking out through her eyes, and going forth in her words, whom before as a close prisoner she had to her heart only committed; so that finding not only by his speeches and letters, but by the pitiful oration of a languishing behaviour, and the easily deciphered character of a sorrowful face, that despair began now to threaten him destruction, she grew content both to pity him, and let him see she pitied him, as well by making her own beautiful beams to thaw away the former iciness of her behaviour, as by entertaining his discourses (whensoever he did use them) in the third person of Musidorus, to so far a degree, that in the end she said that if she had been the princess whom that disguised prince had virtuously loved, she would have requited his faith with faithful affection; finding in her heart that nothing could so heartily love as virtue: with many more words to the same sense of noble favour, and chaste plainness. Which when at the first it made that unexpected bliss shine upon Dorus, he was like one frozen with extremity of cold, overhastily brought to a great fire, rather oppressed than relieved with such a lightning of felicity. But after the strength of nature had made him able to feel the sweetness of joyfulness, that again being a child of passion, and never acquainted with mediocrity, could not set bounds upon his happiness, nor be content to give desire a kingdom, but that it must be an unlimited monarchy. So that the ground he stood upon being over-high in happiness, and slippery through affection, he could not hold himself from falling into such an error, which with sighs blew all comfort out of his {300} breast, and washed away all cheerfulness of his cheer with tears. For this favour filling him with hope, hope encouraging his desire, and desire considering nothing but opportunity; one time (Mopsa being called away by her mother, and he left alone with Pamela) the sudden occasion called love, and that never stayed to ask reason’s leave, but made the too much loving Dorus take her in his arms, offering to kiss her, and, as if it were, to establish a trophy of his victory. But she, as if she had been ready to drink a wine of excellent taste and colour, which suddenly she perceived had poison in it, so did she put him away from her, looking first up to heaven, as amazed to find herself so beguiled in him; then laying cruel punishment upon him of angry love, and lowering beauty, showing disdain, and a despising disdain. “Away,” (said she), “unworthy man to love or to be loved. Assure thyself, I hate myself being so deceived; judge then what I do to thee for deceiving me. Let me see thee no more, the only fall of my judgment, and stain of my conscience.” With that she called Mopsa, not staying for any answer (which was no other but a flood of tears) which she seemed not to mark (much less to pity) and chid her for having left her alone.

It was not a sorrow, but it was even a death which then laid hold of Dorus: which certainly at that instant would have killed him, but that the fear to tarry longer in her presence (contrary to her commandment) gave him life to carry himself away from her sight, and to run into the woods, where, throwing himself down at the foot of a tree, he did not fall into lamentation (for that proceeded of pitying) or grieving for himself (which he did no way) but to curses of his life, as one that detested himself. For finding himself not only unhappy, but unhappy after being fallen from all happiness: and to be fallen from all happiness, not by any misconceiving, but by his own fault, and his fault to be done to no other but Pamela; he did not tender his own estate, but despised it, greedily drawing into his mind, all conceits which might more and more torment him. And so remained he two days in the woods, disdaining to give his body food, or his mind comfort, loving in himself nothing but the love of her. And indeed that love only strove with the fury of his anguish, telling it that if it destroyed Dorus, it should also destroy the image of her that lived in Dorus: and when the thought of that was crept in unto him, it began to win of him some compassion to the shrine of that image, and to bewail not for himself (whom he hated) but that so notable a love should perish. Then began he only so far to wish his own good, as that Pamela might pardon him the fault, though not the punishment: and the uttermost height he aspired unto, was that after his death she might yet pity his error and {301} know that it proceeded of love, and not of boldness. That conceit found such friendship in his thoughts, that at last he yielded, since he was banished her presence, to seek some means by writing to show his sorrow, and testify his repentance. Therefore getting him the necessary instruments of writing, he thought best to counterfeit his hand (fearing that already as she knew his, she would cast it away as soon as she saw it) and to put it in verse, hoping that would draw her on to read the more, choosing the elegiac as fittest for mourning. But never pen did more quakingly perform his office; never was paper more double moistened with ink and tears; never words more slowly married together, and never the Muses more tired than now, with changes and re-changes of his devices: fearing how to end, before he had resolved how to begin, mistrusting each word, condemning each sentence. This word was not significant; that word was too plain; this would not be conceived; the other would be ill-conceived; here sorrow was not enough expressed, there he seemed too much for his own sake to be sorry; this sentence rather showed art than passion, that sentence rather foolishly passionate than forcibly moving. At last, marring with mending, and putting out better than he left, he made an end of it; being ended, was divers times ready to tear it, till his reason assuring him, the more he studied the worse it grew, he folded it up, devoutly invoking good acceptation unto it; and watching his time, when they were all gone one day to dinner, saving Mopsa to the other lodge, stole up into Pamela’s chamber, and in her standish (which first he kissed, and craved of it a safe and friendly keeping) left it there to be seen at her next using her ink (himself returning again to be true prisoner to desperate sorrow) leaving her standish upon her bed’s head, to give her the more occasion to mark it: which also fell out.

For she finding it at her afternoon return in another place than she left it, opened it. But when she saw the letter, her heart gave her from whence it came; and therefore clapping it to again she went away from it as if it had been a contagious garment of an infected person: and yet was not long away, but that she wished she had read it, though she were loth to read it. “Shall I,” said she, “second his boldness so far, as to read his presumptuous letters? And yet,” saith she, “he sees me not now to grow the bolder thereby: and how can I tell whether they be presumptuous?” The paper came from him, and therefore not worthy to be received; and yet the paper she thought was not guilty. At last she concluded, it were not much amiss to look it over, that she might out of his words pick some further quarrel against him. Then she opened it, and threw it away, and took it up again, till (ere she were aware) her eyes would needs read it, containing this matter.

What this would have wrought in her, she herself could not tell, for, before her reason could moderate the disputation between favour and faultiness, her sister and Miso, called her down to entertain Zelmane, who was come to visit the two sisters, about whom, as about two poles, the sky of beauty was turned: while {304} Gynecia wearied her bed with her melancholy sickness, and made Miso’s shrewdness (who like a spirit set to keep a treasure, barred Zelmane from any further conference) to be the lieutenant of her jealousy; both she and her husband driving Zelmane to such a straight of resolution, either of impossible granting, or dangerous refusing, as the best escape she had was (as much as she could) to avoid their company. So as this day, being the fourth day after the uproar (Basilius being with his sick wife, conferring upon such examinations as Philanax and other of his noblemen had made of this late sedition, all touching Cecropia, with vehement suspicion of giving either flame or fuel unto it) Zelmane came with her body, to find her mind, which was gone long before her, and had gotten his seat in Philoclea, who now with a bashful cheerfulness (as though she were ashamed that she could not choose but be glad) joined with her sister in making much of Zelmane.

And so as they sat devising how to give more feathers to the wings of time, there came to the lodge-door six maids, all in one livery of scarlet petticoats, which were tucked up almost to their knees, the petticoats themselves being in many places garnished with leaves, their legs naked, saving that above the ankles they had little black silk laces, upon which did hang a few silver bells, like which they had a little above their elbows upon their bare arms. Upon their hair they wore garlands of roses and gilliflowers, and the hair was so dressed, as that came again above the garlands, interchanging a mutual covering so that it was doubtful whether the hair dressed the garlands, or the garlands dressed the hair. Their breasts liberal to the eye; the face of the foremost of them in excellency fair; and of the rest lovely, if not beautiful: and beautiful might have been, if they had not suffered greedy Phoebus over-often and hard, to kiss them. Their countenances full of a graceful gravity, so as the gesture match with the apparel, it might seem, a wanton modesty, an enticing soberness. Each of them had an instrument of music in their hands, which comforting their well-pleasing tunes, did charge each ear with unsensibleness that did not lend itself unto them. The music entering alone into the lodge, the ladies were all desirous to see from whence so pleasant a guest was come: and therefore went out together, where before they could take the pains to doubt, much less to ask the question of their quality, the fairest of them (with a gay, but yet discreet demeanour) in this sort spoke to them.

“Most excellent ladies (whose excellencies have power to make cities envy those woods, and solitariness to be accounted the sweetest company) vouchsafe our message your gracious hearing, which as it comes from love, so comes it from lovely persons. The maids of all this coast of Arcadia, understanding the often {305} access that certain shepherds of those quarters are allowed to have in this forbidden place, and that their rural sports are not disdained of you, have been stirred up with emulation to them, and affection to you, to bring forth something, which might as well breed your contentment: and therefore hoping that the goodness of their intention, and the hurtlessness of their sex, shall excuse the breach of the commandment in coming to this place unsent for, they chose out us to invite both your princely parents, and yourselves to a place in the woods about half a mile hence, where they have provided some such sports, as they trust your gracious acceptations will interpret to be delightful. We have been at the other lodge, but finding them there busied in weightier affairs, our trust is that you will not deny the shining of your eyes upon us.” The ladies stood in some doubt whether they should go or not, lest Basilius might be angry withal: But Miso (that had been at none of the pastorals, and had a great desire to lead her old senses abroad to some pleasure) told them plainly, they should nor will, nor choose, but go thither, and make the honest country people know that they were not so squeamish as folks thought of them. The ladies glad to be warranted by her authority, with a smiling humbleness obeyed her; Pamela only casting a seeking look, whether she could see Dorus (who poor wretch wandered half mad for sorrow in the woods, crying for pardon of her who could not hear him) but indeed was grieved for his absence, having given the wound to him through her own heart. But so the three ladies and Miso went with those six Nymphs, conquering the length of the way with the force of music, leaving only Mopsa behind, who disgraced weeping with her countenance, because her mother would not suffer her to show her new-scoured face among them. But the place appointed, as they thought, met them half in their way, so well were they pleased with the sweet tunes and pretty conversation of their inviters. There found they in the midst of the thickest part of the wood, a little square place, not burdened with trees, but with a board covered and beautified with the pleasantest fruits that sun-burned Autumn could deliver to them. The maids besought the ladies to sit down and taste of the swelling grapes, which seemed great with child of Bacchus: and of the divers coloured plums, which gave the eye a pleasant taste before they came to the mouth. The ladies would not show to scorn their provision, but ate and drank a little of their cool wine, which seemed to laugh for joy to come to such lips.

But after the collation was ended, and that they looked for the coming forth of such devices as were prepared for them, there rushed out of the woods twenty armed men, who round about environed them, and laying hold on Zelmane before she could {306} draw her sword, and taking it from her, put hoods over the heads of all four, and so muffled, by force set them on horse-back, and carried them away; the sisters crying in vain for succour, while Zelmane’s heart was rent in pieces with rage of the injury and disdain of her fortune. But when they had carried them four or five miles further, they left Miso with a gag in her mouth, and bound hand and foot, so to take her fortune; and brought the three ladies (by that time the night seemed with her silence to conspire to their treason) to a castle about ten miles from the lodges, where they were fain to take a boat which waited for them, for the castle stood in the midst of a great lake upon a high rock, where partly by art, but principally by nature, it was by all men esteemed impregnable. But at the castle-gate their faces were discovered, and there were met with a great number of torches, after whom the sisters knew their aunt-in-law Cecropia. But that sight increased the deadly terror of the princesses, looking for nothing but death, since they were in the power of the wicked Cecropia, who yet came unto them, making courtesy the outside of mischief, and desiring them not to be discomforted for they were in a place dedicated to their service. Philoclea (with a look where love shined through the midst of fear) besought her to be good unto them, having never deserved evil of her. But Pamela’s high heart disdaining humbleness to injury, “Aunt,” said she, “what you have determined of us I pray you do it speedily: for my part I look for no service, where I find violence.”

But Cecropia, using no more words with them, conveyed them all three to several lodgings (Zelmane’s heart so swelling with spite that she could not bring forth a word) and so left them: first taking from them their knives, because they should do themselves no hurt, before she had determined of them: and then giving such order that they wanted nothing but liberty and comfort, she went to her son, who yet kept his bed, because of his wound he had received of Zelmane, and told him whom now he had in his power. Amphialus was but even then returned from far countries where he had won immortal fame both of courage and courtesy, when he met with the princesses, and was hurt by Zelmane, so that he was utterly ignorant of all his mother’s wicked devices, to which he would never have consented, being (like a rose out of a briar) an excellent son of an evil mother: and now, when he heard of this, was as much amazed as if he had seen the sun fall to the earth. And therefore desired his mother that she would tell him the whole discourse, how all these matters had happened. “Son,” said she, “I will do it willingly, and since all is done for you I will hide nothing from you. And howsoever I might be ashamed to tell it to strangers who would think it wickedness, yet what is done for your sake (how evil {307} soever to others) to you is virtue. To begin then even with the beginning: this doting fool Basilius that now reigns, having lived unmarried until he was nigh threescore years old (and in all his speeches affirming, and in all his doings, assuring that he never would marry) made all the eyes of this country to be bent upon your father, his only brother (but younger by thirty years) as upon the undoubted successor, being indeed a man worthy to reign, thinking nothing enough for himself: where this goose (you see) puts down his head, before there be anything near to touch him. So that he holding place and estimation as heir of Arcadia, obtained me of my father the king of Argos, his brother helping to the conclusion, with protesting his bachelorly intentions, for else you may be sure the king of Argos, nor his daughter, would have suffered their royal blood to be stained with the base name of a subjection. So that I came into this country as apparent princess thereof, and accordingly was courted and followed of all the ladies of this country. My port and pomp did well become a king of Argos’s daughter: in my presence their tongues were turned into ears, and their ears were captives unto my tongue; their eyes admired my majesty, and happy was he or she, on whom I would suffer the beams thereof to fall. Did I go to church? It seemed the very gods waited for me, their devotions not being solemnized till I was ready. Did I walk abroad to see any delight? Nay, my walking was the delight itself: for to it was the concourse, one thrusting upon another, who might show himself most diligent and serviceable towards me: my sleeps were enquired after, and my wakings never unsaluted: the very gate of my house full of principal persons, who were glad if their presents had received a grateful acceptation. And in this felicity wert thou born, the very earth submitting itself unto thee to be trodden as by his prince; and to that pass had my husband’s virtue (by my good help) within short time brought it, with a plot we laid, as we should not have needed to have waited the tedious work of a natural end of Basilius, when the heavens (I think envying my great felicity) then stopped thy father’s breath, when he breathed nothing but power and sovereignty. Yet did not thy orphancy, or my widowhood, deprive us of the delightful prospect which the hill of honour doth yield, while expectation of thy succession did bind dependencies unto us.

“But before, my son, thou wert come to the age to feel the sweetness of authority, this beast (whom I can never name with patience) falsely and foolishly married this Gynecia, then a young girl, and brought her to sit above me in all feasts, to turn her shoulder to me-ward in all our solemnities. It is certain it is not so great a spite to be surmounted by strangers as by one’s own allies. Think then what my mind was, since withal there is no {308} question, the fall is greater from the first to the second, than from the second to the undermost. The rage did swell in my heart so much the more as it was fain to be suppressed in silence, and disguised with humbleness. But above all the rest, the grief of griefs was, when with these two daughters, now thy prisoners, she cut off all hope of thy succession. It was a tedious thing to me that my eyes should look lower than anybody’s, that (myself being by) another’s voice than mine should be more respected. But it was unsupportable unto me to think that not only I, but thou, should’st spend all thy time in such misery, and that the sun should see my eldest son less than a prince. And though I had been a saint I could not choose, finding the change this change of fortune bred unto me: for now from the multitude of followers, silence grew to be at my gate, and absence in my presence. The guess of my mind could prevail more before than now many of my earnest requests. And thou (my dear son) by the fickle multitude no more than an ordinary person (born of the mud of the people) regarded. But I (remembering that in all miseries weeping becomes fools, and practice wise folks) have tried divers means to pull us out of the mire of subjection. And though many times fortune failed me, yet did I never fail myself. Wild beasts I kept in a cave hard by the lodges, which I caused by night to be fed in the place of their pastorals. I as then living in my house hard by the place, and against the hour they were to meet (having kept the beasts without meat) then let them loose, knowing that they would seek their food there, and devour what they found. But blind fortune hating sharp-sighted inventions, made them unluckily to be killed. After I used my servant Clinias to stir a notable tumult of country people; but those louts were too gross instruments for delicate conceits. Now lastly, finding Philanax’s examinations grow dangerous, I thought to play double or quit, and with a slight I used of my fine-witted wench Artesia, with other maids of mine, would have sent those goodly inheritrixes of Arcadia to have pleaded their cause before Pluto, but that over fortunately for them, you made me know the last day how vehemently this childish passion of love doth torment you. Therefore I have brought them unto you, yet wishing rather hate than love in you. For hate often begetteth victory, love commonly is the instrument of subjection. It is true that I would also by the same practice have entrapped the parents, but my maids failed of it, not daring to tarry long about it. But this sufficeth, since (these being taken away) you are the undoubted inheritor, and Basilius will not long over-live this loss.”

“O mother,” said Amphialus, “speak not of doing them hurt, no more than to mine eyes, or my heart, or if I have anything more dear than eyes or heart unto me. Let others find what sweetness {309} they will in ever fearing, because they ever are feared: for my part, I will think myself highly entitled, if I may be once by Philoclea accepted for a servant.” “Well,” said Cecropia, “I would I had born you of my mind, as well as of my body, then should you not have sunk under those base weaknesses. But since you have tied your thoughts in so wilful a knot, it is happy my policy hath brought matters to such a pass that you may both enjoy affection, and upon that build your sovereignty.” “Alas!” said Amphialus, “my heart would fain yield you thanks for setting me in the way of felicity, but that fear kills them in me before they are fully born. For if Philoclea be displeased, how can I be pleased? if she count it unkindness, shall I give tokens of kindness? perchance she condemns me of this action, and shall I triumph, perchance she drowns now the beauties I love with sorrowful tears, and where is then my rejoicing?” “You have reason,” said Cecropia with a feigned gravity; “I will therefore send her away presently that her contentment may be recovered.” “No good mother,” said Amphialus, “since she is here, I would not for my life constrain presence, but rather would I die than consent to absence.” “Pretty intricate follies,” said Cecropia, “but get you up and see how you can prevail with her, while I go to the other sister. For after, we shall have our hands full to defend ourselves if Basilius hap to besiege us.” But remembering herself she turned back and asked him what he would have done with Zelmane, since now he might be avenged of his hurt? “Nothing but honourably,” answered Amphialus, “having deserved no other of me, especially being (as I hear) greatly cherished of Philoclea, and therefore I could wish they were lodged together.” “O no,” said Cecropia, “company confirms resolutions, and loneliness breeds a weariness of one’s thoughts, and so a sooner consenting to reasonable proffers.”

But Amphialus (taking of his mother Philoclea’s knives, which he kept as a relic since she had worn them) got up, and calling for his richest apparel, nothing seemed sumptuous enough for his mistress’s eyes; and that which was costly, he feared was not dainty; and though the invention were delicate, he misdoubted the making. As careful he was too of the colour; lest if gay he might seem to glory in his injury, and her wrong; if mourning, it might strike some evil presage unto her of her fortune. At length he took a garment more rich than glaring, the ground being black velvet, richly embroidered with great pearl, and precious stones, but they set so among certain tufts of cypress that the cypress was like black clouds, through which the stars might yield a dark lustre. About his neck he wore a broad and gorgeous collar, whereof the pieces interchangeably answering, the one was of diamonds and {310} pearl set with a white enamel, so that by the cunning of the workman it seemed like a shining ice; and the other piece being of rubies and opals, had a fiery glistering, which he thought pictured the two passions of fear and desire, wherein he was enchained. His hurt, not yet fully well, made him a little halt, but he strove to give the best grace he could unto his halting.

And in that sort he went to Philoclea’s chamber: whom he found (because her chamber was over-lightsome) sitting on that side of her bed which was from the window, which did cast such a shadow upon her as a good painter would bestow upon Venus, when under the trees she bewailed the murder of Adonis: her hands and fingers (as it were) indented one within the other; her shoulder leaning to her bed’s head, and over her head a scarf, which did eclipse almost half her eyes, which under it fixed their beams upon the wall by, with so steady a manner, as if in that place they might well change but not mend their object: and so remained they a good while after his coming in, he not daring to trouble her, nor she perceiving him, till that (a little varying her thoughts, something quickening her senses) she heard him as he happened to stir his upper garment: and perceiving him, rose up, with a demeanour, where, in the book of beauty, there was nothing to be read but sorrow: for kindness was blotted out, and anger was never there.

But Amphialus who had entrusted his memory with long and forcible speeches, found it so locked up in amazement that he could pick nothing out of it but the beseeching her to take what was done in good part, and to assure herself there was nothing but honour meant unto her person. But she making no other answer, but letting her hands fall one from the other, which before were joined (with eyes something cast aside, and a silent sigh) gave him to understand that considering his doings, she thought his speech as full of incongruity, as her answer would be void of purpose: whereupon he kneeling down, and kissing her hand (which she suffered with a countenance witnessing captivity, but not kindness) he besought her to have pity of him, whose love went beyond the bounds of conceit, much more of uttering: that in her hands the balance of his life or death did stand; whereto the least motion of hers would serve to determine, she being indeed the mistress of his life, and he her eternal slave, and with true vehemency besought her that he might hear her speak; whereupon she suffered her sweet breath to turn itself into these kind of words.

“Alas! cousin,” said she, “what shall my tongue be able to do, which is informed by the ears one way, and by the eyes another? You call for pity, and use cruelty; you say you love me, and yet do {311} the effects of enmity. You affirm your death is in my hands, but you have brought me to so near a degree of death, as when you will, you may lay death upon me, so that while you say, I am mistress of your life, I am not mistress of mine own. You entitle yourself my slave, but I am sure I am yours. If then violence, injury, terror, and depriving of that which is more dear than life itself, liberty, be fit orators for affection, you may expect that I will be easily persuaded. But if the nearness of our kindred breed any remorse in you, or there be any such thing in you, which you call love toward me, then let not my fortune be disgraced with the name of imprisonment: let not my heart waste itself by being vexed with feeling evil, and fearing worse. Let not me be a cause of my parents’ woeful destruction; but restore me to myself, and so doing, I shall account I have received myself of you. And what I say for myself, I say for my dear sister, and my friend Zelmane, for I desire no well-being without they may be partakers.” With that her tears rained down from her heavenly eyes, and seemed to water the sweet and beautiful flowers of her face.

But Amphialus was like the poor woman, who loving a tame doe she had above all earthly things, having long played withal, and made it feed at her hand and lap, is constrained at length by famine, all her flock being spent, and she fallen into extreme poverty, to kill the deer to sustain her life. Many a pitiful look doth she cast upon it, and many a time doth she draw back her hand before she can give the stroke. For even so Amphialus by a hunger-starved affection, was compelled to offer this injury, and yet the same affection made him with a tormenting grief think unkindness in himself that he could find in his heart any way to restrain her freedom. But at length, neither able to grant nor deny, he thus answered her: “Dear lady,” said he, “I will not say unto you (how justly soever I may do it) that I am neither author nor accessory unto this your withholding; for since I do not redress it, I am as faulty as if I had begun it. But this I protest unto you (and this protestation of mine let the heavens hear, and if I lie, let them answer me with a deadly thunderbolt) that in my soul I wish I had never seen the light, or rather, that I never had a father to beget such a child, than that by my means those eyes should overflow their own beauties; than by my means the sky of your virtue should be overclouded with sorrow. But woe is me, most excellent lady, I find myself most willing to obey you: neither truly do mine ears receive the least word you speak, with any less reverence than as absolute and unresistable commandments. But alas, that tyrant love (which now possesseth the hold of all my life and reason) will no way suffer it. It is love, it is love, not I which disobey you. What then shall I say? {312} but that I, who am ready to lie under your feet, to venture, nay to lose my life at your least commandment: I am not the stay of your freedom, but love, love, which ties you in your own knots. It is you yourself that imprison yourself: it is your beauty which makes those castle walls embrace you: it is your own eyes which reflect upon themselves this injury. Then is there no other remedy, but that you some way vouchsafe to satisfy this love’s vehemency; which since it grew in yourself) without question you shall find it (far more than I) tractable.”

But with these words Philoclea fell to so extreme a quaking, and her lively whiteness did degenerate to such a deadly paleness that Amphialus feared some dangerous trance: so that taking her hand, and feeling that it (which was wont to be one of the chief firebrands of Cupid) had all the sense of it wrapt up in coldness, he began humbly to beseech her to put away all fear, and to assure herself upon the vow he made thereof unto God, and herself, that the uttermost forces he would ever employ to conquer her affection, should be desire and desert. That promise brought Philoclea again to herself, so that slowly lifting up her eyes upon him, with a countenance ever courteous, but then languishing, she told him that he should do well to do so, if indeed he had ever tasted what true love was: for that where now she did bear him goodwill, she should (if he took any other way) hate and abhor the very thought of him, assuring him withal, that though his mother had taken away her knives, yet the house of death had so many doors that she would easily fly into it if ever she found her honour endangered.

Amphialus having the cold ashes of care cast upon the coals of desire, leaving some of his mother’s gentlewomen to wait upon Philoclea, himself indeed a prisoner to his prisoner, and making all his authority to be but a foot-stool to humbleness, went from her to his mother. To whom with words, which affection indited, but amazement uttered, he delivered what had passed between him and Philoclea, beseeching her to try what her persuasions could do with her, while he gave order for all such things as were necessary against such forces, as he looked daily Basilius would bring before his castle. His mother bade him quiet himself, for she doubted not to take fit times: But that the best way was, first to let her own passion tire itself.

So they called Clinias and some other of their council, advised upon their present affairs. First, he dispatched private letters to all those principal lords and gentlemen of the country whom he thought either alliance, or friendship to himself might draw, with special motion from the general consideration of duty: not omitting all such, whom either youthful age, or youthlike minds {313} did fill with unlimited desires: besides such whom any discontentment made hungry of change, or an overspended want, made want a civil war: to each (according to the counsel of his mother) conforming himself after their humours. To his friend, friendliness; to the ambitious, great expectations; to the displeased, revenge; to the greedy, spoil; wrapping their hopes with such cunning that they rather seemed given over unto them as partakers, than promises sprung of necessity. Then sent he to his mother’s brother, the king of Argos; but he was then so over-laid with war himself as from thence he could attend small succour.

But because he knew how violently rumours do blow the sails of popular judgments, and how few there be that can discern between truth and truth likeness, between shows and substance, he caused a justification of this his action to be written, whereof were sowed[1] abroad many copies, which with some glosses of probability, might hide indeed the foulness of his treason; and from true common-places, fetch down most false applications. For beginning in how much the duty which is owed to the country, goes beyond all other duties, since in itself it contains them all; and that for the respect thereof, not only all tender respects of kindred, or whatsoever other friendships, are to be laid aside, but that even long-held opinions (rather builded upon a secret of government than any ground of truth) are to be forsaken; he fell by degrees to show that since the end whereto anything is directed is ever to be of more noble reckoning, than the thing thereto directed, that therefore the weal-public was more to be regarded than any person or magistrate that thereunto was ordained: the feeling consideration whereof had moved him (though as near of kin to Basilius as could be, yet) to set principally before his eyes, the good estate of so many thousands over whom Basilius reigned, rather than so to hood-wink himself with affection, as to suffer the realm to run to manifest ruin. The care whereof did kindly appertain to those who being subaltern magistrates and officers of the crown, were to be employed, as from the prince, so for the people; and of all other, especially himself, who being descended of the royal race, and next heir male, nature had no sooner opened his eyes, but that the soil whereupon they did look, was to look for at his hands a continual carefulness: which as from his childhood he had ever carried, so now finding that his uncle had not only given over all care of government, but had put into the hands of Philanax (a man neither in birth comparable to many, nor for his corrupt, proud, and partial dealing, liked of any) but beside, had set his {314} daughters, in whom the whole estate, as next heirs thereunto, had no less interest than himself, in so unfit and ill-guarded a place, that it were not only dangerous for their persons, but (if they should be conveyed to any foreign country) to the whole commonwealth pernicious, that therefore he had brought them into this strong castle of his, which way, if it might seem strange, they were to consider that new necessities required new remedies, but there they should be served and honoured as belonged to their greatness until by the general assembly of the states it should be determined how they should to their best (both private and public) advantage be matched; vowing all faith and duty both to the father and children, never by him to be violated. But if in the meantime, before the states could be assembled, he should be assailed, he would then for his own defence take arms; desiring all that either tendered the dangerous case of their country, or in their hearts loved justice, to defend him in this just action. And if the prince should command them otherwise, yet to know that therein he was no more to be obeyed than if he should call for poison to hurt himself withal: since all that was done, was done for his service, howsoever he might (seduced by Philanax) interpret of it: he protesting that whatsoever he should do for his own defence, should be against Philanax, and no way against Basilius.

To this effect, amplified with arguments and examples, and painted with rhetorical colours, did he sow[2] abroad many discourses, which as they prevailed with some of more quick than sound conceit to run his fortune with him, so in many did it breed a coolness, to deal violently against him, and a false-minded neutrality to expect the issue. But besides the ways he used to weaken the adverse party, he omitted nothing for the strengthening of his own. The chief trust whereof, because he wanted men to keep the field, he reposed in the surety of his castle, which at least would win him much time, the mother of many mutations. To that therefore he bent both his outward and inward eyes, striving to make art strive with nature, to whether of them two that fortification should be most beholding. The seat nature bestowed but art gave the building; which as his rocky hardness would not yield to undermining force, so to open assaults he took counsel of skill how to make all approaches, if not impossible, yet difficult; as well at the foot of the castle, as round about the lake, to give unquiet lodgings to them, whom only enmity would make neighbours. Then omitted he nothing of defence, as well simple defence as that which did defend by offending, fitting instruments of mischief to places whence the mischief might be most liberally {315} bestowed. Neither was his smallest care for victuals, as well for the providing that which should suffice, both in store and goodness, as in well preserving it, and wary distributing it, both in quantity and quality, spending that first which would keep least.

But wherein he sharpened his wits to the piercingest point, was touching his men (knowing them to be the weapon of weapons, and master-spring, as it were, which makes all the rest to stir: and that therefore in the art of man stood the quintessence and ruling skill of all prosperous government, either peaceable or military) he chose in number as many as without pestering (and so danger of infection) his victual would serve for two years to maintain; all of able bodies, and some few of able minds to direct, not seeking many commanders, but contenting himself that the multitude should have obeying wits, everyone knowing whom he should command, and whom he should obey, the place where, and the matter wherein; distributing each office as near as he could, to the disposition of the person that should exercise it: knowing no love, danger nor discipline can suddenly alter an habit in nature. Therefore would he not employ the still man to a shifting practice, nor the liberal man to be a dispenser of his victuals, nor the kind-hearted man to be a punisher; but would exercise their virtues in sorts, where they might be profitable, employing his chief care to know them all particularly, and thoroughly regarding also the constitution of their bodies; some being able better to abide watching, some hunger, some labour, making his benefit of each ability, and not forcing beyond power. Time to everything by just proportion he allotted, and as well in that, as in everything else, no small error winked at, lest greater should be animated. Even of vices he made his profit, making the cowardly Clinias to have care of the watch, which he knew his own fear would make him very wakefully perform. And before the siege began, he himself caused rumours to be sowed, and libels to be spread against himself, fuller of malice than witty persuasion, partly to know those that would be apt to stumble at such motions, that he might call them from the faithfuller band, but principally, because in necessity they should not know when any such things were in earnest attempted, whether it were, or not of his own invention. But even then (before the enemy’s face came near to breed any terror) did he exercise his men daily in all their charges, as if danger had presently presented his most hideous presence: himself rather instructing by example than precept; being neither more sparing in travel, nor spending in diet than the meanest soldier; his hand and body disdaining no base matters nor shrinking from the heavy.

The only odds was, that when others took breath, he sighed; {316} and when others rested, he crossed his arms. For love passing through the pikes of danger, and tumbling itself in the dust of labour, yet still made him remember his sweet desire and beautiful image. Often when he had begun to command one, somewhat before half the sentence were ended, his inward guest did so entertain him that he would break it off, and a pretty while after end it, when he had (to the marvel of the standers by) sent himself to talk with his own thoughts. Sometimes when his hand was lifted up to do something, as if with the sight of Gorgon’s head he had been suddenly turned into a stone, so would he there abide with his eyes planted, and hands lifted, till at length coming to the use of himself, he would look about whether any had perceived him; then he would accuse, and in himself condemn all those wits that durst affirm idleness to be the well-spring of love. “O,” would he say, “all you that affect the title of wisdom by ungrateful scorning the ornaments of nature, am I now piping in a shadow? Or do slothful feathers now enwrap me? Is not hate before me, and doubt behind me? Is not danger of the one side, and shame of the other? And do I not stand upon pain and travail, and yet over all, my affection triumphs? The more I stir about urgent affairs, the more methinks the very stirring breeds a breath to blow the coals of my love: the more I exercise my thoughts, the more they increase the appetite of my desires. O sweet Philoclea (with that he would cast up his eyes, wherein some water did appear, as if they would wash themselves against they should see her) thy heavenly face is my astronomy; thy sweet virtue, my sweet philosophy; let me profit therein, and farewell all other cogitations. But alas! my mind misgives me, for your planets bear a contrary aspect unto me. Woe, woe is me, they threaten my destruction; and whom do they threaten this destruction? even him that loves them; and by what means will they destroy, but by loving them? O dear, though killing, eyes, shall death head his dart with the gold of Cupid’s arrow? shall death take his aim from the rest of beauty? O beloved, though hating, Philoclea, how, if thou be’st merciful, hath cruelty stolen into thee? or how, if thou be’st cruel, doth cruelty look more beautiful than ever mercy did? or alas! is it my destiny that makes mercy cruel; like an evil vessel which turns sweet liquor to sourness? so when thy grace falls upon me, my wretched constitution makes it become fierceness.” Thus would he exercise his eloquence when she could not hear him, and be dumb-stricken when her presence gave him fit occasion of speaking: so that his wit could find out no other refuge but the comfort and counsel of his mother, desiring her, whose thoughts were unperplexed, to use for his sake the most prevailing manners of intercession.

She seeing her son’s safety depend thereon, though her pride much disdained the name of a desirer, took the charge upon her, not doubting the easy conquest of an unexpert virgin, who had already with subtlety and impudency begun to undermine a monarchy. Therefore weighing Philoclea’s resolutions by the counterpoise of her own youthful thoughts, which she then called to mind, she doubted not at least to make Philoclea to receive the poison distilled in sweet liquor which she with little disguising had drank up thirstily. Therefore she went softly to Philoclea’s chamber, and peeping through the side of the door, then being a little open, she saw Philoclea sitting low upon a cushion in such a given-over manner, that one would have thought silence, solitariness, and melancholy were come there under the ensign of mishap, to conquer delight, and drive him from his natural seat of beauty: her tears came dropping down like rain in sunshine, and she not taking heed to wipe the tears, they hung upon her cheeks and lips as upon cherries which the dropping tree bedeweth. In the dressing of her hair and apparel, she might see neither a careful art, nor an art of carelessness, but even left to a neglected chance, which yet could no more unperfect her perfections than a die any way cast could lose its squareness.

Cecropia, stirred with no other pity but for her son, came in, and hailing kindness into her countenance, “What ails this sweet lady,” said she, “will you mar so good eyes with weeping? shall tears take away the beauty of that complexion which the women of Arcadia wish for, and the men long after? Fie of this peevish sadness; insooth it is untimely for your age. Look upon your own body and see whether it deserve to pine away with sorrow: see whether you will have these hands (with that she took one of her hands, and kissing it, looked upon it as if she were enamoured with it) fade from their whiteness which makes one desire to touch them; and their softness, which rebounds again a desire to look on them, and become dry, lean and yellow, and make everybody wonder at the change, and say, that sure you had used some art before, which now you had left; for if the beauties had been natural, they would never so soon have been blemished. Take a glass, and see whether those tears become your eyes: although I must confess, those eyes are able to make tears comely.” “Alas! madam,” answered Philoclea, “I know not whether my tears become my eyes, but I am sure my eyes thus beteared, become my fortune.” “Your fortune,” said Cecropia, “if she could see to attire herself, she would put on her best raiments. For I see, and I see it with grief, and (to tell you true) unkindness, you misconstrue everything that only for your sake is attempted. You think you are offended, and are, indeed, defended: you esteem yourself a {318} prisoner, and are, in truth, a mistress; you fear hate, and shall find love. And truly, I had a thing to say unto you, but it is no matter since I find you are so obstinately melancholy as that you woo his fellowship, I will spare my pains, and hold my peace:” and so stayed indeed, thinking Philoclea would have had a female inquisitiveness of the matter. But she, who rather wished to unknow what she knew than to burden her heart with more hopeless knowledge, only desired her to have pity of her, and if, indeed, she did mean her no hurt, then to grant her liberty; for else the very grief and fear would prove her unappointed executioners.

“For that,” said Cecropia, “believe me upon the faith of a king’s daughter, you shall be free, so soon as your freedom may be free of mortal danger, being brought hither for no other cause, but to prevent such mischiefs as you know not of. But if you think, indeed, to win me to have care of you, even as of mine own daughter, then lend your ears unto me, and let not your mind arm itself with a wilfulness to be flexible to nothing. But if I speak reason, let reason have his due reward, persuasion. Then sweet niece,” said she, “I pray you pre-suppose, that now, even in the midst of your agonies, which you paint unto yourself most horrible, wishing with sighs, and praying with vows, for a soon and safe delivery: imagine niece (I say) that some heavenly spirit should appear unto you, and bid you follow him through the door that goes into the garden, assuring you that you should thereby return to your dear mother, and what other delights soever your mind esteems delights, would you (sweet niece) would you refuse to follow him, and say that if he led you not through the chief gate, you would not enjoy your over-desired liberty? Would you not drink the wine you thirst for, without it were in such a glass as you especially fancied? Tell me (dear niece) but I will answer for you, because I know your reason and wit is such, as must needs conclude that such niceness can no more be in you, to disgrace such a mind, than disgracefulness can have any place in so faultless a beauty. Your wisdom would assuredly determine how the mark were hit, not whether the bow were of yew or no, wherein you shot. If this be so, and thus sure (my dear niece) it is, then, I pray you, imagine that I am that same good angel, who grieving in your grief, and, in truth, not able to suffer that bitter sighs should be sent forth with so sweet a breath, am come to lead you, not only to your desired and imagined happiness, but to a true and essential happiness; not only to liberty, but to liberty with commandment. The way I will show you; which if it be not the gate builded hitherto in your private choice, yet shall it be a door to bring you through a garden of pleasures, as sweet as this life can bring forth; nay rather, which {319} makes this life to be a life: My son (let it be no blemish to him that I name him my son, who was your father’s own nephew; for you know I am no small king’s daughter) my son, I say, far passing the nearness of his kindred with nearness of goodwill, and striving to match your matchless beauty with a matchless affection, doth by me present unto you the full enjoying of your liberty, so that with this gift you will accept a greater, which is, this castle, with all the rest which you know he hath in honourable quantity, and will confirm his gift, and your receipt of both, with accepting him to be yours. I might say much both for the person and matter; but who will cry out the sun shines? It is so manifest a profit unto you, as the meanest judgment must straight apprehend it; so far it is from the sharpness of yours, thereof to be ignorant. Therefore (sweet niece!) let your gratefulness be my intercession and your gentleness my eloquence, and let me carry comfort to a heart which greatly needs it.”

Philoclea looked upon her, and cast down her eye again: “Aunt,” said she, “I would I could be so much a mistress of my own mind as to yield to my cousin’s virtuous request; for so I construe of it. But my heart is already set” (and staying a while on that word, she brought forth afterwards) “to lead a virgin’s life to my death; for such a vow I have in myself devoutly made.” “The heavens prevent such a mischief,” said Cecropia. “A vow, quoth you? No, no, my dear niece, nature, when you were first born, vowed you a woman, and as she made you child of a mother, so to do your best to be mother of a child: She gave you beauty to move love; she gave you wit to know love; she gave you an excellent body to reward love; which kind of liberal rewarding is crowned with an unspeakable felicity. For this, as it bindeth the receiver, so it makes happy the bestower. This doth not impoverish, but enrich the giver. O the sweet name of a mother! O the comfort of comforts to see your children grow up, in whom you are, as it were, eternized! if you could conceive what a heart-tickling joy it is to see your own little ones with awful love come running to your lap, and like little models of yourself still carry you about them, you would think unkindness in your own thoughts, that ever they did rebel against the mean unto it. But perchance I set this blessedness before your eyes, as captains do victory before their soldiers, to which they must come through many pains, griefs and dangers: No, I am content you shrink from this my counsel, if the way to come unto it be not most of all pleasant.” “I know not” (answered the sweet Philoclea, fearing lest silence would offend for sullenness) “what contentment you speak of; but I am sure the best you can make of it (which is marriage) is a burdenous yoke.” “Ah, dear niece,” said Cecropia, “how much you are {320} deceived: A yoke, indeed, we all bear, laid upon us in our creation, which by marriage is not increased; but thus far eased that you have a yoke-fellow to help to draw through the cloddy cumbers of this world. O widow-nights, bear witness with me of the difference! How often, alas! do I embrace the orphan-side of my bed which was wont to be imprinted by the body of my dear husband, and with tears acknowledge that I now enjoy such a liberty as the banished man hath; who may, if he list, wander over the world, but is for ever restrained from his most delightful home? That I have now such a liberty as the seeled dove hath, which, being first deprived of eyes, is then by the falconer cast off: For believe me, niece, believe me, man’s experience is woman’s best eye-sight. Have you ever seen a pure rose-water kept in a crystal glass? How fine it looks, how sweet it smells while that beautiful glass imprisons it? Break the prison; and let the water take its own course, doth it not embrace dust, and lose all its former sweetness and fairness? Truly so are we, if we have not the stay, rather than the restraint of crystalline marriage. My heart melts to think of the sweet comforts I, in that happy time, received, when I had never cause to care, but the care was doubled: When I never rejoiced, but that I saw my joy shine in another’s eyes. What shall I say of the free delight which the heart might embrace without the accusing of the inward conscience, or fear of outward shame? And is a solitary life as good as this? Then can one string make as good music as a consort: then can one colour set forth a beauty. But it may be, the general consideration of marriage doth not so much mislike you, as the applying of it to him. He is my son, I must confess I see him with a mother’s eyes, which if they do not much deceive me, he is no such one, over whom contempt may make a just challenge. He is comely, he is noble, he is rich; but that which in itself should carry all comeliness, nobility and riches, he loves you; and he loves you who is beloved of others. Drive not away his affection (sweet lady) and make no other lady hereafter proudly brag that she hath robbed you of so faithful and notable a service.”

Philoclea heard some pieces of her speeches, not otherwise than one doth when a tedious prattler cumbers the hearing of a delightful music. For her thoughts had left her ears in that captivity, and conveyed themselves to behold (with such eyes as imagination could lend them) the estate of her Zelmane: for whom how well she thought many of those sayings might have been used with a far more grateful acceptation. Therefore listening not to dispute in a matter, whereof herself was resolved, and desired not to inform the other; she only told her that whilst she was so captivated she could not conceive of any such {321} persuasions (though never so reasonable) any otherwise than as constraints: and as constraints must needs even in nature abhor them, which at her liberty, in their own force of reason, might more prevail with her; and so fain would have returned the strength of Cecropia’s persuasions, to have procured freedom.

But neither her witty words in an enemy, nor those words, made more than eloquent with passing through such lips, could prevail in Cecropia, more than her persuasions could win Philoclea to disavow her former vow, or to leave the prisoner Zelmane, for the commanding Amphialus. So that both sides being desirers, and neither granters, they broke off conference; Cecropia sucking up more and more spite out of her denial, which yet for her son’s sake she disguised with a vizard of kindness, leaving no office unperformed which might either witness, or endear her son’s affection. Whatsoever could be imagined likely to please her was with liberal diligence performed: musics at her window, and especially such musics as might (with doleful embassage) call the mind to think of sorrow, and think of it with sweetness; with ditties so sensibly expressing Amphialus’s case, that every word seemed to be but a diversifying of the name of Amphialus. Daily presents, as it were oblations to pacify an angry deity, sent unto her; wherein, if the workmanship of the form had striven with the sumptuousness of the matter, as much did the invention, in the application, contend to have the chief excellency: for they were as so many stories of his disgraces, and her perfections; where the richness did invite the eyes, the fashion did entertain the eyes, and the device did teach the eyes, the present misery of the presenter himself awfully serviceable; which was the more notable, as his authority was manifest. And for the bondage wherein she lived, all means used to make known that if it were a bondage, it was a bondage only knit in love-knots: but she in heart already understanding no language but one, the music wrought, indeed, a dolefulness, but it was a dolefulness to be in his power: the ditty intended for Amphialus, she translated to Zelmane: the presents seemed so many tedious clogs of a thralled obligation: and his service, the more diligent it was, the more it did exprobrate, as she thought, unto her, her unworthy estate: that even he that did her service, had authority of commanding her, only construing her servitude in his own nature, esteeming it a right, and a right better servitude: so that all their shots, how well soever levelled, being carried awry from the mark by the storm of her mislike, the prince Amphialus affectionately languished, and Cecropia spitefully cunning, disdained at the barrenness of their success.

Which willingly Cecropia would have revenged, but that she saw her hurt could not be divided from her son’s mischief: {322} wherefore she bethought herself to attempt Pamela, whose beauty being equal, she hoped if she might be won, that her son’s thoughts would rather rest on a beautiful gratefulness than still be tormented with a disdaining beauty. Therefore giving new courage to her wicked inventions, and using the more industry, because she had missed in this, and taking even precepts of prevailing in Pamela, by her failing in Philoclea, she went to her chamber, and (according to her own ungracious method of subtle proceeding) stood listening at the door, because that out of the circumstance of her present behaviour, there might kindly arise a fit beginning of her intended discourse.

And so she might perceive that Pamela did walk up and down, full of deep, though patient thoughts. For her look and countenance was settled, her pace soft, and almost still of one measure, without any passionate gesture, or violent motion: till at length, as it were awaking, and strengthening herself; “Well,” said she, “yet this is the best, and of this I am sure, that howsoever they wrong me, they cannot over-master God: no darkness blinds his eyes, no jail bars Him out. To whom then else should I fly, but to Him for succour?” and therewith kneeling down even where she stood, she thus said.

“O all-seeing light, and eternal life of all things, to whom nothing is either so great that it may resist, or so small that it is contemned: look upon my misery with Thine eye of mercy, and let Thine infinite power vouchsafe to limit out some proportion of deliverance unto me, as to Thee shall seem most convenient. Let not injury, O Lord, triumph over me, and let my faults by Thy hand be corrected, and make not mine unjust enemy the minister of Thy justice. But yet, my God, if in Thy wisdom, this be the aptest chastisement for my unexcusable folly, if this low bondage be fittest for my over-high desires; if the pride of my not enough humble heart, be thus to be broken, O Lord, I yield unto Thy will, and joyfully embrace what sorrow Thou wilt have me suffer. Only thus much let me crave of Thee, let my craving, O Lord, be accepted of Thee (since even that proceeds from Thee) let me crave, even by the noblest title, which in my greatest affliction I may give myself, that I am Thy creature, and by Thy goodness, which is Thyself, that Thou wilt suffer some beam of Thy majesty so to shine into my mind, that it may still depend confidently upon Thee. Let calamity be the exercise, but not the overthrow of my virtue: let their power prevail, but prevail not to destruction: let my greatness be their prey: let my pain be the sweetness of their revenge: let them (if so it seem good unto Thee) vex me with more and more punishment. But, O Lord, let never their wickedness have such a hand, but that I may carry {323} a pure mind in a pure body!” and pausing awhile, “And, O most gracious Lord,” said she, “whatever becomes of me, preserve the virtuous Musidorus.”

The other part Cecropia might well hear; but this latter prayer for Musidorus, her heart held it, as so jewel-like a treasure that it would scarce trust her own lips withal. But this prayer sent to heaven from so heavenly a creature, with such a fervent grace as if devotion had borrowed her body to make of itself a most beautiful representation; with her eyes so lifted to the skyward that one would have thought they had begun to fly thitherward to take their place among their fellow stars; her naked hands raising up their whole length, and as it were, kissing one another, as if the right had been the picture of zeal, and the left of humbleness, which both united themselves to make their suits more acceptable. Lastly, all her senses being rather tokens than instruments of her inward motions, altogether had so strange a working power, that even the hard-hearted wickedness of Cecropia, if it found not a love of that goodness, yet it felt an abashment at that goodness, and if she had not a kindly remorse, yet had she an irksome accusation of her own naughtiness; so that she was put from the bias of her fore-intended lesson. For well she found there was no way at that time to take that mind but with some, at least, image of virtue; and what the figure thereof was, her heart knew not.

Yet did she prodigally spend her uttermost eloquence, leaving no argument unprovided which might with any force invade her excellent judgment; the justness of the request being but for marriage; the worthiness of the suitor: then her own present fortune: fortune, which should not only have amendment, but felicity: besides falsely making her believe that her sister would think herself happy if now she might have his love, which before she contemned: and obliquely touching, what danger it should be for her if her son should accept Philoclea in marriage, and so match the next heir apparent, she being in his power: yet plentifully perjuring how extremely her son loved her, and excusing the little shows he made of it, with the dutiful respect he bare unto her; and taking upon herself that she restrained him, since she found she could set no limits to his passions. And as she did to Philoclea, so did she to her, with the tribute of gifts seek to bring her mind into servitude: and all other means, that might either establish a beholdingness, or at least awake a kindness; doing it so, that by reason of their imprisonment, one sister knew not how the other was wooed but each might think that only she was sought. But if Philoclea with sweet and humble dealing did avoid their assaults, she with the majesty of virtue did beat them off.

But this day their speech was the sooner broken off, by reason that he who stood as watch upon the top of the Keep[3] did not only see a great dust rise (which the earth sent up as if it would strive to have clouds as well as the air) but might spy sometimes, especially when the dust (wherein the naked wind did apparel itself) was carried aside from them, the shining of armour; like flashing of lightning, wherewith the clouds did seem to be with child, which the sun gilding with his beams it gave a sight delightful to any but to them that were to abide the terror. But the watch gave a quick alarm to the soldiers within whom practice already having prepared, began each, with unabashed hearts, or at least countenances, to look to their charge, or obedience which was allotted unto them.

Only Clinias and Amphialus did exceed the bounds of mediocrity, the one in his natural coldness of cowardice, the other in heat of courage. For Clinias (who was bold only in busy whisperings, and even in that whisperingness rather, indeed, confident in his cunning that it should not be betrayed than any way bold, if ever it should be betrayed) now that the enemy gave a dreadful aspect unto the castle, his eyes saw no terror, nor ear heard any martial sound but that they multiplied the hideousness of it to his matted mind. Before their coming he had many times felt a dreadful expectation, but yet his mind (that was willing to ease itself of the burden of fear) did sometimes fain unto itself possibility of let, as the death of Basilius, the discord of the nobility, and, when other cause failed him, the nature of chance served as a cause unto him, and sometimes the hearing other men speak valiantly, and the quietness of his unassailed senses would make himself believe that he durst do something. But now, that present danger did display itself unto his eye, and that a dangerous doing must be the only mean to prevent the danger of suffering, one that had marked him would have judged that his eyes would have run into him, and his soul out of him, so unkindly did either take a scent of danger. He thought the lake was too shallow, and the walls too thin: he misdoubted each man’s treason, and conjectured every possibility of misfortune, not only forecasting likely perils, but such as all the planets together could scarcely have conspired: and already began to arm himself, though it was determined he should tarry within doors; and while he armed himself, imagined in what part of the vault he would hide himself if the enemies won the castle. Desirous he was that everybody should do valiantly but himself; and therefore was afraid to show his fear, but for very fear would have hid his fear, lest it should discomfort others: but the more he sought {325} to disguise it, the more the unsuitableness of a weak broken voice to high brave words, and of a pale shaking countenance, to a gesture of animating, did discover him.

But quite contrarily Amphialus, who, before the enemies came, was careful, providently diligent, and not sometimes without doubting of the issue, now the nearer danger approached (like the light of a glow-worm) the less still it seemed: and now his courage began to boil in choler, and with such impatience to desire to pour out both upon the enemy, that he issued presently into certain boats he had of purpose, and carrying with him some choice men, went to the fortress he had upon the edge of the lake, which he thought would be the first thing that the enemy would attempt, because it was a passage, which commanding all that side of the country, and being lost, would stop victuals, or other supply that might be brought into the castle: and in that fortress having some force of horsemen, he issued out with two hundred horse and five hundred footmen; ambushed his footmen in the falling of a hill, which was over-shadowed with a wood; he with his horsemen went a quarter of a mile further; aside hand of which he might perceive the many troops of the enemy who came but to take view where best to encamp themselves.

But as if the sight of the enemy had been a magnet-stone to his courage, he could not contain himself, but showing his face to the enemy, and his back to his soldiers, used that action as his only oration, both of denouncing war to the one, and persuading help from the other. Who faithfully following an example of such authority, they made the earth to groan under their furious burden, and the enemies to begin to be angry with them, whom in particular they knew not. Among whom there was a young man, youngest brother to Philanax, whose face as yet did not betray his sex with so much as show of hair; of a mind having no limits of hope, not knowing why to fear; full of jollity in conversation, and lately grown a lover. His name was Agenor, of all that army the most beautiful: who having ridden in sportful conversation among the foremost, all armed, saving that his beaver was up, to have his breath in more freedom, seeing Amphialus come a pretty way before his company, neither staying the commandment of the captain, nor reckoning whether his face were armed, or no, set spurs to his horse, and with youthful bravery casting his staff about his head, put it then into his rest, as careful of comely carrying it as if the mark had been but a ring, and the lookers-on ladies. But Amphialus’s lance was already come to the last of his descending line, and began to make the full point of death against the head of this young gentleman; when Amphialus perceiving his youth and beauty, compassion so rebated the edge of choler that he spared {326} that fair nakedness, and let his staff fall to Agenor’s vampalt[4]: so that both with brave breaking should hurtlessly have performed that match, but that the pitiless lance of Amphialus (angry with being broken) with an unlucky counterbuff, full of unsparing splinters, lighted upon that face, far fitter for the combats of Venus, giving not only a sudden, but a foul death, leaving scarcely any tokens of his former beauty; but his hands abandoning the reins, and his thighs the saddle, he fell sideward from the horse. Which sight coming to Leontius, a dear friend of his, who in vain had lamentably cried unto him to stay when he saw him begin his career; it was hard to say whether the pity of the one, or revenge against the other held as then the sovereignty in his passions. But while he directed his eye to his friend, and his hand to his enemy, so wrongly consorted a power could not resist the ready minded force of Amphialus, who perceiving his ill-directed direction against him, so paid him his debt before it was lent, that he also fell to the earth, only happy that one place and one time did finish both their loves and lives together.

But by this time there had been a furious meeting of either side: whether after the terrible salutation of warlike noise, the shaking of hands was with sharp weapons: some lances according to the metal they met and skill of the guider, did stain themselves in blood; some flew up in pieces, as if they would threaten heaven because they failed on earth. But their office was quickly inherited, either by (the prince of weapons) the sword, or by some heavy mace, or biting axe; which hunting still the weakest chase, sought ever to light there where smallest resistance might worse prevent mischief. The clashing of armour, the crushing of staves, the jostling of bodies, the resounding of blows, was the first part of that ill-agreeing music which was beautified with the grisliness of wounds, the rising of dust, the hideous falls and groans of the dying. The very horses angry in their master’s anger, with love and obedience, brought forth the effects of hate and resistance, and with minds of servitude did as if they affected glory. Some lay dead under their dead masters, whom unknightly wounds had unjustly punished for a faithful duty. Some lay upon their lords by like accident, and in death had the honour to be borne by them, whom in life they had borne. Some, having lost their commanding burdens, ran scattered about the field, abashed with the madness of mankind. The earth itself (wont to be a burial of men) was now, as it were, buried with men, so was the face thereof hidden with dead bodies, to whom death had come masked in divers manners. In one place lay disinherited heads, dispossessed of their natural seignories; in another whole bodies to see to, but that their hearts {327} wont to be bound all over so close, were now with deadly violence opened: in others, fouler deaths had uglily displayed their trailing guts. There lay arms, whose fingers yet moved, as if they would feel for him that made them feel: and legs, which contrary to common reason, by being discharged of their burden, were grown heavier. But no sword payed so large a tribute of souls to the eternal kingdom as that of Amphialus; who like a tiger, from whom a company of wolves did seek to ravish a new gotten prey, so he (remembering they came to take away Philoclea) did labour to make valour, strength, choler and hatred, to answer the proportion of his love which was infinite.

There died of his hand the old knight Eschylus, who though by years might well have been allowed to use rather the exercises of wisdom than of courage, yet having a lusty body and a merry heart, he ever took the summons of time in jest, or else it had so creepingly stolen upon him that he had heard scarcely the noise of his feet, and therefore was as fresh in apparel, and as forward in enterprises, as a far younger man: but nothing made him bolder than a certain prophecy had been told him that he should die in the arms of his son, and therefore feared the less the arm of an enemy. But now when Amphialus’s sword was passed through his throat, he thought himself abused, but that before he died, his son indeed seeing his father begin to fall, held him up in his arms, till a pitiless soldier of the other side, with a mace brained him, making father and son become twins in the never again dying birth. As for Drialus, Memnon, Nisus and Polycrates, the first had his eyes cut out so that he could not see to bid the near following death welcome; the second had met with the same prophet that old Eschylus had; and having found many of his speeches true, believed this too, that he should never be killed but by his own companions; and therefore no man was more valiant than he against an enemy, no man more suspicious of his friends: so as he seemed to sleep in security, when he went to a battle, and to enter into a battle, when he began to sleep, such guards he would set about his person, yet mistrusting those very guards, lest they would murder him. But now Amphialus helped to unriddle his doubts; for he overthrowing him from his horse, his own companions coming with a fresh supply, pressed him to death. Nisus grasping with Amphialus, was with a short dagger slain. And for Polycrates, while he shunned as much as he could, keeping only his face for fear of punishment, Amphialus with a memorable blow struck off his head; where, with the convulsions of death, setting his spurs to his horse, he gave so brave a charge upon the enemy, as it grew a proverb, that Polycrates was only valiant after his head was off. But no man {328} escaped so well his hands as Phebilus did: for he having long loved Philoclea, though for the meanness of his estate he never durst reveal it, now knowing Amphialus, setting the edge of a rival upon the sword of an enemy, he held strong fight with him. But Amphialus had already in the most dangerous places disarmed him, and was lifting up his sword to send him away from himself; when he thinking indeed to die, “O Philoclea,” said he, “yet this joys me that I die for thy sake.” The name of Philoclea first stayed his sword, and he heard him out, though he abhorred him much worse than before, yet could he not vouchsafe him the honour of dying for Philoclea, but turned his sword another way, doing him no hurt for over-much hatred. But what good did that to poor Phebilus, if escaping a valiant hand, he was slain by a base soldier, who seeing him so disarmed, thrust him through?

But thus with the well-followed valour of Amphialus were the others almost overthrown, when Philanax, who was the marshal of the army, came in with new force renewing the almost decayed courage of his soldiers. For crying to them, and asking them whether their backs or their arms were better fighters, he himself thrust just into the press, and making force and fury wait upon discretion and government, he might seem a brave lion, who taught his young lionets, how in taking a prey, to join courage with cunning. Then fortune, as if she had made chases enough of the one side of the bloody tennis-court, went of the other side the line, making as many fall down of Amphialus’s followers as before had done of Philanax, they losing the ground, as fast as before they had won it, only leaving them to keep it, who had lost themselves in keeping it. Then those that had killed, inherited the lot of those that had been killed; and cruel death made them lie quietly together, who most in their lives had sought to disquiet each other; and many of those first overthrown, had the comfort to see their murderers over-run them to Charon’s ferry.

Codrus, Ctesiphon, and Milo, lost their lives upon Philanax’s sword. But nobody’s case was more pitied than of a young squire of Amphialus, called Ismenus, who never abandoning his master, and making his tender age aspire to acts of the strongest manhood, in this time that his side was put to the worst, and that Amphialus’s valour was the only stay of them from delivering themselves over to a most shameful flight, he saw his master’s horse killed under him. Whereupon asking advice of no other thought but of faithfulness and courage, he presently alighted from his own horse, and with the help of some choice and faithful servants, got his master up. But in the multitude that came of either side, some {329} to succour, some to save Amphialus, he came under the hand of Philanax: and the youth perceiving he was the man that did most hurt to his party, desirous even to change his life for glory, struck at him as he rode by him, and gave him a hurt upon the leg that made Philanax turn towards him; but seeing him so young, and of a most lovely presence, he rather took pity of him, meaning to take him prisoner, and then to give him to his brother Agenor to be his companion, because they were not much unlike, neither in years, nor countenance. But as he looked down upon him with that thought, he espied where his brother lay dead, and his friend Leontius by him, even almost under the squire’s feet. Then sorrowing not only his own sorrow, but the past-comfort sorrow which he foreknew his mother would take, who with many tears and misgiving sighs had suffered him to go with his elder brother Philanax, blotted out all figures of pity out of his mind, and putting forth his horse, while Ismenus doubled two or three more valiant than well-set blows, saying to himself, let other mothers bewail an untimely death as well as mine, he thrust him through. And the boy fierce, though beautiful, and beautiful though dying, not able to keep his falling feet, fell down to the earth, which he bit for anger, repining at his fortune, and as long as he could resisting death, which might seem unwilling too, so long as he was in taking away his young struggling soul.

Philanax himself could have wished the blow ungiven, when he saw him fall like a fair apple, which some uncourteous body, breaking his bough, should throw down before it were ripe. But the case of his brother made him forget both, that, and himself: so as over-hastily pressing upon the retiring enemies, he was (ere he was aware) further engaged than his own soldiers could relieve him; where being overthrown by Amphialus, Amphialus, glad of him, kept head against his enemies, while some of his men carried away Philanax.

But Philanax’s men, as if with the loss of Philanax they had lost the fountain of their valour, had their courage so dried up in fear that they began to set honour at their backs, and to use the virtue of patience in an untimely time, when into the press comes, as hard as his horse, more afraid of the spur than the sword, could carry him, a knight in armour as black as darkness could make it, followed by none, and adorned by nothing; so far without authority that he was without knowledge. But virtue quickly made him known, and admiration bred him such authority that though they of whose side he came knew him not, yet they all knew it was fit to obey him; and while he was followed by the valiantest, he made way for the vilest. For taking part with he besiegers, he made the Amphialians’ blood serve for a caparison {330} to his horse, and a decking to his armour. His arm no oftener gave blows, than the blows gave wounds, than the wounds gave deaths, so terrible was his force, and yet was his quickness more forcible than his force, and his judgment more quick than his quickness. For though his sword went faster than eyesight could follow it yet his own judgment went still before it. There died of his hand, Sarpedon, Plistonax, Strophilus, and Hippolitus, men of great proof in wars, and who had that day undertaken the guard of Amphialus. But while they sought to save him, they lost the fortresses that nature had placed them in. Then slew he Megalus, who was a little before proud to see himself stained in the blood of his enemies, but when his own blood came to be married to theirs, he then felt that cruelty doth never enjoy a good cheap glory. After him sent he Palemon, who had that day vowed, with foolish bravery, to be the death of ten; and nine already he had killed, and was careful to perform his, almost performed, vow, when the black knight helped him to make up the tenth himself.

And now the often-changing fortune began also to change the hue of the battles. For at the first, though it were terrible, yet terror was decked so bravely with rich furniture, gilt swords, shining armours, pleasant pensils, that the eye with delight had scarce leisure to be afraid: but now all universally defiled with dust, blood, broken armour, mangled bodies, took away the mask, and set forth horror in his own horrible manner. But neither could danger be dreadful to Amphialus his undismayable courage, nor yet seem ugly to him, whose truly affected mind did still paint it over with the beauty of Philoclea: and therefore he, rather inflamed than troubled with the increase of dangers, and glad to find a worthy subject to exercise his courage, sought out this new knight, whom he might easily find: for he, like a wanton rich man that throws down his neighbour’s house to make himself the better prospect, so had his sword made him so spacious a room that Amphialus had more cause to wonder at the finding, than labour for the seeking: which if it stirred hate in him to see how much harm he did to the one side, it provoked as much emulation in him to perceive how much good he did to the other side. Therefore, they approaching one to the other, as in two beautiful folks, love naturally stirs a desire of joining, so in their two courages hate stirred a desire of trial. Then began there a combat between them, worthy to have had more large lists, and more quiet beholders: for with the spur of courage, and the bit of respect, each so guided himself, that one might well see the desire to overcome made them not forget how to overcome: in such time and proportion they did employ their blows, that none of Ceres’s servants could more {331} cunningly place his flail: while the left foot spur set forward his own horse, the right set backward the contrary horse, even sometimes by the advantage of the enemy’s leg, while the left hand, like him that held the stern, guided the horse’s obedient courage. All done in such order that it might seem the mind was a right prince indeed, who sent wise and diligent lieutenants into each of those well-governed parts. But the more they fought, the more they desired to fight; and the more they smarted, the less they felt the smart: and now were like to make a quick proof to whom fortune and valour would seem most friendly, when, in comes an old governor of Amphialus, always a good knight, and careful of his charge; who giving a sore wound to the black knight’s thigh, while he thought not of him, with another blow slew his horse under him. Amphialus cried to him that he dishonoured him: “You say well,” answered the old knight, “to stand now like a private soldier, setting your credit upon particular fighting, while you may see Basilius with all his host is getting between you and your town.” He looked that way, and found that true indeed, that the enemy was beginning to encompass him about and stop his return: and therefore causing the retreat to be sounded, his governor led his men homeward, while he kept himself still hindmost, as if he had stood at the gate of a sluice to let the stream go, with such proportion as should seem good unto him, and with so manful discretion performed it, that (though with loss of many of his men) he returned himself safe, and content, that his enemies had felt how sharp the sword could bite of Philoclea’s lover. The other party being sorry for the loss of Philanax, was yet sorrier when the black knight could not be found: for he having gotten a horse, whom his dying master had bequeathed to the world, finding himself sore hurt, and not desirous to be known, had in the time of the enemy’s retiring, retired away also; his thigh not bleeding blood so fast, as his heart bled revenge. But Basilius having attempted in vain to bar the safe return of Amphialus, encamped himself as strongly as he could, while he, to his grief, might hear the joy that was made in town by his own subjects, that he had that day sped no better. For Amphialus, being well beloved of that people, when they saw him not vanquished, they esteemed him as victorious, his youth setting a flourishing show upon his worthiness and his great nobility ennobling his dangers.

But the first thing Amphialus did, being returned, was to visit Philoclea, and first presuming to cause his dream to be sung unto her, which he had seen the night before he fell in love with her, making a fine boy he had accord the pretty dolefulness unto it.

Laying not only the conquest, but the heart of the conqueror at her feet. But she receiving him after her wonted sorrowful, but otherwise unmoved, manner, it made him think his good success was but as a pleasant monument of a doleful burial: Joy itself seeming bitter unto him, since it agreed not to her taste.

Therefore, still craving his mother’s help to persuade her, he himself sent for Philanax unto him, whom he had not only long {336} hated but now had his hate greatly increased by the death of his squire Ismenus. Besides, he had made him as one of the chief causes that moved him to this rebellion, and therefore was inclined, to colour the better his action, and the more to embrew the hands of his accomplices by making them guilty of such a trespass, in some formal sort to cause him to be executed, being also greatly egged thereunto by his mother, and some other, who long had hated Philanax; only because he was more worthy than they to be loved.

But while that deliberation was handled, according rather to the humour, than the reason of each speaker; Philoclea coming to the knowledge of the hard plight wherein Philanax stood, she desired one of the gentlewomen appointed to wait upon her to go in her name and beseech Amphialus, that, if the love of her had any power of persuasion in his mind, he would lay no further punishment than imprisonment upon Philanax. This message was delivered even as Philanax was entering to the presence of Amphialus, coming, according to the warning was given him, to receive judgment of death. But when he, with manful resolution, attended the fruit of such a tyrannical sentence, thinking it wrong, but no harm to him that should die in so good a cause; Amphialus turned quite the form of his pretended speech, and yielded him humble thanks that by his means he had come to that happiness, as to receive a commandment of his lady: and therefore he willingly gave him liberty to return in safety whither he would, quitting him not only of all former grudge, but assuring him that he would be willing to do him any friendship and service: only desiring thus much of him, that he would let him know the discourse and intent of Basilius’s proceeding.

“Truly, my Lord,” answered Philanax, “if there were any such, known to me, secret in my master’s counsel, as that the revealing thereof, might hinder his good success, I should loathe the keeping of my blood with the loss of my faith, and would think the just name of a traitor a hard purchase of a few years’ living. But since it is so, that my master hath indeed no way of privy practice; but means openly and forcibly to deal against you, I will not stick, in few words, to make your required declaration.” Then told he him in what a maze of amazement, both Basilius and Gynecia were when they missed their children and Zelmane. Sometimes apt to suspect some practice of Zelmane, because she was a stranger; sometimes doubting some relic of the late mutiny, which doubt was rather increased than anywise satisfied, by Miso, who, being found almost dead for hunger by certain country people, brought home word with what cunning they were trained out, and with what violence they were carried away. But that within a few {337} days they came to knowledge where they were by Amphialus’s own letters sent abroad to procure confederates in his attempts; that Basilius’s purpose was never to leave the siege of the town till he had taken it, and revenged the injury done unto him. That he meant rather to win it by time and famine, than by force of assault; knowing how valiant men he had to deal withal in the town: that he had sent orders that supplies of soldiers, pioneers, and all things else necessary, should daily be brought unto him: so as, “My Lord,” said Philanax, “let me now, having received my life by your grace, let me give you your life and honour by my counsel; protesting unto you, that I cannot choose but love you, being my master’s nephew; and that I wish you well in all causes but this. You know his nature is as apt to forgive as his power is able to conquer. Your fault past is excusable, in that love persuaded, and youth was persuaded. Do not urge the effects of angry victory, but rather seek to obtain that constantly by courtesy, which you can never assuredly enjoy by violence.”

One might easily have seen in the cheer of Amphialus that disdainful choler would fain have made the answer for him, but the remembrance of Philoclea served for forcible barriers between anger, and angry effects: so as he said no more, but that he would not put him to the trouble to give him any further counsel, but that he might return, if he listed, presently. Philanax glad to receive an uncorrupted liberty, humbly accepted his favourable convoy out of the town; and so departed, not visiting the princesses, thinking it might be offensive to Amphialus, and no way fruitful to them, who were no way, but by force, to be rescued.

The poor ladies, indeed, not suffered either to meet together, or to have conference with any other, but such as Cecropia had already framed, to sing all their songs to her tune, she herself omitting no day, and catching hold of every occasion to move forward her son’s desire, and remove their own resolutions; using the same arguments to the one sister, as to the other; determining that whom she could win first, the other should, without her son’s knowledge, by poison be made away. But though the reasons were the same to both, yet the handling was diverse, according as she saw their humours to prepare a more or less aptness of apprehension. This day having long speech to Philoclea, amplifying not a little the great dutifulness her son had shown in delivering Philanax; of whom she could get no answer, but a silence sealed up in virtue, and so sweetly graced, as that in one instant it carried with it both resistance and humbleness: Cecropia threatening in herself to run a more rugged race with her, went to her sister Pamela, who that day having wearied herself with reading, and with the height of her heart disdaining to keep company with any {338} of the gentlewomen appointed to attend her, whom she accounted her jailors, was working upon a purse certain roses and lilies, as by the fineness of the work, one might see she had borrowed her wits of the sorrow that then owed them, and lent them wholly to that exercise. For the flowers she had wrought carried such life in them that the cunningest painter might have learned of her needle, which with so pretty a manner made his careers to and fro through the cloth, as if the needle itself would have been loth to have gone fromward such a mistress but that it hoped to return thitherward very quickly again, the cloth looking with many eyes upon her, and lovingly embracing the wounds she gave it: the shears also were at hand to behead the silk that was grown too short. And if at any time she put her mouth to bite it off, it seemed, that where she had been long in making of a rose with her hands, she would in an instant make roses with her lips; as the lilies seemed to have their whiteness rather of the hand that made them than of the matter whereof they were made, and that they grew there by the suns of her eyes, and were refreshed by the most, in discomfort, comfortable air, which an unawares sigh might bestow upon them. But the colours for the ground were so well chosen, neither sullenly dark, nor glaringly lightsome; and so well proportioned, as that, though much cunning were in it, yet it was but to serve for ornament of the principal work; that it was not without marvel to see how a mind which could cast a careless semblant upon the greatest conflicts of fortune could command itself to take care for so small matters. Neither had she neglected the dainty dressing of herself; but as if it had been her marriage time to affliction, she rather seemed to remember her own worthiness than the unworthiness of her husband. For well might one perceive she had not rejected the counsel of a glass, and that her hands had pleased themselves in paying the tribute of undeceiving skill to so high perfections of nature.

The sight whereof so divers from her sister, who rather suffered sorrow to dress itself in her beauty than that she would bestow any entertainment of so unwelcome a guest, made Cecropia take a sudden assuredness of hope that she should obtain somewhat of Pamela: thinking, according to the squaring out of her own good nature that beauty carefully set forth, would soon prove a sign of an unrefusing harbour. Animated therewith, she sat down by Pamela, and taking the purse, and with affected curiosity looking upon the work: “Fully happy is he,” said she, “at least if he knew his own happiness, to whom a purse in this manner, and by this hand wrought, is dedicated. In faith he shall have cause to account it, not as a purse for treasure, but as a treasure itself, worthy to be pursed up in the purse of his own heart.” “And {339} think you so indeed?” said Pamela, half smiling, “I promise you I wrought it but to make some tedious hours believe that I thought not of them; for else I valued it but even as a very purse.” “It is the right nature,” said Cecropia, “of beauty to work unwitting effects of wonder.” “Truly,” said Pamela, “I never thought till now that this outward gloss, entitled beauty, which it pleaseth you to lay to my (as I think) unguilty charge, was but a pleasant mixture of natural colours, delightful to the eye, as music is to the ear, without any further consequence, since it is a thing, which not only beasts have, but even stones and trees many of them do greatly excel in it.” “That other things,” answered Cecropia, “have some portion of it, takes not away the excellency of it, where indeed it doth excel: since we see that even those beasts, trees and stones are in the name of beauty only highly praised. But that the beauty of human persons is beyond all other things, there is great likelihood of reason, since to them only is given the judgment to discern beauty; and among reasonable wights, as it seems, that our sex hath the pre-eminence, so that in that pre-eminence, nature countervails all other liberalities wherein she may be thought to have dealt more favourably toward mankind. How do men crown, think you, themselves with glory for having either by force brought others to yield to their mind, or with long study, and premeditated orations, persuaded what they would have persuaded? and see, a fair woman shall not only command without authority, but persuade without speaking. She shall not need to procure attention, for their own eyes will chain their ears unto it. Men venture lives to conquer, she conquers lives without venturing. She is served, and obeyed, which is the most notable, not because the laws so command it, but because they become laws themselves to obey her; not for her parents’ sake, but for her own. She need not dispute, whether to govern by fear or love, since without her thinking thereof, their love will bring forth fear, and their fear will fortify their love; and she need not seek offensive or defensive force, since her only lips may stand for ten thousand shields, and ten thousand inevitable shot go from her eyes. Beauty, beauty, dear niece, is the crown of the feminine greatness; which gift on whomsoever the heavens (therein most niggardly) do bestow, without question, she is bound to use it to the noble purpose for which it is created; not only winning, but preserving, since that indeed is the right happiness which is not only in itself happy, but can also derive the happiness to another.” “Certainly, Aunt,” said Pamela, “I fear you will make me not only think myself fairer than ever I did, but think my fairness a matter of greater value than heretofore I could imagine it. For I ever, till now, conceived those conquests you speak of rather to proceed from the {340} weakness of the conquered than from the strength of the conquering power: as they say, the Cranes overthrow whole battles of Pigmies, not so much of their cranish courage, as because the other are Pigmies; and that we see young babes think babies of wonderful excellency, and yet the babies are but babies. But since your older years, and abler judgment find beauty to be worthy of so incomparable estimation, certainly, methinks, it ought to be held in dearness, according to the excellency, and no more than we would do of things which we account precious, never to suffer it to be defiled.”

“Defiled?” said Cecropia, “Marry, God forbid that my speech should tend to any such purpose as should deserve so foul a title. My meaning is, to join your beauty to love, your youth to delight. For, truly, as colours should be as good as nothing if there were no eyes to behold them; so is beauty nothing, without the eye of love behold it: and therefore so far is it from defiling it, that it is only the honouring of it, only the preserving of it; for beauty goes away, devoured by time, but where remains it ever flourishing, but in the heart of a true lover? and such a one, if ever there were any, is my son, whose love is so subjected unto you, that rather than breed any offence unto you, it will not delight itself in beholding you.” “There is no effect of his love,” answered Pamela, “better pleaseth me than that: but as I have often answered you, so resolutely I say unto you, that he must get my parents’ consent, and then he shall know further of my mind: for, without that I know I should offend God.” “O sweet youth,” said Cecropia, “how untimely subject it is to devotion? no, no, sweet niece, let us old folks think of such precise considerations: do you enjoy the heaven of your age, whereof you are sure; and like good householders, which spend those things that would not be kept, so do you pleasantly enjoy that which else will bring an over late repentance, when your glass shall accuse you to your face what a change there is in you. Do you see how the spring-time is full of flowers, decking itself with them, and not aspiring to the fruits of autumn? what lesson is that unto you, but that in the April of your age, you should be like April? let not some of them for whom already the grave gapeth, and perhaps envy the felicity in you, which themselves cannot enjoy, persuade you to loose the hold of occasion, while it may not only be taken, but offers, nay sues to be taken, which if it be not now taken, will never hereafter be overtaken. Yourself know how your father hath refused all offers made by the greatest princes about you, and will you suffer your beauty to be hidden in the wrinkles of his peevish thoughts?” “If he be peevish,” said Pamela, “yet he is my father; and how beautiful soever I be, I am his daughter: so that God {341} claims at my hands obedience, and makes me no judge of his imperfections.”

These often replies upon conscience in Pamela, made Cecropia think that there was no righter way for her than as she had, in her opinion, set her in liking of beauty, with persuasion not to suffer it to be void of purpose; so if she could make her less feeling of those heavenly conceits, that then she might easily wind her to her crooked bias. Therefore employing the uttermost of her mischievous wit, and speaking the more earnestly, because she spoke as she thought, she thus dealt with her.

“Dear niece, or rather dear daughter, if my affection and wish might prevail therein, how much doth it increase, through you, the earnest desire I have of this blessed match, to see these virtues of yours knit fast with such zeal of devotion (indeed the best bond) which the most politic wits have found to hold man’s wit in well doing? For as children must first by fear be induced to know that which after when they do know, they are most glad of, so are these bugbears of opinions brought by great clerks into the world to serve as shewels to keep them from those faults, whereto else the vanity of the world, and weakness of senses might pull them. But in you, niece, whose excellency is such as it need not to be held up by the staff of vulgar opinions, I would not you should love virtue servilely, for fear of I know not what, which you see not, but even for the good effects of virtue which you see. Fear, and indeed foolish fear, and fearful ignorance, was the first inventor of those conceits; for when they heard it thunder, not knowing the natural cause, they thought there was some angry body above that spake so loud: and ever the less they did perceive, the more they did conceive; whereof they knew no cause, that grew straight a miracle: foolish folks not marking that the alterations be but upon particular accidents, the universality being always one. Yesterday was but as to-day, and to-morrow will tread the same footsteps of his foregoers: so as it is manifest enough that all things follow but the course of their own nature, saving only man, who while by the pregnancy of his imagination he strives to things supernatural, meanwhile he loseth his own natural felicity. Be wise, and that wisdom shall be a God unto thee; be contented, and that is thy heaven: for else to think that those powers, if there be any such, above are moved either by the eloquence of our prayers, or in a chafe at the folly of our actions, carries as much reason, as if flies should think that men take great care which of them hums sweetest, and which of them flies nimblest.”

She would have spoken further, to have enlarged and confirmed her discourse, when Pamela, whose cheeks were dyed in the beautifullest grain of virtuous anger, with eyes which glistered {342} forth beams of disdain, thus interrupted her. “Peace, wicked woman, peace, unworthy to breathe, that dost not acknowledge the breath giver; most unworthy to have a tongue which speaketh against him, through whom thou speakest: keep your affection to yourself, which like a bemired dog, would defile with fawning. You say yesterday was as to-day. O foolish woman, and most miserably foolish, since wit makes you foolish; what doth that argue but that there is a constancy in the everlasting governor? Would you have an inconstant God, since we count a man foolish that is inconstant? He is not seen, you say, and would you think him a God who might be seen by so wicked eyes as yours? Which yet might see enough if they were not like such, who for sport’s sake, willingly hoodwink themselves to receive blows the easier. But though I speak to you without any hope of fruit in so rotten a heart, and there be nobody else here to judge of my speeches, yet be thou my witness, O captivity, that my ears shall not be willingly guilty of my creator’s blasphemy. You say because we know not the causes of things, therefore fear was the mother of superstition; nay, because we know that each effect hath a cause that hath engendered a true and lively devotion. For this goodly work of which we are, and in which we live, hath not his being by chance; on which opinion it is beyond marvel, by what chance any brain could stumble. For if it be eternal, as you would seem to conceive of it, eternity and chance are things unsufferable together. For that is chanceable which happeneth; and if it happen, there was a time before it happened when it might not have happened; or else it did not happen, and, if so chanceable, not eternal. And as absurd it is to think, that if it had a beginning, his beginning was derived from chance: for chance could never make all things of nothing; and there were substances before, which by chance should meet to make up this work; thereon follows another bottomless pit of absurdities. For then those substances must needs have been from ever, and so eternal: and that eternal causes should bring forth chanceable effects, is as sensible as that the sun should be the author of darkness. Again, if it were chanceable, then was it not necessary; whereby you take away all consequence. But we see in all things, in some respect or other, necessity of consequence: therefore in reason we must needs know that the causes were necessary. Lastly, chance is variable, or else it is not to be called chance: but we see this work is steady and permanent. If nothing but chance had glued those pieces of this All, the heavy parts would have gone infinitely downward, the light infinitely upward, and so never have met to have made up this goodly body. For before there was a heaven, or earth, there was neither a heaven to stay the height of the ring, or an earth, {343} which (in respect of the round walls of heaven) should become a centre. Lastly, perfect order, perfect beauty, perfect constancy, if these be the children of chance, let wisdom be counted the root of wickedness. But, you will say, it is so by nature; as much as if you said, it is so, because it is so. If you mean of many natures conspiring together, as in a popular government to establish this fair estate; as if the elementish and ethereal parts should in their town-house set down the bounds of each one’s office: then consider what follows, that there must needs have been a wisdom which made them concur: for their natures being absolutely contrary, in nature rather would have sought each others’ ruin, than have served as well-consorted parts to such an unexpressible harmony. For that contrary things should meet to make up a perfection without force and wisdom above their powers, is absolutely impossible unless that you will fly to that hissed-out opinion of chance again. But you may, perhaps, affirm that one universal nature, which hath been for ever, is the knitting together of these many parts to such an excellent unity. If you mean a nature of wisdom, goodness and providence, which knows what it doth; then say you that which I seek of you, and cannot conclude those blasphemies with which you defiled your mouth, and mine ears: but if you mean a nature, as we speak of the fire, which goeth upward, it knows not why; and of the nature of the sea, which in ebbing and flowing seems to observe so just a dance, and yet understands no music, it is but still the same absurdity superscribed with another title. For this word, One, being attributed to that which is All, is but one mingling of many, and many ones; as in a less matter, when we say one kingdom which contains many cities, or one city which contains many persons, wherein the under-ones, if there be not a superior power and wisdom, cannot by nature have regard to any preservation but of themselves: no more we see they do, since the water willingly quenches the fire, and drowns the earth, so far as they from a conspired unity; but that a right heavenly nature indeed, as it were unnaturing them, doth so bridle them. Again, it is as absurd in nature, that from an unity many contraries should proceed still kept in an unity; as that from the number of contrarieties an unity should arise. I say still, if you banish both a singularity and plurality of judgment from among them, then (if so earthly a mind can lift itself up so high) do but conceive how a thing whereto you give the highest and most excellent kind of being, which is eternity, can be of a base and vilest degree of being, and next to a not being: which is so to be, as not to enjoy his own being? I will not here call all your senses to witness, which can hear nor see nothing, which yields not most evident evidence of {344} the unspeakableness of that wisdom: each thing being directed to an end, and an end of preservation, so proper effects of judgment, as speaking and laughing, are of mankind. But what mad fury can ever so inveigle any conceit, as to see our mortal and corruptible selves to have a reason, and that this universality, whereof we are but the least pieces, should be utterly devoid thereof: as if one should say, that one’s foot might be wise, and himself foolish: this heard I once alleged against such a godless mind as yours, who being driven to acknowledge this beastly absurdity that our bodies should be better than the whole world, if it had the knowledge whereof the other were void; he sought, not able to answer directly, to sift it off in this sort; and if that reason were true, then must it follow also that the world must have in it a spirit, that could write and read too, and be learned, since that was in us commendable. Wretched fool, not considering that books be but supplies of defects, and so are praised because they help our want, and therefore cannot be incident to the eternal intelligence, which need no recording of opinions to confirm his knowledge, no more than the sun wants wax to be the fuel of his glorious lightfulness. This world therefore cannot otherwise consist but by a mind of wisdom, which governs it; which whether you will allow to be the creator thereof, as undoubtedly he is, or the soul and governor thereof, most certain it is, that whether he govern all, or make all, his power is above either his creatures, or his government. And if his power be above all things, then consequently it must needs be infinite, since there is nothing above it to limit it. For beyond which there is nothing, must needs be boundless and infinite: if his power be infinite, then likewise must his knowledge be infinite: for else there should be an infinite proportion of power which he should not know how to use, the unsensibleness whereof I think even you can conceive: and if infinite, then must nothing, no not the estate of flies, which you with so unsavoury scorn did jest at, be known unto him. For if there were, then there were his knowledge bounded, and so not infinite: if his knowledge and power be infinite, then must needs his goodness and justness march in the same rank: for infiniteness of power and knowledge, without like measure of goodness must necessarily bring forth destruction and ruin, and not ornament and preservation. Since then there is a God, and an all-knowing God, so as he seeth into the darkness of all natural secrets, which is the heart of man; and sees therein the deepest dissembled thoughts, nay sees the thought before they be thought: since he is just to exercise his might, and mighty to perform his justice, assure thyself, most wicked woman, that has so plaguily a corrupted mind that thou canst not keep thy sickness to thyself, but must {345} most wickedly infect others; assure thyself, I say, for what I say depends on everlasting and unremovable causes, that the time will come when thou shalt know that power by feeling it; when thou shalt see His wisdom in the manifesting thy ugly shamefulness, and shalt only perceive him to have been a creator in thy destruction.”

Thus she said, thus she ended, with so fair a majesty of unconquered virtue, that captivity might seem to have authority over tyranny: so foully was the filthiness of impiety discovered by the shining of her unstained goodness, so far as either Cecropia saw indeed, or else the guilty amazement of a self-excusing conscience made her eyes untrue judges of their natural object, that there was a light more than human, which gave a lustre to her perfections. But Cecropia, like a bat, which though it have eyes to discern that there is a sun, yet hath so evil eyes that it cannot delight in the sun, found a truth but could not love it. But as great persons are wont to make the wrong they have done, to be a cause to do the more wrong, her knowledge rose to no higher point, but to envy a worthier; and her will was no otherwise bent, but the more to hate, the more she found her enemy provided against her. Yet all the while she spoke, though with eyes cast like a horse that would strike at the stirrup, and with colour which blushed through yellowness, she sat rather still than quiet, and after her speech rather muttered than replied: for the war of wickedness in herself, brought forth disdainful pride to resist cunning dissimulation; so that, saying little more unto her, but that she should have leisure enough better to bethink herself, she went away repining, but not repenting, condemning greatly, as she thought, her son’s over-feeble humbleness, and purposing to egg him forward to a course of violence. For herself, determining to deal with neither of them both any more in manner of a suitor: for what majesty of virtue did in the one, that did silent humbleness in the other. But finding her son over-apt to lay both condemnation, and execution of sorrow upon himself, she sought to mitigate his mind with feigned delays of comfort, who (having this inward overthrow in himself) was the more vexed that he could not utter the rage thereof upon his outward enemies.

But Basilius, taught by the last day’s trial, what dangerous effects chosen courages can bring forth, rather used the spade than the sword; or the sword, but to defend the spade, girding about the whole town with trenches; which beginning a good way off from the town, with a number of well-directed pioneers, he still carried before him, till they came to a near distance, where he built forts, one answering the other, in such sort, as it was a pretty consideration in the discipline of war, to see building used for the {346} instrument of ruin, and the assailer intrenched as if he was besieged. But many sallies did Amphialus make to hinder their working. But they (exercising more melancholy than choler in their resolution) made him find, that if by the advantage of the place, few are able to defend themselves from many, that many must needs have power (making themselves strong in seat) to repel few, referring the revenge rather to the end, than to a present requital. Yet oftentimes they dealt some blows in light skirmishes, each side having a strong retiring place, and rather fighting with many alarms to vex the enemy, than for any hope of great success.

Which every way was a tedious cumber to the impatient courage of Amphialus; till the fame of this war, bringing thither diverse, both strangers and subjects, as well of princely, as noble houses, the gallant Phalantus, who refrained his sportful delights as then, to serve Basilius (whom he honoured for received honours) when he had spent some time in considering the Arcadian manner in marching, encamping and fighting, and had learned in what points of government and obedience their discipline differed from others, and so had satisfied his mind in the knowledges, both for the cutting off the enemy’s helps, and furnishing one’s self, which Basilius’s orders could deliver unto him, his young spirits (weary of wanting cause to be weary) desired to keep his valour in knowledge by some private act, since the public policy restrained him; the rather, because his old mistress Artesia might see whom she had so lightly forsaken: and therefore demanding and obtaining leave of Basilius, he caused a herald to be furnished with apparel of his office, and tokens of a peaceable message, and so sent him to the gate of the town to demand audience of Amphialus: who, understanding thereof, caused him both safely and courteously to be brought into his presence: who, making lowly reverence unto him, presented his letters, desiring Amphialus, that whatsoever they contained, he would consider he was only the bearer, and not the inditer. Amphialus with noble gentleness assured him both by honourable speeches, and a demeanour which answered for him, that his revenge, whensoever, should sort unto itself a higher subject. But opening the letters, he found them to speak in this manner:

Amphialus read it with cheerful countenance, and thinking but a little with himself, called for pen and paper, and wrote this answer:

Having written and sealed his letter, he delivered it to the herald, and withal took a fair chain from off his own neck and gave it him. And so with safe convoy sent him away from out his city: and he being gone, Amphialus showed unto his mother, and some other of his chief counsellors what he had received, and how he had answered, telling them withal, that he was determined to answer the challenge in his own person. His mother, with prayers authorized by motherly commandment; his old governor, with persuasions mingled with reprehension (that he would rather affect the glory of a private fighter than of a wise general) Clinias with falling down at his feet, and beseeching him to remember that all their lives depended upon his safety, sought all to dissuade him. But Amphialus (whose heart was inflamed with courage, and courage inflamed with affection) made an imperious resolution, cut off the tediousness of replies, giving them a charge what they should do upon all occasions, and particularly to deliver the ladies, if otherwise than well happened unto him: only desiring his mother that she would bring Philoclea to a window, whence she might with ease perfectly discern the combat. And so soon as the morning began to draw dew from the fairest greens to wash her {348} face withal against the approach of the burning sun, he went to his stable, where himself chose out a horse, whom (though he was near twenty years old) he preferred for a piece of sure service, before a great number of younger. His colour was of a brown bay, dappled thick with black spots; his forehead marked with a white star; to which, in all his body there was no part suitable, but the left foot before; his mane and tail black and thick, of goodly and well-proportioned greatness. He caused him to be trimmed with a sumptuous saddle of tawny and gold enamel, enriched with precious stones: his furniture was made into the fashion of branches of a tree, from which the leaves were falling, and so artificially were the leaves made, that, as the horse moved, it seemed indeed that the leaves wagged as when the wind plays with them; and being made of a pale cloth of gold, they did bear the straw-coloured livery of ruin. His armour was also of tawny and gold, but formed into the figures of flames darkened, as when they newly break the prison of a smoky furnace. In his shield he had painted the Torpedo fish. And so appointed, he caused himself with his trumpet and squire (whom he had taken since the death of Ismenus) to be ferried over into the island, a place well chosen for such a purpose. For it was so plain that there was scarcely any bush, or hillock, either to unlevel or shadow it: of length and breadth enough, to try the uttermost both of lance and sword; and the one end of it facing the castle, the other extending itself toward the camp, and no access to it, but by water, there could on secret treachery be wrought; and for manifest violence, either side might have time enough to succour their party.

But there he found Phalantus, already waiting for him upon a horse milk white, but that upon his shoulders and withers he was freckled with red stain, as when a few strawberries are scattered into a dish of cream. He had caused his mane and tail to be dyed in carnation, his reins were vine branches, which engendering one with the other, at the end, when he came to the bit, there for the boss brought forth a cluster of grapes by the workman made so lively that it seemed, as the horse champed on his bit, he chopped for them, and that it did make his mouth water to see the grapes so near him. His furniture behind was of vines, so artificially made that it seemed the horse stood in the shadow of the vine, so prettily were clusters of ruby grapes dispersed among the trappings which embraced his sides. His armour was blue like the heaven, which a sun did with his rays (proportionably delivered) gild in most places. His shield was beautified with this device: a greyhound which over-running his fellow, and taking the hare, yet hurts it not when it takes it. The words were, “The glory, not the prey.”

But as soon as Amphialus landed, he sent his squire to Phalantus to tell him that there was the knight ready to know whether he had anything to say to him. Phalantus answered that his answer now must be in the language of lances; and so each attended the warning of the trumpets, which were to sound at the appointment of four judges, who with consideration of the same had divided the ground. Phalantus’s horse young, and feeling the youth of his master, stood curveting, which being well governed by Phalantus, gave such a glittering grace as when the sun in a clear day shines upon a waving water. Amphialus’s horse stood pawing upon the ground, with his further hoof before, as if he would for his master’s cause begin to make himself angry: till the trumpets sounding together, together they set spurs to their horses, together took their lances from their thighs, conveyed them up into the rest together, together let them sink downward, so as it was a delectable sight in a dangerous effect; and a pleasant consideration that there was so perfect agreement in so mortal disagreement; like a music made of cunning discords. But their horses keeping an even line their masters had skilfully allotted unto them, passed one by another without encountering, although either might feel the angry breath of the other. But the staves being come to a just descent, even when the mark was ready to meet them, Amphialus was run through the vamplate, and under the arm, so that the staff appearing behind him, it seemed to the beholders, he had been in danger. But he struck Phalantus just upon the gorget, so that he battered the lames thereof, and made his head almost touch the back of his horse. But either side having stayed the spur, and used the bit to stop their horse’s fury, casting away the truncheons of their staves, and drawing their swords, they attended the second summons of the death-threatening trumpet which quickly followed; and they as soon making their horses answer their hands, with a gentle gallop, set one toward the other, till they being come to the nearness of a little more than a stave’s length. Amphialus trusting more to the strength, than to the nimbleness of his horse, put him forth with speedy violence, and making his head join to the other’s flank, guided his blow with discretion, and strengthening it with the course of his horse, struck Phalantus upon the head in such sort that his feeling sense did both dazzle his sight, and astonish his hearing. But Phalantus (not accustomed to be ungrateful to such benefits) struck him upon the side of his face, with such force that he thought his jaw had been cut asunder; though the faithfulness of his armour indeed guarded him from further damage. And so remained they awhile, rather angry with fighting, than fighting for anger, till Amphialus’s horse leaning hard upon the other, and winning ground, the other horse feeling himself pressed, began to {350} rise a little before, as he was wont to do in his curvet, which advantage Amphialus taking, set forward his own horse with the further spur, so that Phalantus’s horse came over with his master under him. Which Amphialus seeing, lighted with the intention to help Phalantus. But his horse that had faulted, rather with untimely art than want of force, got up from burdening his burden, so that Phalantus, in the fall having gotten his feet free off the stirrup, could, though something bruised, arise, and seeing Amphialus near him, he asked him whether he had given him any help in removing his horse. Amphialus said “No.” “Truly,” said Phalantus, “I asked it, because I would not willingly have fought with him that had had my life in his mercy. But now,” said Phalantus, “before we proceed further, let me know who you are, because never did any man bring me to the like fortune.” Amphialus, listing to keep himself unknown, told him he was a gentleman to whom Amphialus that day had given armour and horse to try his valour, having never before been in any combat worthy remembrance. “Ah,” said Phalantus in a rage, “and must I be the exercise of your prentice age?” and with that, choler took away either the bruise, or the feeling of the bruise, so that he entered afresh into the combat, and boiling into his arms the disdain of his heart, struck so thick upon Amphialus, as if every blow would fain have been foremost. But Amphialus, that many like trials had taught, great spending to leave small remnants, let pass the storm with strong wards, and nimble avoidings, till his time fit, both for distance and nakedness, he struck him so cruel a blow on the knee that the poor gentleman fell down withal in a swoon.

But Amphialus, pitying approved valour, made precious by natural courtesy, went to him, and taking off his headpiece to give him air, the young knight (disdaining to buy life with yielding, bade him use his fortune, for he was resolved never to yield. “No more you shall,” said Amphialus, “if it be not to my request that you will account yourself to have great interest in me.” Phalantus more overcome by his kindness, than by his fortune, desired yet once again to know his name, who in his first beginning had shown such fury in his face, and yet such stay in his fury. Amphialus then named himself, telling him withal he would think his name much bettered if it might be honoured by the title of his friend. But no balm could be more comfortable to his wound than the knowledge thereof was to his mind, when he knew his mishap should be excused by the renowned valour of the other. And so promising each to other assuredness of goodwill, Phalantus, of whom Amphialus would have no other ransom but his word of friendship, was conveyed into the camp, where he {351} would but little remain among the enemies of Amphialus, but went to seek his adventures other-where.

As for Amphialus, he was received with triumph into the castle, although one might see by his eyes (humbly lifted up to the window where Philoclea stood) that he was rather suppliant than victorious: which occasion Cecropia taking, who as then stood by Philoclea, and had lately left Pamela in another room, whence also she might see the combat. “Sweet lady,” said she, “now you may see whether you have cause to love my son, who then lies under your feet, when he stands upon the neck of his bravest enemies.” “Alas!” said Philoclea, “a simple service to me, methinks it is, to have those who come to succour me destroyed: if it be my duty to call it love, be it so: but the effects it bring forth, I confess I account hateful.” Cecropia grew so angry with this unkind answer that she could not abstain from telling her that she was like them that could not sleep, when they were softly laid: but that if her son would follow her counsel, he should take another course with her: and so flung away from her.

Yet, knowing the desperate melancholy of Amphialus in like cases, framed to him a very thankful message, powdering it with some hope-giving phrases, which were of such joy to Amphialus that he, though against public respect and importunity of dissuaders, presently caused it to be made known to the camp that whatsoever knight would try the like fortune as Phalantus did, he should in like sort be answered: so that divers of the valiantest, partly of themselves, partly at the instigation of Basilius, attempted the combat with him; and according to everyone’s humour, so were the causes of the challenge grounded: one laying treason to his charge; another preferring himself in the worthiness to serve Philoclea; a third exalting some lady’s beauty beyond either of the sisters; a fourth laying disgrace to love itself naming it the bewitcher of the wit, the rebel to reason, the betrayer of resolution, the defiler of thoughts, the underminer of magnanimity, the flatterer of vice, the slave of weakness, the infection of youth, the madness of age, the curse of life, and reproach of death; a fifth disdaining to cast at less than at all, would make the cause of his quarrel the causers of love, and proclaim his blasphemies against womankind; that namely, that sex was the oversight of nature, the disgrace of reasonableness, the obstinate cowards, the slave born tyrants, the shops of vanities, the gilded weather cocks, in whom conscience is but peevishness, chastity, waywardness, and gratefulness a miracle. But all these challenges, how well soever indited, were so well answered, that some by death taught others, though past learning themselves, and some by yielding gave themselves the lie for having blasphemed; to the great grief of Basilius to see his rebel {352} prevail, and in his own sight, to crown himself with deserved honour.

Whereupon thirsting for revenge, and else not hoping to prevail, the best of his camp being already overthrown, he sent a messenger to Argalus, in whose approved courage and force he had, and had cause, to have great confidence, with a letter, requiring him to take his quarrel in hand, from which he had hitherto spared him in respect of his late marriage. But now his honour, and (as he esteemed it) felicity standing upon it, he could no longer forbear to challenge of him his faithful service.

The messenger made speed, and found Argalus at a castle of his own, sitting in a parlour with the fair Parthenia, he reading in a book the stories of Hercules, she by him, as to hear him read: but while his eyes looked on the book, she looked on his eyes, and sometimes staying him with some pretty question, not so much to be resolved of the doubt, as to give him occasion to look upon her: a happy couple, he joying in her, she joying in herself, but in herself, because she enjoyed him: both increased their riches by giving to each other; each making one life double, because they made a double life one; where desire never wanted satisfaction, nor satisfaction ever bred satiety; he ruling, because she would obey, or rather because she would obey, he therein ruling.

But when the messenger came in with letters in his hand, and haste in his countenance, though she knew not what to fear, yet she feared because she knew not; but she rose, and went aside, while he delivered his letters and message: yet afar off she looked, now at the messenger, and then at her husband: the same fear, which made her loth to have cause of fear, yet making her seek cause to nourish her fear. And well she found there was some serious matter: for her husband’s countenance figured some resolution between lothness and necessity: and once his eye cast upon her, and finding hers upon him, he blushed, and she blushed, because he blushed, and yet straight grew pale because she knew not why he had blushed. But when he had read, and heard, and dispatched away the messenger, like a man in whom honour could not be rocked asleep by affection, with promise quickly to follow; he came to Parthenia, and as sorry as might be for parting, and yet more sorry for her sorrow, he gave her the letter to read. She with fearful slowness took it, and with fearful quickness read it, and having read it. “Ah my Argalus,” said she, “and have you made such haste to answer? and are you so soon resolved to leave me?” but he discoursing unto her how much it imported his honour, which since it was dear to him, he knew it would be dear unto her, her reason overclouded with sorrow, suffered her not presently to reply, but left the charge thereof to tears, and sighs, {353} which he not able to bear, left her alone, and went to give order for his present departure.

But by that time he was armed, and ready to go, she had recovered a little strength of spirit again, and coming out, and seeing him armed, and wanting nothing for his departure but her farewell, she ran to him, took him by the arm, and kneeling down without regard who either heard her speech, or saw her demeanour. “My Argalus, my Argalus,” said she, “do not thus forsake me. Remember, alas remember that I have interest in you, which I will never yield shall be thus adventured. Your valour is already sufficiently known: sufficiently have you already done for your country: enough, enough there are beside you to lose less worthy lives. Woe is me, what shall become of me if you thus abandon me? then was it time for you to follow those adventures, when you adventured nobody but yourself, and were nobody’s but your own. But now pardon me, that now, or never, I claim mine own; mine you are, and without me you can undertake no danger: and will you endanger Parthenia? Parthenia shall be in the battle of your fight: Parthenia shall smart in your pain, and your blood must be bled by Parthenia.” “Dear Parthenia,” said he, “this is the first time that ever you resisted my will: I thank you for it, but persevere not in it; and let not the tears of these most beloved eyes be a presage unto me of that which you would not should happen, I shall live, doubt not: for so great a blessing as you are was not given unto me so soon to be deprived of it. Look for me, therefore, shortly, and victorious; and prepare a joyful welcome, and I will wish for no other triumph.” She answered not, but stood as it were thunder-stricken with amazement; for true love made obedience stand up against all other passions. But when he took her in his arms, and sought to print his heart in her sweet lips, she fell in a swoon, so that he was fain to leave her to her gentlewomen, and carried away by the tyranny of honour, though with many a back cast look and hearty groan, went to the camp. Where understanding the notable victories of Amphialus, he thought to give him some days respite of rest, because he would not have his victory disgraced by the other’s weariness. In which days, he sought by all means (having leave to parley with him) to dissuade him from his enterprise: and then imparting his mind to Basilius, because he found Amphialus was inflexible, wrote his defy unto him in this manner.

The challenge thus denounced and accepted, Argalus was armed in white armour, which was all gilded over with knots of women’s hair, which came down from the crest of his head-piece and spread itself in rich quantity over all his armour; his furniture was cut out in the fashion of an eagle, whereof the beak (made into a rich jewel) was fastened to the saddle, the tail covered the crupper of the horse, and the wings served for trappings; which falling off each side, as the horse stirred, the bird seemed to fly. His poitrel and reins were embroidered with feathers suitable unto it: upon his right arm he wore a sleeve which his dear Parthenia had made for him, to be worn in a joust, in the time that success was ungrateful to their well-deserved love: it was full of bleeding hearts, though never intended to any bloody enterprise. In his shield (as his own device) he had two palm-trees near one another, with a word signifying, “In that sort flourishing.” His horse was of fiery sorrel, with black feet, and black list on his back, who with open nostrils breathed war, before he could see an enemy: and now up with one leg, and then with another, seemed to complain of nature that she had made him any whit earthy.

But he had scarcely viewed the ground of the island, and considered the advantages, if any were, thereof, before the castle boat had delivered Amphialus, in all points provided to give a hard entertainment. And then sending each to other their squires in honourable manner, to know whether they should attend any further ceremony, the trumpets sounding, the horses with smooth {355} running, the staves with unshaken motion, obediently performed their choleric commandments. But when they drew near, Argalus’s horse being hot, pressed in with his head, which Amphialus perceiving, knowing if he gave him his side it should be to his disadvantage, pressed in also with him, so that both the horses and men met shoulder to shoulder, so that the horses (hurt as much with the striking as being stricken) tumbled down to the earth, dangerously to their masters, but that they, by strength nimble, and by use skilful in the falling, shunned the harm of the fall, and without more respite drew out their swords with a gallant bravery, each striving to show himself the less endamaged, and to make known that they were glad they had now nothing else to trust to but their own virtue. True it is that Amphialus was the sooner up, but Argalus had his sword out the sooner; and then fell they to the cruellest combat, that any present eye had seen. Their swords first, like canons, battering down the walls of their armour, making breaches almost in every place for troops of wounds to enter. Among the rest, Argalus gave a great wound to Amphialus’s disarmed face, though part of the force of it Amphialus warded upon his shield, and withal, first casting his eye up to Philoclea’s window, as if he had fetched his courage thence, feigning to extend the same sort of blow, turned his sword, and, with a mighty reverse, gave a cruel wound to the right arm of Argalus, the unfaithful armour yielding to the sword’s strong-guided sharpness. But though the blood accused the hurt of Argalus, yet would he in no action of his confess it: but keeping himself in a lower ward, stood watching with timely thrusts to repair his loss, which quickly he did. For Amphialus, following his fawning fortune, laid on so thick upon Argalus that his shield had almost fallen piecemeal to the earth, when Argalus, coming in with his right foot, and something stooping to come under his armour, thrust him into the belly dangerously; and mortally it would have been, but that with the blow before, Amphialus had over-stricken himself so, that he fell sideward down, and with falling saved himself from ruin, the sword by that means slipping aside and not piercing more deeply. Argalus seeing him fall, threatening with voice and sword, bade him yield. But he striving without answer to rise, Argalus struck him with all his might upon his head. But his hurt arm not able to master so sound a force, let the sword fall so that Amphialus, though astonished with the blow, could arise: which Argalus considering, ran in to grasp with him, and so closed together; falling so to the ground, now one getting above, and then the other; at length, both weary of so unlovely embracements, with a dissenting consent got up, and went to their swords but happened, each on his enemies; where Argalus finding his foe’s {356} sword garnished in blood, his heart rose with the same sword to revenge it, and on that blade to ally their bloods together. But his mind was evil waited on by his lamed force, so that he received still more and more wounds, which made all his armour seem to blush, that it had defended his master no better. But Amphialus perceiving it, and weighing the small hatefulness of their quarrel with the worthiness of the knight, desired him to take pity of himself. But Argalus, the more repining, the more he found himself in disadvantage, filling his veins with spite instead of blood, and making courage arise against faintness (like a candle, which a little before it goes out, gives then the greatest blaze) so did he unite all his force, that casting away the little remnant of his shield, and taking his sword in both hands, he struck such a notable blow, that he cleft his shield, armour, and arm almost to the bone.

But then Amphialus forgot all ceremonies, and with cruel blows made more of his best blood succeed the rest: till his hand being stayed by his ear, his ear filled with a pitiful cry, the cry guided his sight to an excellent fair lady, who came running as fast as she could, and yet because she could not so fast as she would, she sent her lamentable voice before her: and being come, and being known to them both to be the beautiful Parthenia, who had that night dreamed she saw her husband in such estate as she then found him, which made her make such haste thither, they both marvelled. But Parthenia ran between them, fear of love making her forget the fear of nature, and then fell down at their feet, determining so to part them, till she could get breath to sigh out her doleful speeches: and when her breath, which running had spent, and dismayedness made slow to return, had by sobs gotten into her sorrow-closed breast, for a while she could say nothing, but, “O wretched eyes of mine, O wailful sight, O day of darkness!” At length turning her eyes, wherein sorrow swam, to Amphialus, “My Lord,” said she, “it is said you love; in the power of that love, I beseech you to leave off this combat, as ever your heart may find comfort in his affection, even for her sake, I crave it: or if you be mortally determined, be so pitiful unto me, as first to kill me, that I might not see the death of Argalus.” Amphialus was about to have answered, when Argalus, vexed with his fortune, but most vexed that she should see him in that fortune; “Ah Parthenia,” said he, “never until now unwelcome unto me, do you come to get my life by request? and cannot Argalus live but by request? is that a life?” With that he went aside, for fear of hurting her, and would have began the combat afresh. But Amphialus not only conjured by that which held the monarchy of his mind, but even in his noble heart melting with compassion at {357} so passionate a sight, desired him to withhold his hands, for that he should strike one who sought his favour, and would not make resistance. A notable example of the wonderful effects of virtue, where the conqueror sought for friendship of the conquered, and the conquered would not pardon the conqueror: both indeed being of that mind to love each other for accepting, but not for giving mercy, and neither affected to outlive a dishonour: so that Argalus, not so much striving with Amphialus, for if he had him in the like sort, in like sort he would have dealt with him, as labouring against his own power, which he chiefly despised, set himself forward, stretching his strength to the uttermost. But the fire of that strife, blown with his inward rage, boiled out his blood in such abundance that he was driven to rest himself upon the pommel of his sword: and then each thing beginning to turn round in the dance of death before his eyes, his sight both dazzled and dimmed, till, thinking to sit down, he fell in a swoon. Parthenia and Amphialus both hastily went unto him: Amphialus took off his helmet, and Parthenia laid his head in her lap, tearing off her linen sleeves and partlet to serve about his wounds: to bind which she took off her hair-lace, and would have cut off her fair hair herself, but that the squires and judges came in with fitter things for that purpose: while she bewailed herself with so lamentable sweetness, as was enough to have taught sorrow to the gladdest thoughts, and have engraved it in the minds of hardest metal.

“O Parthenia, no more Parthenia,” said she, “what art thou? what seest thou? how is thy bliss in a moment fallen? how wert thou even now before all ladies the example of perfect happiness, and now the gazing stock of endless misery? O God, what hath been my desert, to be thus punished? Or if such had been my desert, why was I not myself punished? O wandering life, to what wilderness wouldst thou lead me. But sorrow, I hope thou art sharp enough to save my labour from other remedies. Argalus, Argalus, I will follow thee, I will follow thee.”

But with that Argalus came out of his swoon, and lifting up his languishing eyes, which a painful rest and iron sleep did seek to lock up, seeing her in whom, even dying, he lived, and himself seated in so beloved a place, it seemed a little cheerful blood came up to his cheeks, like a burning coal, almost dead, if some breath a little revive it: and forcing up, the best he could, his feeble voice, “My dear, my better half,” said he, “I find I must now leave thee: and by that sweet hand, and fair eyes of thine I swear that death brings nothing with it to grieve me but that I must leave thee, and cannot remain to answer part of thy infinite deserts with being some comfort unto thee. But since so it pleaseth Him, {358} whose wisdom and goodness guideth all, put thy confidence in Him, and one day we shall blessedly meet again, never to depart: meanwhile live happily, dear Parthenia, and I persuade myself, it will increase the blessedness of my soul so to see thee. Love well the remembrance of thy loving, and truly loving Argalus: and let not,” with that word he sighed, “this disgrace of mine make thee one day think thou hadst an unworthy husband.” They could scarcely understand the last words: for death began to seize himself of his heart, neither could Parthenia make answer, so full was her breast of anguish. But while the other sought to stanch his remediless wounds, she with her kisses made him happy: for his last breath was delivered into her mouth.

But when indeed she found his ghost was gone, then sorrow lost the wit of utterance, and grew rageful, and mad, so that she tore her beautiful face, and rent her hair, as though they could serve for nothing, since Argalus was gone; till Amphialus (so moved with pity of that sight as that he honoured his adversary’s death with tears) caused her, with the help of her women that came with her, partly by force to be conveyed into the boat, with the dead body of Argalus, from which she would not depart. And being come on the other side, there she was received by Basilius himself, with all the funeral pomp of military discipline, trailing all their ensigns upon the ground, making their warlike instruments sound doleful notes, and Basilius with comfort in his mouth and woe in his face, sought to persuade some ease into Parthenia’s mind: but all was as easeful to her, as the handling of sore wounds: all the honour done, being to her but the triumph of her ruin, she finding no comfort but in desperate yielding to sorrow: and rather determined to hate herself if ever she would find ease thereof. And well might she hear as she passed through the camp the great praises spoken of her husband, which were all records of her loss. But the more excellent he was, being indeed counted second to none in all Greece, the more did the breath of those praises bear up the wings of Amphialus’s fame: to whom yet such was his case, that trophy upon trophy, still did but build up the monument of his thraldom; he ever finding himself in such favour of Philoclea that she was most absent when he was present with her; and ever sorriest when he had best success: which would have made him renounce all comfort, but that his mother with diversity of devices kept up his heart.

But while he allayed thus his outward glory with inward discomfort, he was like to have been overtaken with a notable treason, the beginning whereof (though merely ridiculous) had like to have brought forth to him a weeping effect.

Among other that attended Basilius in this expedition, Dametas {359} was one; whether to be present with him, or absent from Miso, once, certain it was without any mind to make his sword cursed by any widow. Now being in the camp, while each talk seemed injurious, which did not acknowledge some duty to the fame of Amphialus, it fell out sometimes in communication, that as the speech of heaven doth often beget the mention of hell, so the admirable prowess of Amphialus (by a contrary) brought forth the remembrance of the cowardice of Clinias: insomuch, as it grew almost to a proverb, “As very a coward as Clinias;” describing him in such sort, that in the end Dametas began to think with himself that if he made a challenge unto him he would never answer it; and that then he should greatly increase the favourable conceit of Basilius. This fancy of his he uttered to a young gentleman that waited upon Philanax, in whose friendship he had especial confidence, because he haunted his company, laughing often merrily at his speeches, and not a little extolling the goodly dotes of Mopsa. The young gentleman as glad as if he had found a hare sitting, egged him on, breaking the matter with Philanax, and then, for fear the humour should quail in him, wrote a challenge himself for Dametas, and brought it to him. But when Dametas read it, putting his head on his shoulder, and somewhat smiling, he said, it was pretty indeed, but that it had not a lofty style enough; and so, would needs indite it in this sort.

The young gentleman seemed dumb-stricken with admiration, and presently took upon him to be the bearer thereof, while the heat of the fit lasted; and having gotten leave of Basilius (everybody helping on to ease his mind, overcharged with melancholy) he went into the town, according to the manner before time used, and, in the presence of Amphialus, delivered this letter to Clinias; desiring to have an answer, which might be fit for his reputation. Clinias opened it, read it, and, in the reading, his blood, not daring to be in so dangerous a place, went out of his face, and hid itself more inwardly: and his very words, as if they were afraid of blows, came very slowly out of his mouth: but, as well as his panting breath would utter it, he bade him tell the lout that sent him, that he disdained to have anything to do with him. But Amphialus, perceiving the matter, took him aside, and very {360} earnestly dealt with him, not to shame himself; Amphialus only desirous to bring it to pass, to make some sport to Philoclea: but, not being able to persuade him, Amphialus licensed the gentleman, telling him that by next morning he should have an answer.

The young gentleman, sorry he had sped no better, returned to Dametas, who had fetched many a sower-breathed sigh, for fear Clinias would accept the challenge. But when he perceived, by his trusty messenger, that this delay was in effect a denial, there being no disposition in him to accept it, then lo, Dametas began to speak his loud voice, to look big, to march up and down, and, in his march, to lift his legs higher than he was wont, swearing, by no mean devotions, that the walls should not keep the coward from him, but he would fetch him out of his coney-burrow: and then was hotter than ever to provide himself of horse and armour, saying he would go to the island bravely addubed, and show himself to his charge Pamela. To this purpose many willing hands were about him, letting him have reins, poitrel, with the rest of the furniture, and very brave bases; but all coming from divers houses, neither colour nor fashion, showed any kindred one with another. But that liked Dametas the better, for that he thought would argue, that he was master of many brave furnitures. Then gave he order to a painter for his device; which was a plough with the oxen loosed from it, a sword, with a great number of arms and legs cut off: and lastly, a great army of pen and ink-horns, and books. Neither did he stick to tell the secret of his intent; which was that he had left off the plough to do such bloody deeds with his sword, as many ink-horns and books should be employed about the historifying of them: and being asked, why he set no word unto it, he said, that was indeed like the painter, that saith in his picture, “here is the dog, and there is the hare:” and with that he laughed so perfectly, as was great consolation to the beholders. Yet remembering that Miso would not take it well at his return, if he forgot his duty to her, he caused in a border about to be written, “Miso, mine own pigsnie, thou shalt hear news of Dametas.”

Thus all things being condignly ordered, with an ill-favoured impatience he waited until the next morning, that he might make a muster of himself in the island, often asking them that very diligently waited upon them, whether it were not pity that such a coward as Clinias should set his run-away feet upon the face of the earth.

But as he was, by divers principal young gentlemen, to his no small glory, lifted up on horseback, comes a page of Amphialus, who with humble smiling reverence, delivered a letter unto him from Clinias, whom Amphialus had brought to this; first with {361} persuasions (that for certain, if he did accept the combat, Dametas would never dare to appear, and that then the honour should be his) but principally threatening him that if he refused it, he would turn him out of the town to be put to death for a traitor by Basilius: so as the present fear (ever to a coward most terrible) of being turned out of the town, made him, though full unwillingly, undertake the other fear, wherein he had some show of hope, that Dametas might hap either to be sick, or not to have the courage to perform the matter. But when Dametas heard the name of Clinias, very aptly suspecting what the matter might be, he bade the page carry back his letter, like a naughty boy as he was; for he was in no humour, he told him, of reading letters. But Dametas his friend, first persuading him, that for certain it was some submission, took upon him so much boldness as to open the letter, and to read it aloud, in this sort.

These terrible words Clinias used, hoping they would give a cooling to the heat of Dametas’s courage: and so indeed they did, that he did groan to hear the thundering of those threatenings. And when the gentlemen had ended the reading of them, Dametas told them, that in his opinion he thought this answer came too late, and that therefore he might very well go and disarm himself, especially considering the other had in courteous manner warned him not to come: but they having him now on horseback, led him into the ferry, and so into the island; the clashing of his own armour striking miserable fear into him, and in his mind, thinking great unkindness in his friend that he had brought him to a matter so contrary to his complexion. There stayed he but a little (the gentleman that came with him teaching him how to use his sword and lance, while he cast his eye about, to see which way he might run away, cursing all islands for being evil situated) when Clinias with a brave sound of trumpets landed at the other end: who came all the way debating with himself, what he had deserved of Amphialus to drive him to those inconveniences. Sometimes his wit {362} made him bethink himself what was best to be done: but fear did so corrupt his wit, that whatsoever he thought was best, he still found danger therein; fearfulness (contrary to all other vices) making him think the better of another, the worse he found himself, rather imagining in himself what words he would use (if he were overcome) to get his life of Dametas, than how to overcome, whereof he could think with no patience. But oftentimes looking to the earth, pitifully complaining, that a man of such sufficiency, as he thought himself, should in his best years be swallowed up by so base an element: fain he would have prayed, but he had not heart enough to have confidence in prayer; the glittering of the armour, and sounding of trumpets giving such an assault to the weak breach of his false senses, that he grew from the degree of fear to an amazement, not almost to know what he did, till two judges (chosen for the purpose) making the trumpet cease, and taking the oath of these champions, that they came without guile or witchcraft, set them at wonted distance, one from the other.

Then the trumpets sounding, Dametas’s horse (used to such causes) when he thought least of the matter, started out so lustily, that Dametas was jogged back with head and body, and pulling withal his bridle-hand, the horse, that was tender of mouth, made half a stop, and fell to bounding, so that Dametas threw away his lance, and with both his hands held by the pommel, the horse half running, half leaping, till he met with Clinias; who fearing he should miss his rest, had put his staff therein before he began his career: neither would he then have begun, but that at the trumpets warning, one (that stood behind) struck on his horse, who running swiftly, the wind took such hold of his staff, that it crossed quite over his breast, in that sort gave a flat bastinado to Dametas: who half out of his saddle, went near to his old occupation of digging the earth, but with the crest of his helmet. Clinias when he was past him, not knowing what he had done, but fearing lest Dametas were at his back, turned with a wide turn; and seeing him on the ground, he thought then was his time, or never, to tread him under his horse’s feet; and withal, if he could, hurt him with his lance, which had not broken, the encounter was so easy. But putting forth his horse, what with the falling of the staff too low before the legs of the horse, and the coming upon Dametas, who was then scrambling up, the horse fell over and over, and lay upon Clinias. Which Dametas, who was gotten up, perceiving, drew out his sword, prying which way he might best come to kill Clinias behind. But the horse that lay upon him, kept such a pawing with his feet, that Dametas durst not approach, but very leisurely, so as the horse, being lusty, got up, and withal began {363} to strike, and leap, that Dametas started back a good way, and gave Clinias time to rise, but so bruised in body, and broken in heart, that he meant to yield himself to mercy; and with that intent drew out his sword, intending when he came nearer to present the pommel of it to Dametas. But Dametas, when he saw him coming with his sword drawn, not conceiving any such intent, went back as fast as his back and heels would lead him. But as Clinias found that he began to think a possibility in the victory, and therefore followed him with the cruel haste of a prevailing coward; laying upon Dametas, who did nothing but cry out to him to hold his hand, sometimes that he was dead, sometimes that he would complain to Basilius; but still bore the blows ungratefully, going back, till at length he came into the water with one of his feet.

But then a new fear of drowning took him, so that daring not to go back, nor to deliberate (the blows still so lighted on him) nor to yield, because of the cruel threatenings of Clinias, fear being come to the extremity, fell to a madness of despair; so that (winking as hard as ever he could) he began to deal some blows, and his arm (being used to the flail in his youth) laid them on so thick that Clinias now began with lamentable eyes to see his own blood come out in many places: and before he had lost half an ounce, finding in himself that he fainted, cried out aloud to Dametas that he yielded. “Throw away thy sword then,” said Dametas, “and I will save thee;” but still laying on as fast as he could. Clinias straight obeyed, and humbly craved mercy, telling him his sword was gone. Then Dametas first opened his eyes, and seeing him indeed unweaponed, made him stand a good way off from it; and then willed him to lie down upon the earth as flat as he could; Clinias obeyed; and Dametas (who never could think himself safe, till Clinias were dead) began to think with himself, that if he struck at him with his sword, if he did not kill him at the first blow, that then Clinias might hap to rise, and revenge himself. Therefore he thought best to kneel down upon him, and with a great whittle he had (having disarmed his head) to cut his throat, which he had used so with calves, as he had no small dexterity in it. But while he sought for his knife, which under his armour he could not well find out, and that Clinias lay with so sheepish a quietness, as if he would have been glad to have his throat cut for fear of more pain, the judges came in, and took Dametas from off him, telling him he did against the law of arms, having promised life if he threw away his sword. Dametas was loath to consent, till they swore, they would not suffer him to fight any more, when he was up; and then more forced, then persuaded, he let him rise, crowing over him, and warning him to take heed {364} how he dealt any more with any that came of his father’s kindred. But thus this combat of cowards being finished, Dametas was with much mirth and melody received into the camp as victorious, never a page there failing to wait upon his triumph.

But Clinias, though he wanted heart to prevent shame, yet he wanted not wit to feel shame; not so much repining at it for the abhorring of shame, as for the discommodities, that to them that are ashamed, ensue. For well he deemed, it would be a great bar to his practice, and a pulling on of injuries, when men needed not care how they used him. Insomuch, that Clinias (finding himself the scorning-stock of every company) fell with repining, to hate the cause thereof; and hate in a coward’s heart, could set itself no other limits, but death. Which purpose was well egged on by representing unto himself, what danger he lately was in; which still kept no less ugly figure in his mind than when it was present; and quickly (even in his dissembling countenance) might be discerned a concealed grudge. For though he forced himself to a far more diligent officiousness toward Amphialus than ever before, yet a leering eye upon the one side at him, a countenance still framed to smiling before him (how little cause soever there was of smiling) and grumbling behind him at any of his commandments, with an uncertain manner of behaviour: his words coming out, though full of flattery, yet slowly, and hoarsely pronounced, might well have blazed what arms his false heart bore. But despised, because of his cowardliness, and not marked because despised, he had the freer scope of practice. Which he did the more desperately enter into, because the daily dangers Amphialus did submit himself unto, made Clinias assuredly look for his overthrow, and for his own consequently, if he did not redeem his former treason to Basilius, with a more treasonable falsehood toward Amphialus. His chief care therefore was, to find out among all sorts of the Amphialians, whom either like fear, tediousness of the siege, or discontent of some unsatisfied ambition would make apt to dig in the same mine that he did: and some already of wealthy weary folks, and unconstant youths (who had not found such sudden success as they had promised themselves) he had made stoop to his lure. But of none he made so good account as of Artesia, sister to the late slain Ismenus, and the chief of the six maids, who had trained out the princesses to their banquet of misery: so much did the sharpness of her wit countervail, as he thought, any other defects of her sex: for she had undertaken that dangerous practice by the persuasion of Cecropia, who assured her that the two princesses should be made away, and then Amphialus would marry her, which she was the apter to believe, by some false persuasion her glass had given her of her own incomparable {365} excellencies, and by the great favour she knew he bare to her brother Ismenus, which, like a self-flattering woman, she conceived was done for her sake. But when she had achieved her attempt, and that she found the princesses were so far from their intended death, as that one of them was like to be her sovereign; and that neither her service won of Amphialus much more than an ordinary favour, nor her over-large offering herself to a mind otherwise owed, had obtained a looked for acceptation: disdain to be disdained, spite of a frustrate hope, and perchance unquenched lust-grown rage, made her unquiet thoughts find no other rest, but malice; which was increased by the death of her brother, whom she judged neither succoured against Philanax, nor revenged upon Philanax. But all these coals were well blown by the company she especially kept with Zelmane all this time of her imprisonment. For finding her presence uncheerful to the mourning Philoclea, and condemned of the high-hearted Pamela, she spent her time most with Zelmane: Who though at the first hardly brooking the instrument of their misery, learning cunning in the school of adversity, in time framed herself to yield her acceptable entertainment. For Zelmane, when she had by that unexpected mischief her body imprisoned, her valour over-mastered, her wit beguiled, her desires barred, her love eclipsed; assured of evil, fearing worse, able to know Philoclea’s misfortune, and not able to succour her, she was a great while before the greatness of her heart could descend to sorrow, but rather rose boiling up in spite and disdain, reason hardly making courage believe that it was distressed: but as if the walls would be afraid of her, so would her looks shoot out threatenings upon them. But the fetters of servitude, growing heavier with wearing, made her feel her case, and the little prevailing of repining: and then grief got a seat in her softened mind, making sweetness of past comforts, by due title, claim tears of present discomforts: and since her fortune made her able to help as little as anybody, yet to be able to wail as much as anybody; solitary sorrow, with a continual circle in herself, going out at her own mouth, to come in again at her own ears. Then was the name of Philoclea graved in the glass windows, and by the foolish idolatry of affection, no sooner written, than adored; and no sooner adored, than pitied: all the wonted praises (she was wont to give unto her) being now but figures of rhetoric to amplify the injuries of misfortune; against which being alone, she would often make invective declamations, methodised only by raging sorrow.

But when Artesia did insinuate herself into her acquaintance, she gave the government of her courage to wit, and was content to familiarize herself with her: so much the rather, as that she {366} perceived in her certain flaws of ill-concealed discontentment: insomuch that when Zelmane would sweeten her mouth with the praise of the sisters, especially setting forth their noble gratefulness in never forgetting well-intended services, and invoking the justice of the gods not to suffer such treasures to be wrongfully hidden, and sometimes with a kind of unkindness charging Artesia that she had been abused to abuse so worthy persons: Artesia, though falsely, would protest that she had been beguiled in it, never meaning other matter than recreation; and yet withal by alleging how ungratefully she was dealt with, it was easy to be seen it was the unrewarding, and not the evil employing her service, which grieved her. But Zelmane, using her own bias to bowl near the mistress of her own thoughts, was content to lend her belief, and withal to magnify her desert, if willingly she would deliver, whom unwillingly she had imprisoned; leaving no argument which might tickle ambition, or flatter revenge. So that Artesia, pushed forward by Clinias, and drawn onward by Zelmane, bound herself to that practice; wherein Zelmane, for her part, desired no more but to have armour and weapons brought into her chamber, not doubting therewith to perform anything, how impossible soever, which longing love can persuade, and invincible valour dare promise.

But Clinias, whose faith could never comprehend the mysteries of courage, persuaded Artesia, while he by corruption had drawn the guard of one gate, to open it, when he would appoint the time to the enemy, that she should impoison Amphialus, which she might the easier do, because she herself had used to make the broths, when Amphialus, either wearied or wounded, did use such diet. And all things already were ready to be put in execution, when they thought best to break this matter with the two excellent sisters, not doubting of their consent in a thing so behoveful to themselves: their reasons being that the princesses knowing their service, might be sure to preserve them from the fury of the entering soldiers: whereof Clinias, even so, could scarcely be sufficiently certain: and withal, making them privy to their action, to bind them afterwards to a promised gratefulness towards them. They went therefore at one time, when they knew them to be alone, Clinias to Philoclea, and Artesia to Pamela; and Clinias, with no few words, did set forth what an exploit was intended for her service. But Philoclea, in whose clear mind, treason could find no hiding-place, told him that she would be glad if he could persuade her cousin to deliver her, and that she would never forget his service therein; but that she desired him to lay down any such way of mischief, for, that for her part, she would rather yield to perpetual imprisonment than consent to the destroying her cousin, who, she knew, loved her, though wronged her. This unlooked-for {367} answer amazed Clinias, so that he had no other remedy in his mind but to kneel down to Philoclea, and beseech her to keep it secret, considering that the intention was for her service, and vowing, since she misliked it, to proceed no further therein, she comforted him with promise of silence, which she performed.

But that little availed; for Artesia having in like sort opened this device to Pamela, she, in whose mind virtue governed with the sceptre of knowledge, hating so horrible a wickedness, and straight judging what was fit to do: “Wicked woman,” said she, “whose unrepenting heart can find no way to amend treason, but by treason, now the time is come that thy wretched wiles have caught thyself in thine own net: as for me, let the gods dispose of me as shall please them; but sure it shall be no such way, nor way-leader, by which I will come to liberty.” This she spoke something with a louder voice than she was wont to use, so that Cecropia heard the noise, who was, sooner than Artesia imagined she would, come up, to bring Pamela to a window where she might see a notable skirmish happened in the camp, as she thought among themselves: and being a cunning fisher in troubled waters, straight found by their voices and gestures there was some matter of consequence, which she desired Pamela to tell her. “Ask of her,” said Pamela, “and learn to know, that who do falsehood to their superiors, teach falsehood to their inferiors.” More she would not say. But Cecropia taking away the each-way guilty Artesia, with fear of torture, got of her the whole practice: so that Zelmane was the more closely imprisoned, and Clinias, with the rest of his corrupted mates, according to their merits, executed: for as for Artesia, she was but locked up in her chamber, Amphialus not consenting, for the love he bore to Ismenus, that further punishment should be laid upon her.

But the noise they heard in the camp was by occasion of the famous prince Anaxius, nephew to the giant Euardes, whom Pyrocles slew; a prince of body exceedingly strong, in arms so skilful and fortunate, as no man was thought to excel him; of courage that knew not how to fear; of parts worthy praise, if they had not been guided by pride, and followed by injustice. For by a strange composition of mind, there was no man more tenderly sensible in anything offered to himself, which in the farthest-fetched construction might be wrested to the name of wrong; no man that in his own actions could worse distinguish between valour and violence: so proud, that he could not abstain from a Thraso-like boasting, and yet, so unlucky a lodging his virtues had gotten, he would never boast more than he would accomplish, falsely accounting an inflexible anger a courageous constancy; esteeming fear and astonishment righter causes of admiration, {368} than love and honour. This man had four sundry times fought with Amphialus, but Mars had been so impartial an arbiter, that neither side got advantage of the other. But in the end, it happened that Anaxius found Amphialus, unknown in great danger, and saved his life: whereupon, loving his own benefit, began to favour him, so much the more, as thinking so well of himself, he could not choose but like him, whom he found a match for himself: which at last grew to as much friendship towards him, as could by a proud heart be conceived. So as in this travel (seeking Pyrocles to be revenged of his uncle’s death) hearing of this siege, never taking pains to examine the quarrel, like a man whose will was his god, and his hand his law, taking with him his two brothers, men accounted little inferior to himself in martial matters, and two hundred chosen horsemen, with whom he thought himself able to conquer the world, yet commanding the rest of his forces to follow, he himself upon such an unexpected suddenness entered in upon the back of Basilius, that many with great unkindness took their death, not knowing why, nor how they were so murdered. There, if ever, did he make known the wonderfulness of his force. But the valiant and faithful Philanax, with well-governed speed, made such head against him as would have showed how soon courage falls in the ditch which hath not the eye of wisdom; but that Amphialus at the same time issued out and winning with abundance of courage one of the sconces which Basilius had builded, made way for his friend Anaxius, with great loss of both sides, but especially of the Basilians, such notable monuments had those two swords especially left of their master’s redoubted worthiness.

There, with the respect fit to his estate, the honour due to his worthiness, and the kindness which accompanies friendship, made fast by interchanged benefits, did Amphialus enforce himself, as much as in a besieged town he could, to make Anaxius know that his succour was not so needful as his presence grateful. For causing the streets and houses of the town to witness his welcome, making both soldiers and magistrates in their countenances to show their gladness of him, he led him to his mother, whom he besought to entertain him with no less love and kindness, than as one who once had saved her son’s life, and now came to save both life and honour. “Tush,” said Anaxius, speaking aloud, looking upon his brothers, “I am only sorry there are not half-a-dozen kings more about you, than what Anaxius can do might be the better manifested.” His brothers smiled, as though he had over-modestly spoken, far underneath the pitch of his power. Then was he disarmed at the earnest request of Amphialus: for Anaxius boiled with desire to issue out upon the {369} enemies, persuading himself that the sun should not be set before he had overthrown them. And having reposed himself, Amphialus asked him whether he would visit the young princesses. But Anaxius whispered him in the ear, “In truth,” said he, “dear friend Amphialus, though I am none of those that love to speak for themselves, I never came yet in company of ladies but that they fell in love with me. And that I in my heart scorn them as a peevish paltry sex, nor worthy to communicate with my virtues, would not do you the wrong: since, as I hear, you do debase yourself so much as to affect them.” The courteous Amphialus could have been angry with him for those words; but knowing his humour, suffered him to dance to his own music: and gave himself to entertain both him and his brothers, with as cheerful a manner as could issue from a mind whom unlucky love had filled with melancholy. For to Anaxius he yielded the direction of all. He gave the watch-word, and if any grace were granted, the means were to be made to Anaxius. And that night when supper was ended wherein Amphialus would needs himself wait upon him, he caused in boats upon the lake an excellent music to be ordered; which, though Anaxius might conceive was for his honour, yet indeed he was but the brick wall to convey it to the ears of the beloved Philoclea.

The music was of cornets, whereof one answering the other, with a sweet emulation striving for the glory of music, and striking upon the smooth face of the quiet lake, was then delivered up to the castle walls, which with a proud reverberation, spreading it into the air, it seemed before the harmony came to the ear, that it had enriched itself in travel, the nature of those places adding melody to that melodious instrument. And when a while that instrument had made a brave proclamation to all possessed minds of attention, an excellent concert straight followed, of five viols, and as many voices; which all being but orators of their master’s passions, bestowed this song upon her that thought upon another matter.

But Anaxius, seeming a-weary before it was ended, told Amphialus, that for his part he liked no music but the neighing of horses, the sound of trumpets, and the cries of yielding persons: and therefore desired, that the next morning they should issue upon the same place where they had entered that day, not doubting to make them quickly a-weary of being the besiegers of Anaxius. Amphialus, who had no whit less courage, though nothing blown up with pride, willingly condescended: and so the next morning, giving false alarm to the other side of the camp, Amphialus at Anaxius’s earnest request, staying within the town to see it guarded, Anaxius and his brethren, Lycurgus and Zoilus sallied out with the best chosen men. But Basilius, having been the last day somewhat unprovided, now had better fortified the overthrown sconce; and so well had prepared everything for defence, that it was impossible for any valour from within to prevail. Yet things were performed by Anaxius beyond the credit of the credulous: for thrice, valiantly followed by his brothers, did he set up his banner upon the rampire of the enemy; though thrice again by the multitude, and advantage of the place, but especially by the coming of three valiant knights, he was driven down again. Numbers there were that day, whose deaths and overthrows were excused by the well known sword of Anaxius: but the rest by the length of time and injury of historians have been wrapped up in dark forgetfulness; only Tressenius is spoken of, because when all abandoned the place, he only made head to Anaxius; till having lost one of his legs, yet not lost the heart of fighting, Lycurgus, second brother to Anaxius, cruelly murdered him; Anaxius himself disdaining any further to deal with them.

But so far had Anaxius at the third time prevailed, that now the Basilians began to let their courage descend to their feet; Basilius and Philanax in vain striving with reverence of authority to bridle the flight of astonishment, and to teach fear, discretion: so that {371} Amphialus, seeing victory show such a flattering countenance to him, came out with all his force, hoping that day to end the siege.

But that fancy altered quickly, by the sudden coming to the other side of the three knights, whereof the one was in white armour, the other in green, and the third by his black armour and device, straight known to be the notable knight who the first day had given fortune so short a stop with his notable deeds, fighting hand to hand with the deemed invincible Amphialus. For the very cowards no sooner saw him, but as borrowing some of his spirit, they went like young eagles to the prey, under the wing of their dam. For the three adventurers, not content to keep them from their rampire, leapt down among them, and entered into a brave combat with the three valiant brothers. But to whether side fortune would have been partial, could not be determined. For the Basilians, lightened with the beams of their strangers’ valour, followed so thick, that the Amphialians were glad with some haste to retire to the wall-ward: though Anaxius neither reason, fear, nor example, could make him assuage the fury of his fight: until one of the Basilians (unworthy to have his name registered, since he did it cowardly, sideward, when he least looked that way) almost cut off one of his legs, so that he fell down, blaspheming heaven, that all the influences thereof had power to overthrow him: and there death would have seized on his proud heart, but that Amphialus took in hand the black knight, while some of his soldiers conveyed away Anaxius, so requiting life for life unto him.

And for the love and example of Amphialus, the fight began to enter into a new fit of heat: when Basilius, that thought enough to be done for that day, caused retreat to be sounded; fearing lest his men following over-earnestly, might be the loss of those excellent knights whom he desired to know. The knights as soon as they heard the retreat, though they were eagerly set, knowing that courage without discipline, is nearer beastliness than manhood, drew back their swords, though hungry of more blood: especially the black knight, who knowing of Amphialus, could not refrain to tell him, that this was the second time he escaped out of his hands, but that he would shortly bring him a bill of all the former accounts. Amphialus seeing it fit to retire also, most of his people being hurt, both in bodies and hearts, withdrew himself with so well-seated a resolution, that it was as far from anger, as from dismayedness, answering no other to the black knight’s threats, but that when he brought him his account, he should find a good paymaster.

The fight being ceased, and each side withdrawn within their strengths, Basilius sent Philanax to entertain the strange knights, {372} and to bring them unto him that he might acknowledge what honour was due to their virtue. But they excused themselves, desiring to be known first by their deeds, before their names should accuse their unworthiness: and though the other replied according as they deserved, yet (finding that unwelcome courtesy is a degree of injury) he suffered them to retire themselves to a tent of their own without the camp, where they kept themselves secret: Philanax himself being called away to another strange knight; strange not only by the unlooked-for-ness of his coming, but by the strange manner of his coming.

For he had before him four damsels, and so many behind him, all upon palfreys, and all apparelled in mourning weeds; each of them a servant on each side, with like liveries of sorrow. Himself in an armour, all painted over with such a cunning of shadow, that it represented a gaping sepulchre; the furniture of his horse was all of cypress branches: wherewith in old time they were wont to dress graves. His bases, which he wore so long, as they came almost to his ankle, were embroidered only with black worms, which seemed to crawl up and down, as ready to devour him. In his shield, for impresa, he had a beautiful child, but having two heads, whereon the one showed that it was already dead; the other alive, but in that case, necessarily looking for death. The word was: “No way to be rid from death, but by death.”

This knight of the tomb, for so the soldiers termed him, sent to Basilius to demand leave to send a damsel into the town, to call out Amphialus, according as before time some others had done. Which being granted, as glad any would undertake the charge, which nobody else in that camp was known willing to do, the damsel went in, and having with tears sobbed out a brave challenge to Amphialus, from the knight of the tomb, Amphialus honourably entertaining the gentlewoman, and desiring to know the knight’s name, which the doleful gentlewoman would not discover, accepted the challenge, only desiring the gentlewoman to say thus much to the strange knight from him, that if his mind were like to his title, there were more cause of affinity than enmity between them. And therefore presently, accordingly as he was wont, as soon as he perceived the knight of the tomb, with his damsels and judge, was come into the island, he also went over in accustomed manner; and yet for the courtesy of his nature, desired to speak with him.

But the knight of the tomb, with silence and drawing his horse back, showed no will to hear, nor speak: but with lance on thigh, made him know, it was fit for him to go to the other end of the career, whence waiting the start of the unknown knight, he likewise made his spurs claim haste of his horse. But when his staff was in his rest, coming down to meet with the knight, now very near {373} him, he perceived the knight had missed his rest: wherefore the courteous Amphialus would not let his lance descend: but with a gallant grace, ran over the head of his therein friended enemy: and having stopped his horse, and with the turning of him, blessed his sight with the window where he thought Philoclea might stand, he perceived the knight had lighted from his horse, and thrown away his staff, angry with his misfortune, as of having missed his rest, and drawn his sword, to make that supply his fellow’s fault; he also alighted, and drew his sword, esteeming victory with advantage, rather robbed than purchased: and so the other coming eagerly toward him, he with his shield out; and sword aloft, with more bravery than anger drew unto him, and straight made their swords speak for them a pretty while with equal fierceness. But Amphialus, to whom the earth brought forth few matches, having both much more skill to choose the places, and more force to work upon the chosen, had already made many windows in his armour for death to come in at, when in the nobleness of his nature abhorring to make the punishment overgo the offence, he stepped a little back, and withal, “Sir knight,” said he, “you may easily see that it pleaseth God to favour my cause; employ your valour against them that wish you hurt, for my part I have not deserved hate of you.” “Thou liest, false traitor,” said the other, with an angry, but weak voice; but Amphialus, in whom abused kindness became spiteful rage. “Ah barbarous wretch,” said he, “only courageous in discourtesy, thou shalt soon see whether thy tongue hath betrayed thy heart, or no:” and with that redoubled his blows, gave him a great wound upon his neck, and closing with him, overthrew him, and with the fall thrust him mortally into the body, and with that went to pull off his helmet, with intention to make him give himself the lie, for having so said, or to cut off his head.

But the headpiece was no sooner off, but that there fell about the shoulders of the overcome knight the treasure of fair golden hair, which with the face, soon known by the badge of excellency, witnessed that it was Parthenia, the unfortunately virtuous wife of Argalus; her beauty then, even in the despite of the past sorrow, or coming death, assuring all beholders that it was nothing short of perfection. For her exceeding fair eyes, having with continual weeping gotten a little redness about them, her round sweetly swelling lips a little trembling, as though they kissed their neighbour death; in her cheeks the whiteness striving by little and little to get upon the rosiness of them; her neck, a neck indeed of alabaster, displaying the wound, which with most dainty blood laboured to drown his own beauties; so that here was a river of purest red, there an island of perfectest white, each giving {374} lustre to the other, with the sweet countenance, God knows, full of an unaffected languishing: though these things to a grossly conceiving sense might seem disgraces, yet indeed were they but apparelling beauty in a new fashion, which all looked upon through the spectacles of pity, did even increase the lines of her natural fairness; so that Amphialus was astonished with grief, compassion and shame, detesting his fortune that made him unfortunate in victory.

Therefore putting off his headpiece and gauntlet, kneeling down unto her, and with tears testifying his sorrow, he offered his, by himself accursed, hands to help her, protesting his life and power to be ready to do her honour. But Parthenia, who had inward messengers of the desired death’s approach, looking upon him, and straight turning away her feeble sight, as from a delightless object, drawing out her words, which her breath, loth to depart from so sweet a body, did faintly deliver: “Sir,” said she, “I pray you, if prayers have place in enemies, to let my maids take my body untouched by you: the only honour I now desire by your means, is, that I have no honour of you. Argalus made no such bargain with you, that the hands which killed him, should help me. I have of them, and I do not only pardon you, but thank you for it, the service which I desired. There rests nothing now, but that I go live with him, since whose death I have done nothing but die.” Then pausing, and a little fainting, and again coming to herself; “O sweet life, welcome,” said she, “now feel I the bands united of the cruel death, which so long hath held me. And O life, O death, answer for me, that my thoughts have not so much as in a dream tasted any comfort, since they were deprived of Argalus. I come, my Argalus, I come: and, O God, hide my faults in thy mercies, and grant, as I feel thou dost grant, that in thy eternal love, we may love each other eternally. And this, O Lord:”——but there Atropos[5] cut off her sentence: for with that, casting up both eyes and hands to the skies, the noble soul departed (one might well assure himself) to heaven, which left the body in so heavenly a demeanour.

But Amphialus, with a heart oppressed with grief, because of her request, withdrew himself: but the judges, as full of pity, had been all this while disarming her, and her gentlewomen with lamentable cries labouring to staunch the remediless wounds: and a while she was dead before they perceived it, death being able to divide the soul, but not the beauty from that body. But when the infallible tokens of death assured them of their loss, one of the women would have killed herself, but that the squire of Amphialus perceiving, by force held her. Others that had as {375} strong passion, though weaker resolution, fell to cast dust upon their heads, to tear their garments; all falling upon the earth, and crying upon their sweet mistress, as if their cries could persuade the soul to leave the celestial happiness, to come again into the elements of sorrow: one time calling to remembrance her virtue, chasteness, sweetness, and goodness to them; another time accursing themselves that they had obeyed her; being deceived by her words, who assured them that it was revealed unto her that she should have her heart’s desire in the battle against Amphialus, which they wrongly understood. Then kissing her cold hands and feet, weary of the world, since she was gone who was their world, the very heavens seemed with a cloudy countenance to lour at the loss, and fame itself (though by nature glad to tell such rare accidents) yet could not choose but deliver it in lamentable accents, and in such sort went it quickly all over the camp: and as if the air had been infected with sorrow, no heart was so hard, but was as subject to that contagion; the rareness of the accident, matching together, the rarely matched together, pity with admiration. Basilius himself came forth, and brought the fair Gynecia with him, who was come into the camp under colour of visiting her husband, and hearing of her daughters: but indeed Zelmane was the saint to which her pilgrimage was intended, cursing, envying, blessing, and in her heart kissing the walls which imprisoned her. But both they, with Philanax, and the rest of the principal nobility, went out to make honour triumph over death, conveying that excellent body (whereto Basilius himself would needs lend his shoulder) to a church a mile from the camp, where the valiant Argalus lay entombed; recommending to that sepulchre the blessed relics of a faithful and virtuous love, giving order for the making of two marble images to represent them, and each way enriching the tomb: upon which Basilius himself caused this epitaph to be written,

Then with eyes full of tears, and mouths full of her praises, returned they to the camp, with more and more hate against Amphialus, who, poor gentleman, had therefore greater portion of woe than any of them. For that courteous heart, which would have grieved but to have heard the like adventure, was rent with remembering himself to be the author; so that his wisdom could not so far temper his passion, but that he took his sword, counted the best in the world (which with much blood he had once conquered of a mighty giant) and broke it into many pieces, which afterwards he had good cause to repent, saying, that neither it was worthy to serve the noble exercise of chivalry, nor any other worthy to feel that sword, which had stricken so excellent a lady; and withal, banishing all cheerfulness of his countenance he returned home: where he got him to his bed, not so much to rest his restless mind, as to avoid all company; the sight whereof was tedious unto him. And then melancholy, only rich in unfortunate remembrances, brought before him all the mishaps with which his life had wrestled: taking this, not only as a confirming of the former, but a presage of following misery, and to his heart, already overcome by sorrowfulness, even trifling misfortunes came, to fill up the roll of a grieved memory, labouring only his wits to pierce further and further into his own wretchedness. So as all that night, in despite of darkness, he held his eyes open; and in the morning, when the light began to restore to each body his colour, then with curtains barred he himself from the enjoying of it; neither willing to feel the comfort of the day, nor the ease of the night, until his mother (who never knew what love meant, but only to him-ward) came to his bedside, and beginning with loving earnestness to lay a kind chiding upon him, because he would suffer the weakness of sorrow to conquer the strength of his virtues; he did with a broken piecemeal speech, as if the tempest of passion unorderly blew out his words, remember the mishaps of his youth, the evils he had been the cause of, his rebelling with shame, and that shame increased with shameful accidents, the deaths of Philoxenus and Parthenia, wherein he found himself hated of the ever-ruling powers, but especially (and so especially, as the rest seemed nothing when he came to that) his fatal love to Philoclea: to whom he had so governed himself as one that could neither conquer, nor yield; being of the one side a slave, and of the other a jailor: and withal almost upbraiding unto his mother the little success of her large hoping promises, he in effect finding Philoclea nothing mollified, and now himself, so cast down as he thought himself unworthy of better. But his mother, as she had plentiful cause, making him see that of his other griefs there was little or no fault in {377} himself, and therefore there ought to be little or no grief in him; when she came to the head of the sore, indeed seeing that she could no longer patch up her former promises (he taking a desperate deafness to all delaying hopes) she confessed plainly that she could prevail nothing: but the fault was his own, who had marred the young girl by seeking to have that by prayer, which he should have taken by authority. That it were an absurd cunning to make high ladders to go in a plain way; so was it an untimely and foolish flattery, there to beseech, where one might command, puffing them up by being besought, with such a self-pride of superiority, that it was not, forsooth, to be held out but by denial. “O God,” said Amphialus, “how well I thought my fortune would bring forth this end of your labours? assure yourself, mother, I will sooner pull out these eyes, than they should look upon the heavenly Philoclea, but as upon a heaven whence they have their light, and to which they are subject. If they will pour down any influences of comfort: O happy I: but if by the sacrifice of a faithful heart, they will not be called unto me, let me languish and wither with languishing, and grieve with withering, but never so much as repine with never so much grieving. Mother, O Mother, lust may well be a tyrant, but true love where it is indeed, it is a servant. Accursed more than I am, may I be, if ever I did approach her, but that I freezed as much in a fearful reverence, as I burned in a vehement desire. Did ever man’s eye look through love upon the majesty of virtue, shining through beauty, but that he became, as it well became him, a captive? and it is the style of the captive to write, ‘Our will and pleasure?’”

“Tush, tush, son,” said Cecropia, “if you say you love, but withal you fear, you fear lest you should offend. Offend? and how know you that you should offend? because she doth deny. Deny? now by my truth, if your sadness would let me laugh, I could laugh heartily to see that you are ignorant, that ‘No’ is no Negative in a woman’s mouth. My son, believe me, a woman speaking of women; a lover’s modesty among us is much more praised, than liked: or if we like it, so well we like it, that for marring of his modesty, he shall never proceed further. Each virtue hath his time: if you command your soldier to march foremost, and he for courtesy put others before him, would you praise his modesty? love is your general, he bids you dare, and will Amphialus be a dastard? let example serve: do you think Theseus should ever have gotten Antiope with sighing and crossing his arms? he ravished her, and ravished her that was an Amazon, and therefore had gotten a habit of stoutness above the nature of a woman: but having ravished her, he got a child of her. And I say no {378} more, but that, they say, is not gotten without consent on both sides. Iole had her own father killed by Hercules, and herself ravished, by force ravished, and yet ere long this ravished and unfathered lady could sportfully put on the lion’s skin upon her own fair shoulders, and play with the club with her own delicate hands: so easily had she pardoned the ravisher, that she could not but delight in those weapons of ravishing. But above all mark Helen, daughter to Jupiter, who could never brook her mannerly-wooing Menelaus, but disdained his humbleness, and loathed his softness. But so well she could like the force of enforcing Paris, that for him she could abide what might be abidden. But what? Menelaus takes heart, he recovers her by force, by force carries her home, by force enjoys her; and she who would never like him for serviceableness, ever after loved him for violence. For what can be more agreeable than upon force to lay the fault of desire, and in one instant to join a dear delight with a just excuse? or rather the true cause is (pardon me, O woman-kind, for revealing to mine own son the truth of this mystery) we think there wants fire, where we find no sparkles, at least of fury. Truly I have known a great lady, long sought by most great, most wise, most beautiful, and most valiant persons, never won, because they did over-superstitiously solicit her: the same lady brought under by another, inferior to all them in all those qualities, only because he could use that imperious masterfulness which nature gives to men above women. For indeed, son, I confess unto you, in our very creation we are servants: and who prayeth his servants, shall never be well obeyed: but as a ready horse straight yields when he finds one that will make him yield, the same falls to bounds when feels a fearful horseman. Awake thy spirits, good Amphialus, and assure thyself, that though she refuseth, she refuseth but to endear the obtaining. If she weep, and chide, and protest before it be gotten, she can but weep, and chide, and protest, when it is gotten. Think, she would not strive, but that she means to try thy force; and my Amphialus, know thyself a man, and show thyself a man; and, believe me upon my word, a woman is a woman.”

Amphialus was about to answer her, when a gentleman of his made him understand that there was a messenger come, who had brought a letter unto him from out of the camp: whom he presently calling for, took, opened, and read the letter, importing this.

Amphialus read it, and with a deep sigh (according to the humour of inward affliction) seemed even to condemn himself, as though indeed his reproaches were true. But howsoever the dullness of melancholy would have languishingly yielded thereunto, his courage, unused to such injuries, desired help of anger to make him this answer.

This being written, and delivered, the messenger told him that his lord would, if he liked the same, bring two knights with him to be his patrons. Which Amphialus accepted, and withal shaking off, with resolution, his mother’s importunate persuasions, he furnished himself for the fight, but not in his wonted furniture. For now, as if he would turn his inside outward, he would needs appear all in black; his decking both for himself, and horse, being cut out into the fashion of very rags: yet all so daintily joined together with precious stones, as it was a brave raggedness, and a rich poverty: and so cunningly had the workman followed his humour in his armour, that he had given it a rusty show, and yet so that any man might perceive was by art, and not negligence; carrying at one instant a disgraced handsomeness, and a new oldness. In his shield he bare for his device, a Night, by an excellent painter, excellently painted, with a sun with a shadow, and upon the shadow a speech signifying, that it only was barred from enjoying that, whereof it had his life? or “From whose I am, banished.” In his crest he carried Philoclea’s knives, the only token of her forced favour.

So passed he over into the island, taking with him the two brothers of Anaxius, where he found the forsaken knight attired in his own livery, as black as sorrow itself could see itself in the blackest glass: his ornaments of the same hue, but formed into the figures of ravens, which seemed to gape for carrion: only his {380} reins were snakes, which finely wrapping themselves one within the other, their heads came together to the cheeks and bosses of the bit, where they might seem to bite at the horse, and the horse, as he champed the bit, to bite at them, and that the white foam was engendered by the poisonous fury of the combat. His impresa was a Catoblepa[6], which so long lies dead, as the moon, whereto it hath so natural a sympathy, wants her light. The word signified, that the moon wanted not the light, but the poor beast wanted the moon’s light. He had in his headpiece, a whip to witness a self-punishing repentance. Their very horses were coal black too, not having so much as one star to give light to their night of blackness: so as one would have thought they had been the two sons of sorrow and were come hither to fight for their birthright in that sorry inheritance.

Which alliance of passions so moved Amphialus, already tender minded by the afflictions of love, that without staff or sword drawn, he trotted fairly to the forsaken knight, willing to have put off this combat, to which his melancholy heart did, more than ever in like occasion, misgive him: and therefore saluting him, “Good knight,” said he, “because we are men, and should know reason why we do things, tell me the cause, that makes you thus eager to fight with me.” “Because I affirm,” answered the forsaken knight, “that thou dost most rebellious injury to these ladies to whom all men owe service.” “You shall not fight with me,” said Amphialus, “upon the quarrel: for I confess the same too: but it proceeds from their own beauty, to enforce love to offer this force.” “I maintain then,” said the forsaken knight, “that thou art not worthy so to love.” “And that I confess too,” said Amphialus, “since the world is not so richly blessed, as to bring forth anything worthy thereof. But no more unworthy than any other, since in none can be a more worthy love.” “Yes, more unworthy than myself,” said the forsaken knight, “for though I deserve contempt, thou deservest both contempt and hatred.”

But Amphialus by that thinking, though wrongly, each indeed mistaking other, that he was his rival, forgot all mind of reconciliation, and having all his thoughts bound up in choler, never staying either judge, trumpet, or his own lance, drew out his sword, and saying, “Thou liest, false villain,” unto him, his words and blows came so quick together, as the one seemed a lightning of the other’s thunder. But he found no barren ground of such seed: for it yielded him his own with such increase, that though reason and amazement go rarely together, yet the most reasonable eyes that saw it, found reason to be amazed at the fury of their combat. Never game of death better played; never fury set itself forth in {381} greater bravery. The courteous Vulcan, when he wrought at his more courteous wife’s request Aeneas an armour, made not his hammer beget a greater sound than the swords of these noble knights did: they needed no fire to their forge, for they made the fire to shine at the meeting of their swords and armours, each side fetching still new spirit from the castle window, and careful of keeping their sight that way as a matter of greater consideration in their combat, than either the advantage of sun or wind; which sun and wind, if the astonished eyes of the beholders were not by the astonishment deceived, did both stand still to be beholders of this rare match. For neither could their amazed eyes discern motion of the sun, and no breath of wind stirred, as if either for fear it would not come among such blows, or with delight had eyes so busy, as it had forgot to open his mouth. This fight being the more cruel, since both love and hatred conspired to sharpen their humours, that hard it was to say whether love with one trumpet, or hatred with another, gave the louder alarm to their courages. Spite, rage, disdain, shame, revenge, came waiting upon hatred: of the other side came with love, longing desire, both invincible hope, and fearless despair, with rival-like jealousy, which, although brought up within doors in the school of Cupid, should show themselves no less forward than the other dusty band of Mars, to make themselves notable in the notableness of this combat. Of either side confidence, unacquainted with loss, but assuring trust to overcome, and good experience how to overcome: now seconding their terrible blows with cunning labouring the horses to win ground of the enemy; now unlooked-for parting one from the other to win advantages by an advantageous return. But force against force, skill against skill, so interchangeably encountered that it was not easy to determine whether enterprising, or preventing came former: both sometimes at one instant, doing and suffering wrong, and choler no less rising of the doing than of the suffering. But as the fire, the more fuel is put to it, the more hungry still it is to devour more, so the more they struck, the more unsatisfied they were with striking. Their very armour by piecemeal fell away from them; and yet their flesh abode the wounds constantly, as though it were less sensible of smart, than the senseless armour: their blood in most places staining their black colour, as if it would give a more lively colour of mourning than black can do. And so long a space they fought, while neither virtue nor fortune seemed partial of either side: which so tormented the unquiet heart of Amphialus, that he resolved to see a quick end: and therefore with the violence of courage, adding strength to his blow, he struck in such wise upon the side of the other’s head that his remembrance left that battered lodging, so that he was quite from himself, casting his {382} arms abroad, and ready to fall down; his sword likewise went out of his hand, but that being fast by a chain to his arm, he could not lose. And Amphialus used the favour of occasion, redoubling his blows: but the horse, weary to be beaten, as well as the master, carried his master away, till he came unto himself. But then who could have seen him, might well have discerned shame in his cheeks, and revenge in his eyes: so that setting his teeth together with rage, he came running upon Amphialus, reaching out his arm, which had gathered up his sword, meaning with that blow to have cleaved Amphialus in two. But Amphialus, seeing the blow coming, shunned it with nimble turning his horse aside; wherewith the forsaken knight overstrake himself, so as almost he came down with his own strength: but the more hungry of his purpose, the more he was barred the food of it: disdaining the resistance, both of force and fortune, he returned upon the spur again, and ran with such violence upon Amphialus that his horse with the force of the shock rose up before, almost overturned: which Amphialus perceiving, with rein and spur put forth his horse, and withal gave a mighty blow in the descent of his horse, upon the shoulder of the forsaken knight, from whence sliding, it fell upon the neck of his horse, so as horse and man fell to the ground: but he was scarce down before he was upon his feet again, with brave gesture showing rising of courage, in the falling of fortune. But the courteous Amphialus excused himself, for having, against his will, killed his horse. “Excuse thyself for viler faults,” answered the forsaken knight, “and use this poor advantage the best thou canst, for thou shalt quickly find thou hast need of more.” “Thy folly,” said Amphialus, “shall not make me forget myself:” and therefore, trotting a little aside, alighted from his horse, because he would not have fortune come to claim any part of the victory. Which courteous act would have mollified the noble heart of the forsaken knight, if any other had done it besides the jailor of his mistress; but that was a sufficient defeasance of the firmest bond of good nature; and therefore he was no sooner alighted but that he ran unto him, re-entering into as cruel a fight as eye did ever see, or thought could reasonably imagine; far beyond the reach of weak words to be able to express it. For what they had done on horseback, was but a morsel to keep their stomachs in appetite in comparison of that which now (being themselves) they did. Nor ever glutton by the change of dainty diet could be brought to fresh feeding, when he might have been satisfied before, with more earnestness, than those, by the change of their manner of fight, fell clean to a new fight, though any else would have thought they had their fill already. Amphialus being the taller man, for the most part stood with his right leg before, his shield at the uttermost {383} length of his arm; his sword high, but with the point towards his enemy. But when he struck, which came so thick, as if every blow would strive to be foremost, his arm seemed still a postilion of death. The forsaken knight showed with like skill, unlike gesture, keeping himself in continual motion, proportioning the distance between them to anything that Amphialus attempted; his eye guided his foot, and his foot conveyed his hand; and since nature had made him something the lower of the two, he made art follow, and not strive with nature; shunning rather than warding his blows; like a cunning mastiff who knows the sharpness of the horn and strength of the bull, fights low to get his proper advantage; answering mightiness with nimbleness, and yet at times employing his wonderful force, wherein he was second to none. In sum, the blows were strong, the thrusts thick, and the avoidings cunning. But the forsaken knight, that thought it a degree of being conquered to be long in conquering, struck him so mighty a blow, that he made Amphialus put knee to the ground, without any humbleness. But when he felt himself stricken down, and saw himself stricken down by his rival, then shame seemed one arm, and disdain another; fury in his eyes, and revenge in his heart; skill and force gave place and they took the place of skill and force, with so unweariable a manner that the forsaken knight was driven also to leave the stern of cunning, and gave himself wholly to be guided by the storm of fury: there being in both, because hate would not suffer admiration, extreme disdain to find themselves so matched.

“What,” said Amphialus to himself, “am I Amphialus, before whom so many monsters and giants have fallen dead, when I only sought causeless adventures? and can one knight now withstand me in the presence of Philoclea, and fighting for Philoclea, or since I lost my liberty, have I lost my courage, have I gotten the heart of a slave as well as the fortune? If an army were against me in the sight of Philoclea, could it resist me? O beast, one man resists thee: thy rival resists thee: or am I indeed Amphialus? have not passions killed him, and wretched I, I know not how, succeeded into his place?” Of the other side the forsaken knight with no less spite fell out with himself; “Hast thou broken,” said he to himself, “the commandment of thy only princess, to come now into her presence, and in her presence to prove thyself a coward? Doth Asia and Egypt set up trophies unto thee to be matched here by a traitor? O noble Barsanes, how shamed will thy soul be, that he that slew thee, should be resisted by this one man? O incomparable Pyrocles, more grieved wilt thou be with thy friend’s shame, than with thine own imprisonment, when thou shalt know how little I have been able to do for the delivery of thee, and these {384} heavenly princesses. Am I worthy to be friend to the most valorous prince that ever was entitled valorous, and show myself so weak a wretch? No, shamed Musidorus, worthy for nothing but to keep sheep, get thee a sheep-hook again, since thou canst use a sword no better.”

Thus at times did they, now with one thought, then with another, sharpen their over-sharp humours; like the lion that beats himself with his own tail, to make himself the more angry. These thoughts indeed not staying, but whetting their angry swords, which now had put on the apparel of cruelty: they bleeding so abundantly, that everybody that saw them, fainted for them, and yet they fainted not in themselves: their smart being more sensible to other eyes than to their own feeling. Wrath and courage barring the common sense from bringing any message of their case to the mind: pain, weariness, and weakness, not daring to make known their case, though already in the limits of death, in the presence of so violent fury: which filling the veins with rage instead of blood, and making the mind minister spirits to the body, a great while held out their fight, like an arrow shot upward by the force of the bow, though by his own nature he would go downward. The forsaken knight had the more wounds, but Amphialus had the sorer; which the other, watching time and place, had cunningly given unto him: who ever saw a well-manned galley fight with a tall ship, might make unto himself some kind of comparison of the difference of these two knights; a better couple than which the world could not brag of. Amphialus seemed to excel in strength, the forsaken knight in nimbleness; and yet did the one’s strength excel in nimbleness, and the other’s nimbleness excel in strength; but now strength and nimbleness were both gone, and excess of courage only maintained the fight. Three times had Amphialus, with his mighty blows driven the forsaken knight to go staggering backward, but every one of these times he requited pain with smart, and shame with repulse. And now whether he had cause, or that over-much confidence, an over-forward scholar of unconquered courage, made him think he had cause, he began to persuade himself he had the advantage of the combat though the advantage he took himself to have was only that he should be the later to die: which hope, hate, as unsecret as love, could not conceal, but drawing himself a little back from him, broke out in these manner of words.

“Ah Amphialus,” said the forsaken knight, “this third time thou shalt not escape me, but thy death shall satisfy thy injury and my malice, and pay for the cruelty thou showedst in killing the noble Argalus, and the fair Parthenia.” “In troth,” said Amphialus, “thou art the best knight that ever I fought withal, which would {385} make me willing to grant thee thy life, if thy wit were as good as thy courage; that, besides other follies, layest that to my charge, which most against my will was committed. But whether my death be in thy power, or no, let this tell thee;” and upon the word waited a blow, which parted his shield in two pieces; and despising the weak resistance of his already broken armour, made a great breach into his heart side, as if he would make a passage for his love to get out at.

But pain rather seemed to increase life, than to weaken life in these champions. For the forsaken knight coming in with his right leg, and making it guide the force of the blow, struck Amphialus upon the belly so horrible a wound, that his guts came out withal. Which Amphialus perceiving (fearing death, only because it should come with overthrow) he seemed to conjure all his strength for one moment’s service; and so lifting up his sword with both hands, hit the forsaken knight upon the head, a blow, wherewith his sword broke. But, as if it would do a notable service before it died, it prevailed so, even in the instant of breaking, that the forsaken knight fell to the ground, quite for that instant forgetting both love and hatred: and Amphialus (finding himself also in such weakness, as he looked for speedy death) glad of the victory, though little hoping to enjoy it, pulled up his vizor, meaning with his dagger to give him death; but instead of death, he gave him life: for the air so revived his spirits, that coming to himself, and seeing his present danger, with a life conquering death, he took Amphialus by the thigh, and together rose himself, and overturned him. But Amphialus scrambled up again, both now so weak indeed, as their motions rather seemed the after-drops of a storm, than any matter of great fury.

But Amphialus might repent himself of his wilful breaking his sword: for the forsaken knight (having with the extremity of justly-conceived hate, and the unpitifulness of his own near-threatening death, blotted out all compliments of courtesy) let fly at him so cruelly, that though the blows were weak, yet weakness upon a weakened subject, proved such strength, that Amphialus having attempted in vain once or twice to close with him, receiving wound upon wound, sent his whole burden to strike the earth with falling, since he could strike his foe no better in standing: giving no other tokens of himself, than as of a man even ready to take his oath to be death’s true servant.

Which when the hardy brothers of Anaxius perceived, not reckoning law of arms, nor use of chivalry, they flew in to defend their friend, or revenge their loss of him. But they were forthwith encountered with the two brave companions of the forsaken knight, whereof the one being all in green, both armour and furniture, it {386} seemed a pleasant garden, wherein grew orange trees; which with their golden fruits, cunningly beaten in and embroidered, greatly enriched the eye-pleasing colour of green. In his shield was a sheep feeding in a pleasant field, with this word, “Without fear or envy.” And therefore was called the knight of the sheep. The other knight was all in milk white, his attiring else all cut in stars, which made of cloth of silver, and silver spangles, each way seemed to cast many aspects. His device was the very pole itself, about which many stars stirring, but the place itself left void. The word was, “The best place yet reserved.” But these four knights inheriting the hate of their friends, began a most fierce combat: the forsaken knight himself not able to help his side, but was driven to sit him down, with the extreme faintness of his more and more fainting body. But these valiant couples seeking honour by dishonouring, and to build safety upon ruin, gave new appetites to the almost glutted eyes of the beholders; and now blood began to put sweat from the full possession of their outsides, no advantage being yet to be seen, only the knight of the sheep seeming most inclined to deliver, and effecting most of all that viewed him, when a company of soldiers sent by Cecropia, came out in boats to the island, and all came running to the destruction of the three knights, whereof one was utterly unable to defend himself.

But then did the other two knights show their wonderful courage and fidelity, for turning back to back, and both bestriding the black forsaken knight (who had fainted so long till he had lost the feeling of faintness) they held play against the rest, though the two brothers unknightly helped them; till Philanax, who watchfully attended such traitorous practices, sent likewise over, both by boat and swimming, so choice a number, as did put most of the others to the sword. Only the two brothers, with some of the bravest of them, carrying away the body of Amphialus, which they would rather have died, than have left behind them.

So was the forsaken knight, laid upon cloaks, carried home to the camp. But his two friends knowing his earnest desire not to be known, covering him from anybody’s eyes, conveyed him to their own tent: Basilius himself conquering his earnest desire to see him, with fear to displease him, who had fought so notably in his quarrel. But fame set the honour upon his back, which he would not suffer to shine in his face: no man’s mouth being barren of praises to the noble knight that had battered the most esteemed knight in the world; everybody praying for his life, and thinking that therein they prayed for themselves. But he himself, when by the diligent care of friends, and well-applied cunning of surgeons, he came to renew again the league between his mind and body; then fell he to a fresh war with his own thoughts, wrongfully {387} condemning his manhood, laying cowardice to himself, whom the impudentest backbiter would not have so wronged. For his courage (used to use victory as an inheritance) could brook no resistance at any time: but now that he had promised himself not only the conquest of him, but the scaling of the walls, and delivery of Pamela, though he had done beyond all others’ expectation, yet so short was he of his own, that he hated to look upon the sun that had seen him do so weakly: and so much abhorred all visitation or honour, whereof he thought himself unworthy, that he besought his two noble friends to carry him away to a castle not far off, where he might cure his wounds, and never be known till he made success excuse this, as he thought, want in him. They lovingly obeyed him, leaving Basilius and all the camp very sorry for the parting of these three unknown knights, in whose prowess they had reposed the greatest trust of victory.

But they being gone, Basilius and Philanax gave good order to the strengthening of the siege, fortifying themselves, so that they feared no more any such sudden onset, as that of Anaxius. And they within (by reason of Anaxius’s hurt, but especially of Amphialus’s) gave themselves only to a diligent watch and ward, making no sallies out, but committing the principal trust to Zoilus and Lycurgus. For Anaxius was yet forced to keep his chamber. And as for Amphialus, his body had such wounds, and he gave such wounds to his mind, as easily it could not be determined whether death or he made the greater haste one to the other: for when the diligent care of cunning surgeons had brought life to the possession of his own right, sorrow and shame, like two corrupted servants, came waiting of it, persuading nothing but the giving over of itself to destruction. They laid before his eyes his present case, painting every piece of it in most ugly colours: they showed him his love wrapped in despair, his fame blotted by overthrow; so that if before he languished, because he could not obtain his desiring, he now lamented, because he durst not desire the obtaining. “Recreant Amphialus,” would he say to himself, “how darest thou entitle thyself the lover of Philoclea, that hath neither showed thyself a faithful coward, or a valiant rebel, but both rebellious and cowardly, which no law can quit, nor grace have pity of? alas! life! what little pleasure thou dost me, to give me nothing but sense of reproach, and exercise of ruin? I would, sweet Philoclea, I had died, before thy eyes had seen my weakness: and then perchance with some sigh thou wouldst have confessed, thou hadst lost a worthy servant. But now, caitiff that I am, whatever I have done, serves but to build up my rival’s glory.”

To these speeches he would couple such gestures of vexation, and would fortify the gestures with such effects of fury, as sometimes {388} offering to tear up his wounds, sometimes to refuse the sustenance of meat, and council of physicians, that his perplexed mother was driven to make him by force to be tended, with extreme courtesy to herself, and annoyance to him: till in the end he was contented to promise her he would attempt no violence upon himself, upon condition he might be troubled by nobody but only his physicians: his melancholy detesting all company, so that the very surgeons nor servants durst speak unto him in doing him service; only he had prayed his mother, as she tendered his life, she would procure him grace, and that without that she would never come at him more.

His mother, who had confined all her love only unto him, set only such about him as were absolutely at her commandment, whom she forbade to let him know anything that passed in the castle, till his wounds were cured, but as she from time to time should instruct them: she, for herself, being resolved, now she had the government of all things in her own hands, to satisfy her son’s love by their yielding, or satisfy her own revenge in their punishment. Yet first, because she would be the freer from outward force, she sent a messenger to the camp to denounce unto Basilius, that if he did not presently raise his siege, she would cause the heads of the three ladies, prisoners, to be cut off before his eyes. And to make him the more fear a present performance, she caused his two daughters and Zelmane to be led unto the walls, where she had made a scaffold, easy to be seen by Basilius: and there caused them to be kept, as ready for the slaughter, till answer came from Basilius. A sight full of pity it was, to see these three (all excelling in all those excellencies, wherewith nature can beautify anybody: Pamela giving sweetness to majesty; Philoclea enriching nobleness with humbleness, Zelmane setting in womanly beauty manlike valour) to be thus subjected to the basest injury of unjust fortune. One might see in Pamela a willingness to die, rather than to have life at other’s discretion; though sometimes a princely disdain would sparkle out of her princely eyes, that it should be in other’s power to force her to die. In Philoclea a pretty fear came up, to endamask her rosy cheeks: but it was such a fear, as rather seemed a kindly child to her innate humbleness, than any other dismayedness: or if she were dismayed, it was more for Zelmane, than for herself; or if more for herself, it was because Zelmane should lose her. As for Zelmane, as she went with her hands bound (for they durst not adventure on her well-known valour, especially among a people, which perchance might be moved by such a spectacle to some revolt) she was the true image of overmastered courage, and of spite, that sees no remedy. For her breast swelled withal, the blood burst out at her {389} nose, and she looked paler than accustomed, with her eyes cast upon the ground, with such a grace, as if she were fallen out with the heavens, for suffering such an injury. The lookers on were so moved withal, as they misliked what themselves did, and yet still did what themselves misliked. For some glad to rid themselves of the dangerous annoyances of this siege, some willing to shorten the way to Amphialus’s succession, whereon they were dependants, some, and the greatest some, doing because others did, and suffering because none durst begin to hinder, did in this sort set their hands to this, in their own conscience, wicked enterprise.

But when this message was brought to Basilius, and that this pitiful preparation was a sufficient letter of credit for him to believe it, he called unto him his chief counsellors: among which, those he chiefly trusted were Philanax and Kalander, lately come to the camp at Basilius’s commandment, and in himself weary of his solitary life, wanting his son’s presence, and never having heard from his beloved guests since they departed from him. Now in this doubt what he should do, he willed Kalander to give him his advice: who spoke much to this purpose. “You command me, Sir,” said he, “to speak, rather because you will keep your wonted grave and noble manner, to do nothing of importance without counsel, than that in this cause, which indeed hath but one way, your mind needs to have any counsel: so that my speech shall rather be to confirm what you have already determined, than to argue against any possibility of other determination. For what sophistical scholar can find any question in this, whether you will have your incomparable daughters live or die? whether since you be here to cause their deliverance, you will make your being here the cause of their destruction? for nothing can be more insensible than to think what one doth, and to forget the end why it is done. Do therefore as I am sure you mean to do, remove the siege, and after seek by practice, or other gentle means, to recover that which by force you cannot: and therefore is indeed, when it pleaseth you, more counsel to be taken. Once, in extremities the winning of time is the purchase of life, and worse by no means than their deaths can befall unto you. A man might use more words, if it were to any purpose to gild gold, or that I had any cause to doubt of your mind: but you are wise, and are a father.” He said no more, for he durst not attempt to persuade the marrying of his daughter to Amphialus, but left that to bring in at another consultation. But Basilius made sign to Philanax, who standing a while in a maze as inwardly perplexed, at last thus delivered his opinion.

“If ever I could wish my faith untried, and my counsel untrusted, it should be at this time, when in truth I must confess I would be {390} content to purchase silence with discredit. But since you command, I obey: only let me say thus much, that I obey not to these excellent ladies’ father, but to my prince: and a prince it is to whom I give counsel. Therefore as to a prince I say, that the grave, and, I well know, true-minded counsel of my Lord Kalander had come in good time when you first took arms, before all your subjects got notice of your intention, before so much blood was spent, and before they were driven to seek this shift for their last remedy. But if now, this force you away, why did you take arms, since you might be sure when ever they were in extremity they would have recourse to this threatening? and for a wise man to take in hand that which his enemy may with a word overthrow, hath in my conceit great incongruity, and as great, not to forethink what his enemy in reason will do. But they threaten they will kill your daughters. What if they promised you, if you removed your siege, they would honourably send home your daughters? would you be angry at their promises? truly no more ought you to be terrified by their threatenings. For yet of the two, promise binds faith more than threatening. But indeed a prince of judgment ought not to consider what his enemies promise, or threaten, but what the promisers and threateners in reason will do; and the nearest conjecture thereunto, is what is best for their own behoof to do. They threaten, if you remove not, they will kill your daughters: and if you do remove, what surety have you but that they will kill them? since if the purpose be to cut off all impediments of Amphialus’s ambition, the same cause will continue when you are away; and so much the more encouraged, as the revenging power is absent, and they have the more opportunity to draw their factious friends about them; but if it be for their security only, the same cause will bring forth the same effects: and for their security they will preserve them. But it may be said, no man knows what desperate folks will do; it is true, and as true that no reason nor policy can prevent what desperate folks will do: and therefore they are among those dangers, which wisdom is not to reckon. Only let it suffice to take away their despair, which may be by granting pardon for what is past; so that the ladies may be freely delivered. And let them that are your subjects trust you that are their prince; do not you subject yourself to trust them, who are so untrusty as to be manifest traitors. For if they find you so base-minded, as by their threatening to remove your force, what indignity is it, that they would not bring you unto still by the same threatening? since then if love stir them, love will keep them from murdering what they love: and if ambition provoke them, ambitious they will be when you are away, as well as while you are here: take not away your force, which bars not the one, and bridles the {391} other. For as for their shows and words, they are but fear-babes, not worthy once to move a worthy man’s conceit, which must still consider what in reason they are like to do. Their despair, I grant, you shall do well to prevent: which as it is the last of all resolutions, so no man falls into it, while so good a way as you may offer, is open unto them. In sum, you are a prince, and a father of people, who ought with the eye of wisdom, the hand of fortitude, and the heart of justice, to set down all private conceits, in comparison of what for the public is profitable.”

He would have proceeded on, when Gynecia came running in amazed for her daughter Pamela, but mad for Zelmane: and falling at Basilius’s feet, besought him to make no delay, using such gestures of compassion instead of stopped words, that Basilius, otherwise enough tender-minded, easily granted to raise the siege, which he saw dangerous to his daughters; but indeed more careful for Zelmane, by whose besieged person the poor old man was straightly besieged: so as to rid him of the famine of his mind, he went in speed away, discharging his soldiers: only leaving the authority, as before, in Philanax’s hands, he himself went with Gynecia to a strong castle of his, where he took counsel how first to deliver Zelmane, whom he called the poor stranger, as though only law of hospitality moved him; and for that purpose sent divers messengers to traffic with Cecropia.

But she by this means rid of the present danger of the siege, desiring Zoilus and Lycurgus to take the care, till their brother recovered, of revictualling and furnishing the city, both with men and what else wanted, against any new occasion should urge them, she herself disdaining to hearken to Basilius, without he would grant his daughter in marriage to her son, which by no means he would be brought unto, bent all the sharpness of her malicious wit, how to bring a comfortable grant to her son, whereupon she well found no less than his life depended. Therefore for a while she attempted all means of eloquent praying, and flattering persuasions, mingling sometimes gifts, sometimes threatenings, as she had cause to hope, that either open force or undermining would best win the castle of their resolution. And ever as much as she did to Philoclea, so much did she to Pamela, though in manner sometimes differing, as she found fit to level at the one’s noble height, and the other’s sweet lowliness. For though she knew her son’s heart had wholly given itself to Philoclea, yet seeing the equal gifts in Pamela, she hoped a fair grant would recover the sorrow of a fair refusal; cruelly intending the present impoisoning the one, as soon as the other’s affection were purchased.

But in vain were all her vain oratory employed. Pamela’s determination was built upon so brave a rock that no shot of hers {392} could reach unto it: and Philoclea, though humbly seated, was so environed with sweet rivers of clear virtue, as could neither be battered nor undermined: her witty persuasions had wise answers; her eloquence recompensed with sweetness; her threatenings repelled with disdain in the one, and patience in the other; her gifts either not accepted, or accepted to obey, but not to bind. So as Cecropia in nature violent, cruel, because ambitious; hateful, for old rooted grudge to their mother, and now spiteful, because she could not prevail with girls, as she counted them: lastly, drawn on by her love to her son, and held up by a tyrannical authority, forthwith followed the bias of her own crooked disposition, and doubling and redoubling her threatenings, fell to confirm some of her threatened effects; first withdrawing all comfort both of servants and service from them. But that these excellent ladies had been used unto, even at home, and then found in themselves how much good the hardness of education doth to the resistance of misery. Then dishonourably using them both in diet and lodging, by a contempt to pull down their thoughts to yielding. But as before, the consideration of a prison had disgraced all ornaments, so now the same consideration made them attend all diseasefulness. Then still as she found those not prevail, would she go forward with giving them terrors, sometimes with noise of horror, sometimes with sudden frightings in the night, when the solitary darkness thereof might easier astonish the disarmed senses. But as all virtue and love resisted, strengthened one by the other, when each found itself over vehemently assaulted; Cecropia still sweetening her fierceness with fair promises, if they would promise fair, that feeling evil, and seeing a way far better, their minds might the sooner be mollified. But they that could not taste her behaviour, when it was pleasing indeed, could worse now, when they had lost all taste by her injuries.

She resolving all extremities rather than fail of conquest, pursued on her rugged way; letting no day pass without new and new perplexing the poor ladies’ minds, and troubling their bodies; and still swelling the more she was stopped, and growing hot with her own doings; at length abominable rage carried her to absolute tyrannies; so that taking with her certain old women, of wicked dispositions, and apt for envy’s sake to be cruel to youth and beauty, with a countenance impoisoned with malice, flew to the sweet Philoclea, as if so many kites should come about a white dove, and matching violent gestures with mischievous threatenings, she having a rod in her hand, like a fury that should carry wood to the burning of Diana’s temple, fell to scourge that most beautiful body: love in vain holding the shield of beauty against her blind {393} cruelty. The sun drew clouds up to hide his face from so pitiful a sight, and the very stone wall did yield drops of sweat for agony of such a mischief: each senseless thing had sense of pity, only they that had sense were senseless. Virtue rarely found her worldly weakness more, than by the oppression of that day: and weeping Cupid told his weeping mother, that he was sorry he was not deaf as well as blind, that he might never know so lamentable a work. Philoclea, with tearful eyes and sobbing breast, as soon as her weariness rather than compassion gave her respite, kneeled down to Cecropia, and making pity in her face honourable, and torment delightful, besought her since she hated her, for what cause she took God to witness she knew not, that she would at once take away her life, and not please herself with the tormenting of a poor gentlewoman. “If,” said she, “the common course of humanity cannot move you, nor the having me in your own walls cannot claim pity, nor womanly mercy, nor near alliance, nor remembrance, how miserable soever now, that I am a prince’s daughter, yet let the love, you have often told me, your son bears me, so much procure, that for his sake one death may be thought enough for me. I have not lived so many years but that one death may be able to conclude them. Neither have my faults I hope, been so many, but that one death may satisfy them. It is no great suit to an enemy, when but death is desired. I crave but that. As for the granting your request, know for certain you lose your labours, being every day further off minded from becoming his wife, who useth me like a slave.”

But that, instead of getting grace, renewed again Cecropia’s fury; so that, excellent creature, she was newly again tormented by these hellish monsters: Cecropia using no other words, but that she was a proud and ungrateful wench, and that she would teach her to know her own good, since of herself she would not conceive it. So that with silence and patience (like a fair gorgeous armour, hammered upon by an ill-favoured smith) she abode her pitiless dealing with her; till rather reserving her for more, than meaning to end, they left her to an uncomfortable leisure, to consider with herself her fortune; both helpless, herself being a prisoner; and hopeless, since Zelmane was a prisoner; who therein only was short of the bottom of misery, that she knew not how unworthily her angel, by these devils, were abused: but wanted, God wot, no stings of grief when those words did but strike upon her heart, that Philoclea was a captive, and she not able to succour her. For well she knew the confidence Philoclea had in her, and well she knew Philoclea had cause to have confidence, and all trodden under foot by the wheel of senseless fortune. Yet if there be that imperious power in the soul, that {394} it can deliver knowledge to another without bodily organs; so vehement were the working of their spirits, that one met with the other, though themselves perceived it not, but only thought it to be the doubling of their own loving fancies. And that was the only worldly thing whereon Philoclea rested her mind, that she knew she should die beloved of Zelmane, and would die rather than to be false to Zelmane. And so this most dainty nymph, easing the pain of her mind with thinking of another’s pain; and almost forgetting the pain of her body, through the pain of her mind, she wasted even longing for the conclusion of her tedious tragedy.

But for a while she was unvisited, Cecropia employing her time in using the like cruelty upon Pamela, her heart growing not only to desire the fruit of punishing them, but even to delight in the punishing them. But if ever the beams of perfection shined through the clouds of affliction, if ever virtue took a body to show his (else-unconceivable) beauty, it was in Pamela. For when reason taught her there was no resistance, for to just resistance first her heart was inclined, then with so heavenly a quietness, and so graceful a calmness, did she suffer the divers kinds of torments she used to her, that while they vexed her fair body, it seemed that she rather directed than obeyed the vexation. And when Cecropia ended, and asked whether her heart would yield, she a little smiled, but such a smiling as showed no love, and yet could not but be lovely. “And then, beastly woman,” said she, “follow on, do what thou wilt and canst upon me: for I know thy power is not unlimited. Thou mayest well wreck this silly body, but thou canst never overthrow. For my part I will not do thee the pleasure to desire death of thee: but assure thyself, both my life and death shall triumph with honour, laying shame upon thy detestable tyranny.”

And so, in effect, conquering their doing with her suffering, while Cecropia tried as many sorts of pains, that might rather vex them than spoil them (for that she would not do while she was in any hope to win either of them for her son) Pamela remained almost as much content with trial in herself, what virtue could do, as grieved with the misery wherein she found herself plunged; only sometimes her thoughts softened in her, when with open wings they flew to Musidorus. For then she would think with herself, how grievously Musidorus would take this her misery; and she that wept not for herself, wept yet Musidorus’s tears which he would weep for her. For gentle love did easier yield to lamentation, than the constancy of virtue would else admit. Then would she remember the case wherein she had left her poor shepherd, and she that wished death for herself, feared death for him; and she that condemned in herself the feebleness of sorrow, {395} yet thought it great reason to be sorry for his sorrow: and she that long had prayed for the virtuous joining themselves together, now thinking to die herself, heartily prayed that long time their fortunes might be separated. “Live long, my Musidorus,” would she say, “and let my name live in thy mouth, in thy heart my memory. Live long, that thou mayest love long the chaste love of thy dead Pamela.” Then she would wish to herself that no other woman might ever possess his heart: and yet scarcely the wish was made a wish, when herself would find fault with it, as being too unjust that so excellent a man should be banished from the comfort of life. Then would she fortify her resolution, with bethinking the worst, taking the counsel of virtue, and comfort of love.

So these diamonds of the world, whom nature had made to be preciously set in the eyes of men, to be the chief works of her workmanship, the chief ornaments of the world, and princesses of felicity, by rebellious injury were brought to the uttermost distress that an enemy’s heart could wish, or a woman’s spite invent: Cecropia daily in one or other sort punishing them, still with her evil torments giving them fear of worse, making the fear itself the sorest torment of all, that in the end, weary of their bodies, they should be content to bestow them at her appointment.

But, as in labour, the more one doth exercise it, the more by the doing one is enabled to do, strength growing upon the work; so that what at first would have seemed impossible, after grows easy; so these princesses, second to none, and far from any second, only to be matched by themselves, with the use of suffering, their minds got the habit of suffering so that all fears and terrors were to them but summons to a battle, whereof they knew beforehand they should be victorious, and which in the suffering was painful, being suffered was a trophy to itself; whereby Cecropia found herself still further off: for whereat first she might perchance have persuaded them to have visited her son, and have given him some comfort in his sickness, drawing near to the confines of death’s kingdom, now they protested that they would never otherwise speak to him than as to the enemy of most unjust cruelty towards them, that any time or place could ever make them know.

This made the poison swell in her cankered breast, perceiving that, as in water, the more she grasped the less she held; but yet now having run so long the way of rigour, it was too late in reason, and too contrary to her passion to return to a course of meekness. And therefore, taking counsel of one of her old associates (who so far excelled in wickedness, as that she had not only lost all feeling of conscience, but had gotten a very glory in evil) in the end they determined, that beating, and other such sharp dealing, did not so {396} much pull down a woman’s heart as it bred anger, and that nothing was more enemy to yielding than anger; making their tender hearts take on the armour of obstinacy: for thus did their wicked minds, blind to the light of virtue, and owly-eyed in the night of wickedness, interpret it; and that therefore was no more to be tried. And for fear of death (which no question would do most with them) they had been so often threatened, as they began to be familiarly acquainted with it, and learned to esteem threatening words to be but words. Therefore the last, but the best way now was, that the one seeing indeed the other’s death, should perceive there was no dallying meant: and then there was no doubt, that a woman’s soul would do so much, rather than leave so beautiful a body.

This being concluded, Cecropia went to Philoclea and told her that now she was to come to the last part of the play, for her part though she found her hard-hearted obstinacy such that neither the sweetness of loving means, nor the force of hard means could prevail with her, yet before she would pass to a further degree of extremity, she had sought to win her sister; in hopes that her son might be in time satisfied with the love of so fair a lady; but finding her also rather more than less wilful, she was now minded that one of their deaths should serve for an example to the other, that despising worthy folks, was more hurtful to the despiser than the despised: that yet because her son especially affected her, and that in her own self she was more inclinable to pity her than she had deserved, she would begin with her sister, who that afternoon should have her head cut off before her face; if in the meantime one of them did not pull out their ill-wrought stitches of unkindness, she bade her look for no other, nor longer time than she told her. There was no assault given to the sweet Philoclea’s mind, that entered so far, as this: for where to all pains and dangers of herself, foresight, with his lieutenant resolution, had made ready defence, now with the love she bare her sister, she was driven to a stay, before she determined: but long she stayed not, before this reason did shine unto her, that since in herself she preferred death before such a base servitude, love did teach her to wish the same to her sister. Therefore crossing her arms, and looking sideward upon the ground, “Do what you will,” said she, “with us: for my part heaven shall melt before I be removed. But if you will follow my counsel, for your own sake (for as for prayers for my sake I have felt how little they prevail) let my death first serve for example to win her, who perchance is not so resolved against Amphialus, and so shall you not only justly punish me, who indeed do hate both you and your son, but, if that may move you, you shall do more virtuously in preserving one most worthy of life, and {397} killing another most desirous of death: lastly, in winning her, instead of peevish unhappy creature that I am, you shall bless your son with the most excellent woman in all praiseworthy things, that the world holdeth.” But Cecropia, who had already set down to herself what she would do, both with bitter terms and countenance, told her, that she should not need to woo death over-eagerly: for if her sister going before her did not teach her wit, herself should quickly follow.

For since they were not to be gotten, there was no way for her son’s quiet, but to know that they were past getting. And so since no entreating, nor threatening might prevail, she bade her prepare her eyes for a new play, which she should see within a few hours in the hall of that castle.

A place indeed over-fit for so unfit a matter: for being so stately made, that the bottom of it being even with the ground, the roof reached as high as any part of the castle, at either end it had convenient lodgings. In the one end was, one storey from the ground, Philoclea’s abode; in the other of even height, Pamela’s, and Zelmane’s in a chamber above her; but also vaulted of strong and thick built stone, as one could no way hear the other, each of these chambers had a little window to look into the hall, but because the sisters should not have so much comfort, as to look one to the other, there was, of the outsides, curtains drawn, which they could not reach with their hands, so barring the reach of their sight. But when the hour came that the tragedy should begin, and the curtains were withdrawn from before the windows of Zelmane and Philoclea: a sufficient challenge to call their eyes to defend themselves in such an encounter. And by and by came in at one end of the hall, with about a dozen armed soldiers, a lady, led by a couple, with her hands bound before her: from above her eyes to her lips muffled with a fair handkerchief, but from her mouth to her shoulders all bare: and so was led on to a scaffold raised a good deal from the floor, and all covered with crimson velvet. But neither Zelmane, nor Philoclea needed to be told who she was: for the apparel she wore, made them too well assured that it was the admirable Pamela. Whereunto the rare whiteness of her naked neck gave sufficient testimony to their astonished senses. But the fair lady being come to the scaffold, and then made to kneel down, and so left by her unkind supporters, as it seemed that she was about to speak somewhat (whereunto Philoclea, poor soul, earnestly listened, according to her speech, even minding to frame her mind, her heart never till then almost wavering to save her sister’s life) before the unfortunate lady could pronounce three words, the executioner cut off the one’s speech, and the other’s attention, with making his sword do his cruel office upon that {398} beautiful neck. Yet the pitiless sword had such pity of so precious an object, that at first it did but hit flat-long. But that little availed, since the lady falling down astonished withal, the cruel villain forced the sword with another blow, to divorce the fair marriage of the head and body.

And this was done so in an instant, that the very act did over-run Philoclea’s sorrow (sorrow not being able so quickly to thunderbolt her heart through her senses, but first only oppressed her with a storm of amazement) but when her eyes saw that they did see, as condemning themselves to have seen it, they became weary of their own power of seeing, and her soul then drinking up woe with great draughts, she fell down to deadly trances: but her waiting jailors with cruel pity brought loathed life unto her; which yet many times took his leave, as though he would indeed depart: but when he was stayed by force, he kept with him deadly sorrow, which thus exercised her mourning speech: “Pamela, my sister, my sister, Pamela, woe is me for thee, I would I had died for thee. Pamela never more shall I see thee; never more shall I enjoy thy sweet company, and wise counsel. Alas! thou art gone to a beautiful heaven, and hast left me here, who have nothing good in me, but that I did ever love thee, and ever will lament thee. Let this day be noted of all virtuous folks for most unfortunate: let it never be mentioned but among curses, and cursed be they that did this mischief, and most cursed be mine eyes that beheld it. Sweet Pamela, that head is stricken off, where only wisdom might be spoken withal; that body is destroyed, which was the living book of virtue. Dear Pamela, how hast thou left me to all wretchedness and misery? yet while thou livedst, in thee I breathed, of thee I hoped. O Pamela, how much did I for thy excellency honour thee more than my mother, and love thee more than myself! never more shall I lie with thee; never more shall we bathe in the pleasant river together; never more shall I see thee in thy shepherds’ apparel. But thou art gone, and where am I? Pamela is dead, and live I? O my God!” And with that she fell again in a swoon, so that it was a great while before they could bring her to herself again; but being come to herself. “Alas!” said she, “unkind woman, since you have given me so many deaths, torment me not now with life: for God’s sake let me go, and excuse your hands of more blood. Let me follow my Pamela, whom ever I sought to follow. Alas! Pamela, they will not let me come to thee. But if they keep promise I shall tread thine own steps after thee. For to what am I born, miserable soul! but to be most unhappy in myself, and yet more unhappy in others? But O that a thousand more miseries had chanced unto me, so thou hadst not died: Pamela, my sister Pamela.” And so like a {399} lamentable Philomela, complained she the horrible wrong done to her sister, which if it stirred not in the wickedly closed minds of her tormentors, a pity of her sorrow, yet bred it a weariness of her sorrow: so that only leaving one to prevent any harm she should do herself, the rest went away, consulting again with Cecropia, how to make profit of this their late bloody act.

In the end, that woman that used most to keep company with Zelmane, told Cecropia that she found by many more sensible proofs in Zelmane, that there was never woman so loved another, as she loved Philoclea: which was the cause that she, further than the commandment of Cecropia, had caused Zelmane’s curtains to be also drawn: because having the same spectacle that Philoclea had, she might stand in the greater fear for her, whom she loved so well: and that indeed she had hit the needle in that device: for never saw she creature so astonished as Zelmane, exceeding sorrow for Pamela, but exceedingly exceeding that exceedingness in fear for Philoclea. Therefore her advice was, she should cause Zelmane to come and speak with Philoclea. For there being such vehemency of friendship between them, it was most likely both to move Zelmane to persuade, and Philoclea to be persuaded. Cecropia liked well of the counsel, and gave order to the same woman to go deal therein with Zelmane, and to assure her with oath, that Cecropia was determined Philoclea should pass the same way that Pamela had done, without she did yield to satisfy the extremity of her son’s affection: which the woman did, adding thereunto many, as she thought, good reasons to make Zelmane think Amphialus a fit match for Philoclea.

But Zelmane (who had from time to time understood the cruel dealing they had used to the sisters, and now had her own eyes wounded with the sight of one’s death) was so confused withal (her courage still rebelling against her wit, desiring still with force to do impossible matters) that as her desire was stopped with power, so her conceit was darkened with a mist of desire. For blind love, and invincible valour still would cry out, that it could not be, Philoclea should be in so miserable estate, and she not relieve her: and so while she hailed her wit to her courage, she drew it from his own limits. But now Philoclea’s death, a word able to marshal all his thoughts in order, being come to so short a point, either with small delay to be suffered, or by the giving herself to another to be prevented, she was driven to think and to desire some leisure of thinking, which the woman granted for that night unto her. A night that was not half so black, as her mind; nor half so silent, as was fit for her musing thoughts. At last he that would fain have desperately lost a thousand lives for her sake, could not find in his heart, that she should lose any life for her own sake; and he that {400} despised his own death in respect of honour, yet could well nigh dispense with honour itself in respect of Philoclea’s death; for once the thought could not enter into his heart, nor the breath issue out of his mouth, which could consent to Philoclea’s death for any bargain. Then how to prevent the next degree to death, which was her being possessed by another, was the point of his mind’s labour: and in that he found no other way but that Philoclea should pretend a yielding unto Cecropia’s request; and so by speaking with Amphialus, and making fair, but delaying, promises, procure liberty for Zelmane; who only wished but to come by a sword, not doubting then to destroy them all, and deliver Philoclea: so little did both the men, and their forces seem in her eyes, looking down upon them from the high top of affection’s tower.

With that mind therefore, but first well bound, she was brought to Philoclea, having already plotted out in her conceit how she should deal with her: and so came she with heart and eyes, which did each sacrifice other to love upon the altar of sorrow: and there had she the pleasing displeasing sight of Philoclea: Philoclea, whom already the extreme sense of sorrow had brought to a dullness therein, her face not without tokens that beauty had been by many miseries cruelly battered, and yet showed it most the perfection of that beauty, which could remain unoverthrown by such enemies. But when Zelmane was set down by her, and the woman gone away (because she might be the better persuaded when nobody was by, that had heard her say she would not be persuaded) then began first the eyes to speak, and the hearts to cry out: sorrow a while would needs speak his own language, without using their tongues to be his interpreters. At last Zelmane broke silence, but spoke with the only eloquence of amazement: for all her long methodised oration was inherited only by such kind of speeches. “Dear lady, in extreme necessities we must not. But alas! unfortunate wretch that I am that I live to see this day. And I take heaven and earth to witness, that nothing,” and with that her breast swelled so with spite and grief, that her breath had not leisure to turn itself into words. But the sweet Philoclea that had already died in Pamela, and of the other side had the heaviness of her heart something quickened in the most beloved sight of Zelmane, guessed somewhat at Zelmane’s mind, and therefore spoke unto her in this sort: “My Pyrocles,” said she, “I know this exceeding comfort of your presence, is not brought unto me for any goodwill that is owed unto me: but, as I suppose, to make you persuade me to save my life with the ransom of mine honour: although nobody should be so unfit a pleader in that cause as yourself, yet perchance you would have me live.” “Your honour? {401} God forbid,” said Zelmane, “that ever, for any cause, I should yield to any touch of it. But a while to pretend some affection, till time, or my liberty might work something for your service, this if my astonished senses would give me leave, I would fain have persuaded you.”

“To what purpose, my Pyrocles?” said Philoclea, “of a miserable time what gain is there? hath Pamela’s example wrought no more in me? is a captive life so much worth? can it ever go out of these lips, that I love any other but Pyrocles? shall my tongue be so false a traitor to my heart, as to say I love any other but Pyrocles? and why should I do all this to live? O Pamela, sister Pamela, why should I live? only for thy sake, Pyrocles, I would live: but to thee I know too well I shall not live; and if not to thee hath thy love so base allay, my Pyrocles, as to wish me to live? for dissimulation, my Pyrocles, my simplicity is such, that I have hardly been able to keep a straight way, what shall I do in a crooked? But in this case there is no mean of dissimulation, not for the cunningest: present answer is required, and present performance upon the answer. Art thou so terrible, O death? no, my Pyrocles; and for that I do thank thee, and in my soul thank thee: for I confess the love of thee is herein my chiefest virtue. Trouble me not therefore, dear Pyrocles, nor double not my death by tormenting my resolution: since I cannot live with thee, I will die for thee. Only remember me, dear Pyrocles, and love the remembrance of me: and if I may crave so much of thee, let me be thy last love; for though I be not worthy of thee, who indeed art the worthiest creature living, yet remember that my love was a worthy love.”

But Pyrocles was so overcome with sorrow (which wisdom and virtue made just in so excellent a lady’s case, full of so excellent kindness) that words were ashamed to come forth, knowing how weak they were to express his mind, and her merit: and therefore so stayed in a deadly silence, forsaken of hope, and forsaking comfort; till the appointed guardians came in, to see the fruits of Zelmane’s labour: and then Zelmane warned by their presence, fell again to persuade, though scarcely herself could tell what; but in sum, desirous of delays. But Philoclea, sweetly continuing constant, and in the end, punishing her importunity with silence, Zelmane was fain to end. Yet craving another time’s conference, she obtained it, and divers others; till at the last Cecropia found it to no purpose, and therefore determined to follow her own way. Zelmane yet still desirous to win, by any means, respite, even wasted with sorrow and uncertain, whether in worse case in her presence, or absence, being able to do nothing for Philoclea’s succour, but by submitting the greatest courage of the earth to {402} fall at the feet of Cecropia, and crave stay of their sentence till the uttermost was seen what her persuasions might be.

Cecropia seemed much to be moved by her importunity, so as divers days were won of painful life to the excellent Philoclea; while Zelmane suffered some hope to cherish her mind, especially trusting upon the help of Musidorus, who, she knew, would not be idle in this matter; till one morning a noise awaked Zelmane, from whose over-watchful mind the tired body had stolen a little sleep: and straight with the first opening of her eyes, care taking his wonted place, she ran to the window which looked into the hall (for that way the noise guided her) and there might she see (the curtain being left open ever since the last execution) seven or eight persons in a cluster upon the scaffold: who by and by retiring themselves, nothing was to be seen thereupon, but a basin of gold pitifully enamelled with blood, and in the midst of it, the head of the most beautiful Philoclea. The horribleness of the mischief was such, that Pyrocles could not at first believe his own senses, but bent his woeful eyes to discern it better; where too well he might see it was Philoclea’s self, having no veil, but beauty over her face, which still appeared to be alive, so did these eyes shine, even as they were wont, and they were wont more than any other: and sometimes as they moved, it might well make the beholder think, that death therein had borrowed her beauty, and not they any way disgraced by death, so sweet and piercing a grace they carried with them.

It was not a pity, it was not an amazement, it was not a sorrow which then laid hold on Pyrocles, but a wild fury of desperate agony: so that he cried out, “O tyrant heaven, traitor earth, blind providence, no justice, how is this done? how is this suffered? hath this world a government? if it have, let it pour out all his mischiefs upon me, and see whether it have power to make me more wretched than I am. Did she excel for this? have I prayed for this? abominable hand that did it; detestable devil that commanded it; cursed light that beheld it; and if the light be cursed, what are then mine eyes that have seen it? and have I seen Philoclea dead, and do I live? and do I live not to help her, but to talk of her? and stand I still talking?” and with that, carried by the madness of anguish, not having a readier way to kill himself, he ran as hard as ever he could with his head against the wall, with intention to brain himself; but the haste to do it made the doing the slower. For as he came to give the blow, his foot tripped, so that it came not with the full force: yet forcible enough to strike him down, and withal to deprive him of his senses, so that he lay a while comforted by the hurt, in that he felt not his discomfort.

And when he came again to himself, he heard, or he thought he heard a voice, which cried, “Revenge, Revenge,” unto him: whether indeed it were his good angel which used that voice to stay him from unnatural murdering of himself, or that his wandering spirits lighted upon that conceit, and by their weakness, subject to apprehensions, supposed they heard it. But that indeed helped with virtue and her valiant servant anger, stopped him from present destroying of himself; yielding in reason and manhood, first to destroy man, woman, and child, that were any way of kin to them that were accessory to this cruelty; then to raze the castle, and to build a sumptuous monument for her sister, and a most sumptuous one for herself, and then himself to die upon her tomb. This determining in himself to do, and to seek all means how, for that purpose, to get out of prison, he was content a while to bear the thirst of death: and yet went he again to the window, to kiss the beloved head with his eyes; but there saw he nothing but the scaffold, all covered over with scarlet, and nothing but solitary silence to mourn this mischief. But then, sorrow having dispersed itself from his heart into his noble parts, it proclaimed his authority in cries and tears, nor with a more gentle dolefulness could pour out his inward evil.

“Alas!” said he, “is that head taken away too, so soon from my eyes? What, mine eyes, perhaps they envy the excellency of your sorrow? indeed, there is nothing now left to become the eyes of all mankind, but tears; and woe be to me, if any exceed me in woefulness. I do conjure you all my senses, to accept no object but of sorrow, be ashamed, nay abhor to think of comfort. Unhappy eyes, you have seen too much, that ever the light should be welcome to you: unhappy ears, you shall never hear the music of music in her voice: unhappy heart that hast lived to feel these pangs. Thou hast done thy worst, world, and cursed be thou, and cursed art thou, since to thine ownself thou hast done the worst thou couldst do. Exiled beauty, let only now thy beauty be blubbered faces. Widowed music, let now thy tunes be roarings and lamentations. Orphan virtue, get thee wings, and fly after her into heaven: here is no dwelling-place for thee. Why lived I, alas! alas, why loved I? to die wretched, and to be the example of heaven’s hate? and hate and spare not, for your worst blow is stricken. Sweet Philoclea, thou art gone, and hast carried with thee my love; and hast left thy love in me, and I wretched man do live; I live, to die continually, till thy revenge do give me leave to die, and then die I will, my Philoclea, my heart willingly makes this promise to itself. Surely he did not look on thee when he gave the cruel blow, for no eye could have abidden to see such beauty overthrown by such mischief. Alas! {404} why should they divide such a head from such a body? no other body is worthy of that head; no other head is worthy of that body: O yet if I had taken my last leave, if I might have taken a holy kiss from that dying mouth! where art thou hope, which promisest never to leave a man while he liveth? tell me, what canst thou hope for? nay tell me, what is there that I would willingly hope after? wishing power which is accounted infinite, what now is left to wish for; she is gone, and gone with her all my hope, all my wishing. Love be ashamed to be called love. Cruel hate, unspeakable hate is victorious over thee. Who is there now left that can justify thy tyranny, and give reason to thy passion? O cruel divorce of the sweetest marriage that ever was in nature: Philoclea is dead, and dead with her is all goodness, all sweetness, all excellency. Philoclea is dead, and yet life is not ashamed to continue upon the earth. Philoclea is dead: O deadly word, which containeth in itself the uttermost of all misfortunes. But happy word when thou shalt be said of me, and long it shall not be, before it be said.”

Then stopping his words with sighs, drowning his sighs in tears, and drying again his tears in rage, he would sit a while in a wandering muse, which represented nothing but vexations unto him; then throwing himself sometimes upon the floor, and sometimes upon the bed: then up again, till walking was wearisome, and rest loathsome: and so neither suffering food, nor sleep to help his afflicted nature, all that day and night he did nothing but weep Philoclea, sigh Philoclea, and cry out Philoclea; till as it happened (at that time upon his bed) toward the dawning of the day he heard one stir in his chamber, by the motion of garments: and with an angry voice asked who was there. “A poor gentlewoman, answered the party, that wishes long life unto you.” “And I soon death to you,” said he, “for the horrible curse you have given me.” “Certainly,” said she, “an unkind answer, and far unworthy the excellency of your mind, but not unsuitable to the rest of your behaviour. For most part of this night I have heard you (being let into your chamber, you never perceiving it, so was your mind estranged from your senses) and have heard nothing of Zelmane, in Zelmane, nothing but weak wailing, fitter for some nurse of a village, than so famous a creature as you are.” “O God,” cried out Pyrocles, “that thou wert a man that usest these words unto me. I tell thee I am sorry, I tell thee I will be sorry, in the despite of thee, and all them that would have me joyful.” “And yet,” replied she, “perchance Philoclea is not dead, whom you so much bemoan.” “I would we were both dead on that condition,” said Pyrocles. “See the folly of your passion,” said she, “as though you should be nearer to her, you being dead, {405} and she alive, than she being dead and you alive? and if she be dead, was she not born to die? what then do you cry out for? not for her, who must have died one time or other; but for some few years: so as it is time and this world, that seem so lovely things, and not Philoclea unto you.” “O noble sisters,” cried Pyrocles, “now you be gone, who were the only exalters of all womankind, what is left in that sex, but babbling and business?” “And truly,” said she, “I will yet a little longer trouble you.” “Nay, I pray you do,” said Pyrocles, “for I wish for nothing in my short life but mischiefs and cumbers: and I am content you shall be one of them.” “In truth,” said she, “you would think yourself a greatly privileged person, if since the strongest building, and lastingest monarchies are subject to end, only your Philoclea, because she is yours, should be exempted. But indeed you bemoan yourself who have lost a friend; you cannot her, who hath in one act both preserved her honour, and left the miseries of this world.” “O woman’s philosophy, childish folly,” said Pyrocles, “as though I do bemoan myself: I have not reason so to do, having lost more than any monarchy, nay then my life can be worth unto me.” “Alas!” said she, “comfort yourself; nature did not forget her skill, when she made them: and you shall find many their superiors, and perchance such, as when your eyes shall look abroad, yourself will like better.”

But that speech put all good manners out of the conceit of Pyrocles, insomuch, that leaping out of his bed, he ran to have stricken her; but coming near her (the morning then winning the field of darkness) he saw, or he thought he saw, indeed the very face of Philoclea; the same sweetness, the same grace, the same beauty: with which carried into a divine astonishment, he fell down at her feet. “Most blessed angel,” said he, “well hast thou done to take that shape, since thou wouldst submit thyself to mortal sense; for a more angelical form could not have been created for thee. Alas, even by that excellent beauty, so beloved of me, let it be lawful, for me to ask of thee, what is the cause that she, that heavenly creature, whose form you have taken, should by the heavens be destined to so unripe an end? why should injustice so prevail? why was she seen to the world so soon to be ravished from us? why was she not suffered to live, to teach the world perfection?” “Do not deceive thyself,” answered she, “I am no angel; I am Philoclea, the same Philoclea, so truly loving you, so truly beloved of you.” “If it be so,” said he, “that you are indeed the soul of Philoclea, you have done well to keep your own figure, for no heaven could have given you a better. Then alas! why have you taken the pains to leave your blissful seat to come to this place most wretched, to me, who am wretchedness itself, and not {406} rather obtain for me, that I might come where you are, there eternally to behold, and eternally to love your beauties? You know, I know, that I desire nothing but death, which I only stay to be justly revenged of your unjust murderers.” “Dear Pyrocles,” said she, “I am thy Philoclea, and as yet living: not murdered as you supposed, and therefore be comforted.” And with that gave him her hand. But the sweet touch of that hand seemed to his estrayed powers so heavenly a thing, that it rather for a while confirmed him in his former belief: till she with vehement protestations (and desire that it might be so, helping to persuade that it was so) brought him to yield; yet doubtfully to yield to this height of all comfort that Philoclea lived: which witnessing with tears of joy; “Alas!” said he, “how shall I believe mine eyes any more? or do you yet but appear thus unto me, to stay me from some desperate end? for alas, I saw the excellent Pamela beheaded, I saw your head, the head indeed, and chief part indeed of all nature’s works, standing in a dish of gold, too mean a shrine, God wot, for such a relic. How can this be, my only dear, and you live? Or if this be not so, how can I believe mine own senses? And if I cannot believe them, why should I believe these blessed tidings they bring me?”

“The truth is,” said she, “my Pyrocles, that neither I, as you find, nor yet my dear sister is dead: although the mischievously subtle Cecropia used slights to make either of us think so of other. For, having in vain attempted the farthest of her wicked eloquence to make either of us yield to her son: and seeing that neither it, accompanied with great flatteries and rich presents, could get any ground of us, nor yet the violent way she fell into, of cruelly tormenting our bodies, could prevail with us, at last she made either of us think the other dead, and so hoped to have wrested our minds to the forgetting of virtue: and first she gave to mine eyes the miserable spectacle of my sister’s, as I thought, death; but indeed it was not my sister, it was only Artesia, she who so cunningly brought us to this misery. Truly I am sorry for the poor gentlewoman, though justly she be punished for her double falsehood: but Artesia muffled so, that you could not easily discern her, and in my sister’s apparel, which they had taken from her under colour of giving her other, did they execute: and when I, for thy sake especially, dear Pyrocles, could by no force nor fear be one, they assayed the like with my sister, by bringing me down under the scaffold, and making me thrust my head up through a hole they had made therein, they did put about my neck a dish of gold, whereout they had beaten the bottom, so as having set blood in it, you saw how I played the part of death, God knows even willing to have done it in earnest, and so they had set me, that I {407} reached but on tiptoes to the ground, so as I scarcely could breathe, much less speak: and truly if they had kept me there any whit longer, they had strangled me, instead of beheading me: but when they took me away, and seeking to see their issue of this practice, they found my noble sister, for the dear love she vouchsafeth to bear me, so grieved withal, that she willed them to do their uttermost cruelty unto her: for she vowed never to receive sustenance of them that had been the causers of my murder: and finding both of us even given over, not likely to live many hours longer, and my sister Pamela rather worse than myself, the strength of her heart worse bearing those indignities, the good woman Cecropia, with the same pity as folks keep fowls, when they are not fat enough for their eating, made us know her deceit, and let us come one to another; with what joy you can well imagine, who I know feel the like, saving that we only thought ourselves reserved to miseries, and therefore fitter for condoling than congratulating. For my part I am fully persuaded it is but with a little respite, to have a more feeling sense of the torment she prepares for us. True it is, that one of my guardians would have me to believe that this proceeds from my gentle cousin Amphialus; who having heard some inkling that we were evil intreated, had called his mother to his bedside, from whence he never rose since his last combat, and besought and charged her, upon all the love she bore him, to use us with all kindness: vowing with all the imprecations he could imagine, that if ever he understood, for his sake, that I received further hurt than the want of liberty, he would not live an hour longer. And the good woman swore to me that he would kill his mother, if he knew how I had been dealt with, but that Cecropia keeps him from understanding things how they pass, only having heard a whispering, and myself named, he had (of abundance, forsooth, of honourable love) given this charge for us; whereupon this enlargement of mine was grown: for my part I know too well their cunning, who leave no money unoffered that may buy mine honour, to believe any word they say, but, my dear Pyrocles, even look for the worst, and prepare thyself for the same. Yet I must confess, I was content to rob from death, and borrow of my misery the sweet comfort of seeing my sweet sister, and most sweet comfort of thee my Pyrocles. And so having leave, I came stealing into your chamber: where, O Lord, what a joy it was unto me, to hear you solemnize the funerals of the poor Philoclea. That I myself might live to hear my death bewailed? And by whom? By my dear Pyrocles. That I saw death was not strong enough to divide thy love from me? O my Pyrocles, I am too well paid for my pains. I have suffered; joyful is my woe for so noble a cause; and welcome be all my miseries, since to thee I {408} am so welcome. Alas how I pitied to hear thy pity of me; and yet a great while I could not find in my heart to interrupt thee, but often had even pleasure to weep with thee: and so kindly came forth thy lamentations, that they forced me to lament too, as if indeed I had been a looker-on, to see poor Philoclea die. Till at last I spoke with you, to try whether I could remove thee from sorrow, till I had almost procured myself a beating.”

And with that she prettily smiled; which mingled with her tears; one could not tell whether it was a mourning pleasure, or a delightful sorrow: but like when a few April drops are scattered by a gentle Zephirus among fine coloured flowers. But Pyrocles, who had felt, with so small distance of time, in himself the overthrow both of hope and despair, knew not to what key he should frame his mind, either of joy or sorrow. But finding perfect reason in neither, suffered himself to be carried by the tide of his imagination, and his imaginations to be raised even by the sway which hearing or seeing might give unto them: he saw her alive, he was glad to see her alive; he saw her weep, he was sorry to see her weep; he heard her comfortable speeches, nothing more gladsome; he heard her prognosticating her own destruction, nothing more doleful. But when he had a little taken breath from the panting motion of such contraries in passions, he fell to consider with her of her present estate, but comforting her, that certainly the worst of this storm was past, since already they had done the worst, which man’s wit could imagine; and that if they had determined to have killed her, now they would have done it, and also earnestly counselling her, and enabling his counsels with vehement prayers, that she would so far second the hopes of Amphialus, as that she might but procure him liberty; promising then as much to her, as the liberality of loving courage durst promise to himself.

But who could lively describe the manner of these speeches, should paint out the lightsome colours of affection, shaded with the deepest shadows of sorrow, finding them between hope and fear, a kind of sweetness in tears; till Philoclea content to receive a kiss, and but a kiss of Pyrocles, sealed up his moving lips, and closed them up in comfort: and herself, for the passage was left between them open, went to her sister; with whom she had stayed but a while, fortifying one another while Philoclea tempered Pamela’s just disdain, and Pamela ennobled Philoclea’s sweet humbleness, when Amphialus came unto them: who never since he had heard Philoclea named, could be quiet in himself, although none of them about him (fearing more his mother’s violence than his power) would discover what had passed: and many messengers he sent to know her estate, which brought answer back, according as it pleased Cecropia to indite them, till his heart full of unfortunate {409} affection, more and more misgiving him, having impatiently borne the delay of the night’s unfitness, this morning he got up, and though full of wounds, which not without danger could suffer such exercise, he apparelled himself, and with the countenance that showed strength in nothing but in grief, he came where the sisters were, and weakly kneeling down, he besought them to pardon him: if they had not been used in that castle according to their worthiness, and his duty, beginning to excuse small matters, poor gentleman, not knowing in what sort they had been handled.

But Pamela’s high heart, having conceived mortal hatred for the injury offered to her and her sister, could scarcely abide his sight, much less hear out his excuses, but interrupted him with these words: “Traitor,” said she, “to thine own blood, and false to the profession of so much love as thou hast vowed, do not defile our ears with thy excuses, but pursue on thy cruelty, that thou and thy godly mother have used towards us: for my part, assure thyself, and so do I answer for my sister, whose mind I know, I do not more desire mine own safety than thy destruction.” Amazed with this speech, he turned his eye full of humble sorrowfulness, to Philoclea: “And is this, most excellent lady, your doom of me also.” She, sweet lady, sat weeping; for as her most noble kinsman she had ever favoured him, and loved his love, though she could not be in love with his person; and now partly unkindness of his wrong, partly pity of his case, made her sweet mind yield some tears before she could answer; and her answer was no other, but that she had the same cause as her sister had. He replied no further, but delivering from his heart two or three untaught sighs, rose, and with most low reverence went out of their chamber, and straight, by threatening torture, learned of one of the women in what terrible manner these princesses had been used. But when he heard it, crying out, “O God!” and then not able to say any more, for his speech went back to rebound woe upon his heart, he needed no judge to go upon him; for no man could ever think any other worthy of greater punishment than he thought himself. Full therefore of the horriblest despair, which a most guilty conscience could breed, with wild looks, promising some terrible issue, understanding his mother was upon the top of the leads, he caught one of his servant’s swords from him, and none of them daring to stay him, he went up, carried by fury instead of strength, where she was at that time, musing how to go through with this matter, and resolving to make much of her nieces in show, and secretly to impoison them; thinking since they were not to be won, her son’s love would no otherwise be mitigated.

But when she saw him come in with a sword drawn, and a look more terrible than the sword, she straight was stricken with the guiltiness of her own conscience: yet the well-known humbleness of her son somewhat animated her, till he coming near her, and crying to her, “Thou damnable creature, only fit to bring forth such a monster of unhappiness as I am;” she fearing he would have stricken her, though indeed he meant it not, but only intended to kill himself in her presence, went back so far, till ere she were aware, she overthrew herself from over the leads, to receive her death’s kiss at the ground: and yet was she not so happy as presently to die, but that she had time with hellish agony to see her son’s mischief, whom she loved so well, before her end, when she confessed, with most desperate but not repenting mind, the purpose she had to impoison the princesses, and would then have had them murdered. But everybody seeing, and glad to see her end, had left obedience to her tyranny.

And, if it could be, her ruin increased woe in the noble heart of Amphialus, who when he saw her fall, had his own rage stayed a little with the suddenness of her destruction: “And was I not miserable enough before,” said he, “but that before my end I must be the death of my mother? Who, how wicked soever, yet I would she had received her punishment by some other: O Amphialus, wretched Amphialus, thou hast lived to be the death of thy most dear companion and friend Philoxenus, and of his father, thy most careful foster-father. Thou hast lived to kill a lady with thine own hands, and so excellent and virtuous a lady as the fair Parthenia was; thou hast lived to see thy faithful Ismenus slain in succouring thee, and thou not able to defend him; thou hast lived to show thyself such a coward, as that one unknown knight could overcome thee in thy lady’s presence: thou hast lived to bear arms against thy rightful prince, thine own uncle: thou hast lived to be accounted, and justly accounted a traitor, by the most excellent persons that this world holdeth: thou hast lived to be the death of her that gave thee life. But ah wretched Amphialus, thou hast lived for thy sake, and by thy authority, to have Philoclea tormented. O heavens, in Amphialus’s castle, where Amphialus commanded, tormented, tormented. Torment of my soul, Philoclea tormented, and thou hast had such comfort in thy life, as to live all this while. Perchance this hand, used only to mischievous acts, thinks it were too good a deed to kill me: or else filthy hand, only worthy to kill women, thou art afraid to strike a man. Fear not cowardly hand, for thou shalt kill but a cowardly traitor: and do it gladly, for thou shalt kill him whom Philoclea hateth.” With that furiously he tore open his doublet, and setting the pommel of the sword to the ground, and the point to his breast, he fell upon {411} it. But the sword more merciful than he to himself, with the slipping of the pommel the point swerved, and razed him but upon the side: yet with the fall his other wounds opened so that he bled in such extremity, that Charon’s boat might very well be carried in that flood: which yet he sought so hasten by this means. As he opened his doublet, and fell, there fell out Philoclea’s knives which Cecropia at the first had taken from her, and delivered to her son; and he had ever worn them next his heart, as the only relic he had of his saint: now seeing them by him, his sword being so, as weakness could not well draw it out from his doublet, he took the knives, and pulling one of them out, and many times kissing it, and then, first with the passions of kindness and unkindness melting in tears. “O dear knives, you are come in good time to revenge the wrong I have done you all this while, in keeping you from her blessed side; and wearing you without your mistress’s leave. Alas! be witness with me, yet before I die, and well you may, for you have lain next my heart, that but my consent, your excellent mistress should have had as much honour as this poor place could have brought forth for so high an excellency; and now I am condemned to die by her mouth. Alas! other, far other hope would my desire often have given me; but other event it hath pleased her to lay upon me. Ah Philoclea,” with that his tears gushed out as though they would strive to overflow his blood, “I would yet thou knowest how I love thee. Unworthy I am, unhappy I am, false I am; but to thee alas! I am not false. But what a traitor am I, any way to excuse him, whom she condemneth? since there is nothing left me wherein I may do her service, but in punishing him who hath so offended her. Dear knife, then do your noble mistress’s commandment.” With that, he stabbed himself into divers places of his breast and throat, until these wounds, with the old, freshly bleeding, brought him to the senseless gate of death. By which time, his servants, having, with fear of his fury, abstained a while from coming unto him, one of them, preferring dutiful affection before fearful duty, came in and there found him swimming in his own blood, giving a pitiful spectacle, where the conquest was the conqueror’s overthrow, and self-ruin the only triumph of a battle, fought between him and himself. The time full of danger, the person full of worthiness, the manner full of horror, did greatly astonish all the beholders: so as by and by all the town was full of it, and they of all ages came running up to see the beloved body; everybody thinking their safety bled in his wounds, and their honour died in his destruction.

But when it came, and quickly it came to the ears of his proud friend Anaxius, who by that time was grown well of his wound, but never had come abroad, disdaining to abase himself to the {412} company of any other but of Amphialus, he was exceedingly vexed either with kindness or, if a proud heart be not capable thereof, with disdain, that he, who had the honour to be called the friend of Anaxius, should come to such an unexpected ruin. Therefore then coming abroad, with a face red in anger, and engrained in pride, with lids raised, and eyes levelled from top to toe of them that met him, treading as though he thought to make the earth shake under him, with his hand upon his sword; short speeches, and disdainful answers, giving straight order to his two brothers, to go take the oath of obedience, in his name, of all the soldiers and citizens in the town: and withal to swear them to revenge the death of Amphialus upon Basilius; he himself went to see him, calling for all the surgeons and physicians there, spending some time in viewing the body, and threatening them all to be hanged, if they did not heal him. But they, taking view of his wounds, and falling down at Anaxius’s feet, assured him that they were mortal, and no possible means to keep him above two days alive: and he stood partly in doubt, to kill, or save them, between his own fury, and their humbleness. But vowing with his own hands to kill the two sisters, as causers of his friend’s death: when his brothers came to him, and told him they had done his commandment, in having received the oath of allegiance, with no great difficulties, the most part terrified by their valour, and force of their servants; and many that had been forward actors in the rebellion, willing to do anything, rather than come under the subjection of Basilius again; and such few as durst gainsay, being cut off by present slaughter.

But withal, as the chief matter of their coming to him, they told Anaxius, that the fair queen Helen was come, with an honourable retinue, to the town: humbly desiring leave to see Amphialus, whom she had sought in many places of the world; and lastly, being returned into her own country, she heard together of the late siege, and of his combat with the strange knight, who had dangerously hurt him. Whereupon full of loving care (which she was content even to publish to the world, how ungratefully soever he dealt with her) she had gotten leave of Basilius, to come by his frontiers, to carry away Amphialus with her, to the excellentest surgeon then known, whom she had in her country, but so old, as not able to travel: but had given her sovereign anointments, to preserve his body withal, till he might be brought unto him: and that Basilius had granted leave; either natural kindness prevailing over all the offences done, or rather glad to make any passage which might lead him out of his country, and from his daughters. This discourse Lycurgus understanding of Helen, delivered to his brother, with her vehement desire to see the {413} body, and take her last farewell of him. Anaxius, though he were fallen out with all womankind, in respect of the hate he bore the sisters, whom he accounted murderers of Amphialus, yet at his brother’s request, granted her leave. And she, poor lady, with grievous expectation, and languishing desire, carried her faint legs to the place where he lay, either not breathing, or in all appearance breathing nothing but death.

In which piteous plight when she saw him, though sorrow had set before her mind the pitifullest conceit thereof that it could paint, yet the present sight went beyond all the former apprehensions: so that beginning to kneel by the body, her sight ran from her service, rather than abide such a sight; and she fell in a swoon upon him, as if she could not choose but die of his wounds. But when her breath, aweary to be closed up in woe, broke the prison of her fair lips, and brought memory with his servant senses to his natural office, she made yet the breath convey these doleful words with it. “Alas!” said she, “Amphialus, what strange disasters be these, that having sought thee so long, I should be now sorry to find thee? that these eyes should look upon Amphialus, and be grieved withal? that I should have thee in my power without glory, and embrace thee without comfort? how often have I blest the means that might bring me near thee? now woe worth the cause that brings me so near thee. Often, alas! often hast thou disdained my tears: but now, my dear Amphialus, receive them: these eyes can serve for nothing else but to weep for thee: since thou wouldst never vouchsafe them thy comfort, yet disdain not them thy sorrow. I would they had been more dear unto thee; for then hadst thou lived. Woe is me that thy noble heart could love who hated thee, and hate who loved thee. Alas why should not my faith to thee cover my other defects, who only sought to make my crown thy footstool, myself thy servant, that was all my ambition; and alas thou disdainest it, to serve them, by whom thy incomparable self wert disdained. Yet, O Philoclea, wheresoever you are, pardon me if I speak in the bitterness of my soul, excellent may you be in all other things, and excellent sure you are since he loved you, your want of pity, where the fault only was infiniteness of desert, cannot be excused. I would, O God, I would that you had granted his deserved suit of marrying you, and that I had been your serving-maid, to have made my estate the foil of your felicity, so he had lived. How many weary steps have I trodden after thee, while my only complaint was, that thou wert unkind? alas! I would now thou wert to be unkind. Alas, why wouldst thou not command my service, in persuading Philoclea to love thee? who could, or if everyone could, who would have recounted thy perfection so well {414} as I? who with such kindly passions could have stirred pity for thee as I? who should have delivered not only the words, but the tears I had of thee: and so shouldst thou have exercised thy disdain in me, and yet used my service for thee.”

With that the body moving somewhat, and giving a groan, full of death’s music, she fell upon his face, and kissed him, and withal cried out; “O miserable I, that have only favour by misery;” and then would she have returned to a fresh career of complaints, when an aged and wise gentleman came to her, and besought her to remember what was fit for her greatness, wisdom, and honour: and withal, that it was fitter to show her love in carrying the body to her excellent surgeon, first applying such excellent medicines as she had received of him for that purpose, rather than only show herself a woman-lover in fruitless lamentations. She was straight warned with the obedience of an overthrown mind, and therefore leaving some surgeons of her own to dress the body, went herself to Anaxius, and humbling herself to him, as low as his own pride could wish, besought him, that since the surgeons there had utterly given him over, that he would let her carry him away in her litter with her, since the worst he could have should be to die, and to die in her arms that loved him above all things; and where he should have such monuments erected over him, as were fit for her love, and his worthiness: beseeching him withal, since she was in a country of enemies, where she trusted more to Anaxius’s valour, than Basilius’s promise, that he would convey them safely out of these territories. Her reasons something moved him, but nothing thoroughly persuaded him, but the last request of his help; which he straight promised: warranting all security, as long as that sword had his master alive. She as happy therein as unhappiness could be, having received as small comfort of her own surgeons as of the others, caused yet the body to be easily conveyed into the litter: all the people then beginning to roar and cry, as though never till then they had lost their lord. And if the terror of Anaxius had not kept them under, they would have mutinied, rather than suffered his body to be carried away.

But Anaxius himself riding before the litter, with the choice men of that place, they were afraid even to cry, though they were ready to cry for fear; but because that they might do, everybody forced, even with harming themselves, to do honour to him: some throwing themselves upon the ground; some tearing their clothes, and casting dust upon their heads, and some even wounding themselves, and sprinkling their own blood in the air.

The general consort of whose mourning performed so the natural tunes of sorrow, that even to them, if any such were, that felt not the loss, yet others’ grief taught them grief; having before {415} both their compassionate sense so passionate a spectacle of a young man, of great beauty, beautified with great honour, honoured by great valour, made of inestimable value by the noble using of it, to lie there languishing under the arrest of death, and a death where the manner could be no comfort to the discomfortableness of the matter. But when the body was carried through the gate, and the people, saving such as were appointed, not suffered to go further, then was such an universal cry, as if they had all had but one life, and all received but one blow.

Which so moved Anaxius to consider the loss of his friend, that, his mind apter to revenge than tenderness, he presently giving order to his brothers to keep the prisoners safe, and unvisited till his return from conveying Helen, he sent a messenger to the sisters to tell them this courteous message: that at his return, with his own hands, he would cut off their heads, and send them for tokens to their father.

This message was brought unto the sisters, as they sat at that time together with Zelmane, conferring how to carry themselves, having heard of the death of Amphialus. And as no expectation of death is so painful, as where the resolution is hindered by the intermixing of hopes, so did this new alarm, though not remove, yet move somewhat the constancy of their minds, which were so unconstantly dealt with. But within a while, the excellent Pamela had brought her mind again to his old acquaintance: and then as careful for her sister, whom she most dearly loved, “Sister,” said she, “you see how many acts our tragedy hath: fortune is not yet aweary of vexing us: but what? a ship is not counted strong by biding one storm: it is but the same trumpet of death, which now perhaps gives the last sound: and let us make that profit of our former miseries, that in them we learned to die willingly.” “Truly,” said Philoclea, “dear sister, I was so beaten with the evils of life, that though I had not virtue enough to despise the sweetness of it, yet my weakness bred that strength to be weary of the pains of it: only I must confess that little hope, which by these late accidents was awakened in me, was at the first angry withal. But even in the darkness of that horror, I see a light of comfort appear; and how can I tread amiss, that see Pamela’s steps? I would only, O that my wish might take place, that my school-mistress might live, to see me say my lesson truly.” “Were that a life, my Philoclea?” said Pamela. “No, no,” said she, “let it come, and put on his worst face: for at the worst it is but a bugbear. Joy it is to me to see you so well resolved, and since the world will not have us, let it lose us. Only,” with that she stayed a little and sighed, “only my Philoclea,” then she bowed down, and whispered in her ear, “only Musidorus, my shepherd, comes between me and death, and {416} makes me think I should not die, because I know he would not I should die.” With that Philoclea sighed also, saying no more, but looking upon Zelmane, who was walking up and down the chamber, having heard this message from Anaxius, and having in time past heard of his nature, thought him like enough to perform it, which winded her again into the former maze of perplexity. Yet debating with herself of the manner how to prevent it, she continued her musing humour, little saying, or indeed, little finding in her heart to say, in a case of such extremity, where peremptorily death was threatened: and so stayed they; having yet that comfort, that they might tarry together. Pamela nobly, Philoclea sweetly, and Zelmane sadly and desperately; none of them entertaining sleep, which they thought should shortly begin never to awake.

But Anaxius came home, having safely conducted Helen; and safely he might well do it; for though many of Basilius’s knights would have attempted something upon Anaxius, by that means to deliver the ladies, yet Philanax having received his master’s commandment, and knowing his word was given, would not consent unto it. And the black knight, who by then was able to carry abroad his wounds, did not know thereof; but was bringing force, by force to deliver his lady. So as Anaxius, interpreting it rather fear than faith, and making even chance an argument of his virtue, returned: and as soon as he was returned, with a felon heart calling his brothers up with him, he went into the chamber, where they were all three together, with full intention to kill the sisters with his own hands, and send their heads for tokens to their father, though his brothers, who were otherwise inclined, dissuaded him; but his reverence stayed their persuasions. But when he was come into the chamber, with the very words of choleric threatening climbing up his throat, his eyes first lighted upon Pamela; who hearing he was coming, and looking for death, thought she would keep her own majesty in welcoming it; but the beams thereof so struck his eyes, with such a counterbuff upon his pride, that if his anger could not so quickly love, nor his pride so easily honour, yet both were forced to find a worthiness.

Which while it bred a pause in him, Zelmane, who had already in her mind both what and how to say, stepped out unto him, and with a resolute steadiness, void either of anger, kindness, disdain, or humbleness, spoke in this sort. “Anaxius,” said she, “if fame hath not been over-partial to thee, thou art a man of exceeding valour. Therefore I do call thee even before that virtue, and will make it the judge between us. And now I do affirm, that to the eternal blot of all the fair acts that thou hast done, thou dost weakly, in seeking without danger to revenge his death, whose life with danger thou mightest perhaps have preserved: thou dost cowardly {417} in going about by the death of these excellent ladies, to prevent the just punishment that hereafter they by the powers, which they better than their father, or any other could make, might lay upon thee, and dost most basely, in once presenting thyself as an executioner, a vile office upon men, and in a just cause; beyond the degree of any vile word, in so unjust a cause, and upon ladies, and such ladies. And therefore, as a hangman, I say, thou art unworthy to be counted a knight, or to be admitted into the company of knights. Neither for what I say, will I allege other reasons of wisdom, or justice, to prove my speech, because I know thou dost disdain to be tied to their rules, but even in thine own virtue, whereof thou so much gloriest, I will make my trial: and therefore defy thee, by the death of one of us two, to prove or disprove these reproaches. Choose thee what arms thou likest: I only demand that these ladies, whom I defend, may in liberty see the combat.”

When Zelmane began her speech, the excellency of her beauty and grace made him a little content to hear. Besides that, a new lesson he had read in Pamela, had already taught him some regard. But when she entered into a bravery of speech, he thought at first, a mad and railing humour possessed her; till finding the speeches hold well together, and at length come to a flat challenge of combat, he stood leaning back with his body and head, sometimes with bent brows looking upon the one side of her, sometimes of the other, beyond marvel marvelling, that he, who had never heard such speeches from any knight, should be thus rebuffed by a woman, and that marvel made him hear out her speech: which ended, he turned his head to his brother Zoilus, and said nothing, but only lifting up his eyes, smiled. But Zelmane finding his mind, “Anaxius,” said she, “perchance thou disdainest to answer me, because, as a woman, thou thinkest me not fit to be fought withal. But I tell thee that I have been trained up in martial matters, with so good success, that I have many times overcome braver knights than thyself: and am well known to be equal in feats of arms to the famous Pyrocles, who slew thy valiant uncle, the giant Euardes.” The remembrance of his uncle’s death something nettled him, so as he answered thus.

“Indeed,” said he, “any woman may be as valiant as that coward and traitorly boy, who slew my uncle traitorously, and after ran from me in the plain field. Five thousand such could not have overcome Euardes, but by falsehood. But I sought him all over Asia, following him still from one of his coney-holes to another, till coming into this country, I heard of my friend being besieged, and so came to blow away the wretches that troubled him. But wheresoever the miserable boy fly, heaven, nor {418} hell shall keep his heart from being torn by these hands.” “Thou liest in thy throat,” said Zelmane, “that boy, wherever he went, did so noble acts, as thy heart, as proud as it is, dares not think of, much less perform. But to please thee the better with my presence, I tell thee, no creature can be nearer of kin to him than myself: and so well we love, that he would not be sorrier for his own death than for mine: I being begotten by his father, of an Amazon lady. And therefore, thou canst not devise to revenge thyself more upon him, than by killing me: which if thou darest do, manfully do it, otherwise, if thou harm these incomparable ladies, or myself without daring to fight with me, I protest before these knights, and before heaven and earth, that will reveal thy shame, that thou art the beggarliest dastardly villain that dishonoureth the earth with his steps: and if thou lettest me over-live them, so will I blaze thee.” But all this could not move Anaxius, but that he only said, “Evil should it become the terror of the world to fight, much worse to scold with thee.”

“But,” said he, “for the death of these same,” pointing to the princesses, “of my grace I give them life.” And withal going to Pamela, and offering to take her by the chin, “And as for you, minion,” said he, “yield but gently to my will, and you shall not only live, but live so happily:” he would have said further, when Pamela, displeased both with words, matter and manner, putting him away with her fair hand; “proud beast,” said she, “yet thou playest worse thy comedy, than thy tragedy. For my part, assure thyself, since my destiny is such, that each moment my life and death stand in equal balance, I had rather have thee, and think thee far fitter to be my hangman, than my husband.” Pride and anger would fain have cruelly revenged so bitter an answer, but already Cupid had begun to make it his sport to pull his plumes: so that unused to a way of courtesy, and put out of his bias of pride, he hastily went away, grumbling to himself: between threatening and wishing; leaving his brothers with them: the elder of whom Lycurgus, liked Philoclea, and Zoilus would needs love Zelmane, or at least entertain themselves with making them believe so. Lycurgus more bragged, and near his brother’s humour, began, with setting forth their blood, their deeds, how many they had despised of most excellent women; how much they were bound to them, that would seek that of them. In sum, in all his speeches, more like the bestower than the desirer of felicity. Whom it was an excellent pastime, to those that would delight in the play of virtue, to see with what a witty ignorance she would not understand: and how acknowledging his perfections, she would make that one of his perfections, not to be injurious to ladies. But when he knew not how to reply, then {419} would he fall to touching and toying, still viewing his graces in no glass but self-liking. To which Philoclea’s shamefacedness and humbleness were as strong resisters as choler and disdain: for though she yielded not, he thought she was to be overcome: and that thought a while stayed him from further violence. But Zelmane had eye to his behaviour, and set it in her memory upon the score of revenge, while she herself was no less attempted by Zoilus; who less fond of brags was forwardest in offering, indeed, dishonourable violence.

But when after their fruitless labours they had gone away, called by their brother, who began to be perplexed between new conceived desires, and disdain to be disdained, Zelmane, who with most assured quietness of judgment looked into their present estate, earnestly persuaded the two sisters, that to avoid the mischiefs of proud outrage, they would only so far suit their behaviour to their estates, as they might win time, which, as it could not bring them to worse case than they were, so it might bring forth unexpected relief. “And why,” said Pamela, “shall we any longer flatter adversity? why should we delight to make ourselves any longer balls to injurious fortune, since our own parents are content to be tyrants over us, since our own kin are content traitorously to abuse us? certainly in mishap it may be some comfort to us that we are lighted in these fellows’ hands, who yet will keep us from having cause of being miserable by our friend’s means. Nothing grieves me more than that you, noble lady Zelmane, to whom the world might have made us able to do honour, should receive only hurt by the contagion of our misery. As for me and my sister, undoubtedly it becomes our birth to think of dying nobly, while we have done or suffered nothing which might make our soul ashamed at the parture from these bodies. Hope is the fawning traitor of the mind, while under colour of friendship it robs it of his chief force of resolution.” “Virtuous and fair lady,” said Zelmane, “What you say is true, and that truth may well make up a part in the harmony of your noble thoughts. But yet the time, which ought always to be one, is not tuned for it, while that may bring forth any good, do not bar yourself thereof: for then will be the time to die nobly, when you cannot live nobly.” Then so earnestly she persuaded with them both, to refer themselves to their father’s consent, in obtaining whereof they knew some while would be spent, and by that means to temper the minds of their proud wooers; that in the end Pamela yielded to her, because she spoke reason, and Philoclea yielded to her reason, because she spoke it.

And so when they were again solicited in that little pleasing petition, Pamela forced herself to make answer to Anaxius, that if {420} her father gave his consent she would make herself believe, that such was the heavenly determination, since she had no means to avoid it. Anaxius who was the most frank promiser to himself of success, nothing doubted of Basilius’s consent, but rather assured himself, he would be his orator in that matter; and therefore he chose out an officious servant, whom he esteemed very wise, because he never found him but just of his opinion, and willed him to be his ambassador to Basilius, and to make him know, that if he meant to have his daughters both safe and happy, and desired himself to have such a son-in-law, as would not only protect him in his quiet course, but, if he listed to accept it, would give him the monarchy of the world, that then he should receive Anaxius, who never before knew what it was to pray anything. That if he did not, he would make him know that the power of Anaxius was in everything beyond his will, and yet his will not to be resisted by any other power. His servant, with smiling and cast-up look, desired God to make his memory able to contain the treasure of that wise speech: and therefore besought him to repeat it again, that by the oftener hearing it his mind might be the better acquainted with the divineness thereof; and that being graciously granted he then doubted not by carrying with him in his conceit the grace wherewith Anaxius spoke it, to persuade rocky minds to their own harm; so little doubted he to win Basilius to that, which he thought would make him think the heavens opened when he heard but the proffer thereof. Anaxius gravely allowed the probability of his conjecture; and therefore sent him away, promising him he should have the bringing up of his second son by Pamela.

The messenger with speed performed his lord’s commandment to Basilius; who by nature quiet, and by superstition made doubtful, was loth to take any matter of arms in hand, wherein already he had found so slow success; though Philanax vehemently urged him thereunto, making him see that his retiring back did encourage injuries. But Basilius, betwixt the fear of Anaxius’s might, the passion of his love, and jealousy of his estate, was so perplexed, that not able to determine, he took the common course of men, to fly only then to devotion, when they want resolution: therefore detaining the messenger with delays, he deferred the directing of his course to the counsel of Apollo, which because himself at that time could not go well to require, he entrusted the matter to his best trusted Philanax; who, as one in whom obedience was a sufficient reason unto him, went with diligence to Delphos, where being entered into the secret place of the temple, and having performed the sacrifices usual, the spirit that possessed the prophesying woman, with a sacred fury attended not his {421} demand, but as if it would argue him of incredulity, told him, not in dark wonted speeches, but plainly to be understood, what he came for, and that he should return to Basilius, and will him to deny his daughters to Anaxius and his brothers; for that they were reserved for such as were better beloved of the Gods, that he should not doubt, for they should return unto him safely and speedily; and that he should keep on his solitary course till both Philanax and Basilius fully agreed in the understanding of the former prophecy: withal commanding Philanax from thence forward to give tribute, but not oblation to human wisdom.

Philanax then finding that reason cannot show itself more reasonable than to leave reasoning in things above reason, returns to his lord, and like one that preferred truth before the maintaining of an opinion, hid nothing from him, nor from thenceforth durst any more dissuade him from that which he found by the celestial providence directed; but he himself looking to repair the government, as much as in so broken an estate by civil dissention he might, and fortifying with notable art both the lodges, so that they were almost made unapproachable, he left Basilius to bemoan the absence of his daughters, and to bewail the imprisonment of Zelmane: yet wholly given holily to obey the oracle, he gave a resolute negative unto the messenger of Anaxius, who all this while had waited for it; yet in good terms desiring him to show himself in respect of his birth and profession, so princely a knight, as without forcing him to seek the way of force, to deliver in noble sort these ladies unto him, and so should the injury have been by Amphialus, and the benefit in him.

The messenger went back with this answer, yet having ever used to sugar anything which his master was to receive, he told him, that when Basilius first understood his desires, it did over-reach so far all his most hopeful expectations that he thought it were too great a boldness to hearken to such a man, in whom the heavens had such interest, without asking the God’s counsel; and therefore had sent his principal counsellor to Delphos, who although he kept the matter ever so secret, yet his diligence inspired by Anaxius’s privilege over all worldly things, had found out the secret, which was, that he should not presume to marry his daughter to one who already was enrolled among the demi-gods, and yet much less he should dare the attempting to take them out of his hands.

Anaxius, who till then had made fortune his creator, and force his god, now began to find another wisdom to be above, that judged so rightly of him: and where in this time of his servant’s waiting for Basilius’s resolution, he and his brothers had courted their ladies, as whom they vouchsafed to have for their wives; he {422} resolved now to dally no longer in delays, but to make violence his orator, since he had found persuasions had gotten nothing but answers. Which intention he opened to his brothers, who having all this while wanted nothing to take that away but his authority, gave spurs to his runnings; and, worthy men, neither feeling virtue in themselves, nor tendering it in others, they went headlong to make that evil consort of love and force, when Anaxius had word, that from the tower there were descried some companies of armed men, marching towards the town, wherefore he gave present order to his servants and soldiers to go to the gates and walls, leaving none within but himself and his brothers: his thoughts then so full of their intended prey, that Mars his loudest trumpet could scarcely have awaked him.

But while he was directing what he would have done, his youngest brother Zoilus, glad that he had the commission, went in the name of Anaxius to tell the sisters, that since he had answer from their father, that he and his brother Lycurgus should have them in what sort it pleased them, that they would now grant them no longer time, but presently to determine whether they thought it more honourable comfort to be compelled or persuaded. Pamela made him answer, that in a matter whereon the whole state of her life depended, and wherein she had ever answered she would not lead, but follow her parents’ pleasure, she thought it reason she should either by letter, or particular messenger, understand something from themselves, and not have their belief bound to the report of their partial servant: and therefore as to their words, she and her sister had ever a simple and true resolution, so against their unjust force, God, they hoped, would either arm their lives, or take away their lives. “Well, ladies,” said he, “I will leave my brothers, who by and by will come unto you to be their own ambassadors: for my part I must now do myself service.” And with that turning up his mustaches, and marching as if he would begin a paven[7], he went toward Zelmane. But Zelmane having heard all this while of the messenger’s being with Basilius, had much to do to keep these excellent ladies from seeking by the passport of death to escape these base dangers whereunto they found themselves subject, still hoping that Musidorus would find some means to deliver them; and therefore had often, both by her own example and comfortable reasons, persuaded them to overpass many insolent indignities of their proud suitors, who thought it was a sufficient favour not to do the uttermost injury, now come again to the strait she most feared for them, either of death or dishonour, if heroical courage would have let her, she had been beyond herself amazed: but that yet held up her wit, to attend {423} the uttermost occasion, which even then brought his hairy forehead unto her: for Zoilus smacking his lips, as for the prologue of a kiss, and something advancing himself, “Darling,” said he, “let thy heart be full of joy, and let thy fair eyes be of counsel with it, for this day thou shalt have Zoilus, whom many have longed for, but none shall have him but Zelmane. And oh! how much glory I have to think what a race will be between us? The world, by the heavens, the world will be too little for them.” And with that he would have put his arm about her neck; but she withdrawing herself from him, “My lord,” said she, “much good may your thoughts do you: but that I may not dissemble with you, my nativity being cast by one that never failed in any of his prognostications, I have been assured that I should never be apt to bear children; but since you will honour me with so high a favour, I must only desire that I may perform a vow, which I made among my countrywomen, the famous Amazons, that I would marry none, but such one as was able to withstand me in arms: therefore, before I make mine own desire serviceable to yours, you must vouchsafe to lend me armour and weapons, that at least with a blow or two of the sword I may not find myself perjured to myself.” But Zoilus, laughing with a hearty loudness, went by force to embrace her; making no other answer, but since she had a mind to try his knighthood, she should quickly know what a man of arms he was; and so without reverence to the ladies, began to struggle with her.

But in Zelmane then disdain became wisdom, and anger gave occasion. For abiding no longer abode in the matter, she that had not put off, though she had disguised Pyrocles, being far fuller of stronger nimbleness, tripped up his feet so that he fell down at hers. And withal, meaning to pursue what she had begun, pulled out his sword which he wore about him: but before she could strike him withal, he got up, and ran to a fair chamber, where he had left his two brethren, preparing themselves to come down to their mistresses. But she followed at his heels, and even as he came to throw himself into their arms for succour, she hit him with his own sword such a blow upon the waist that she almost cut him asunder: once she sundered his soul from his body, sending it to Proserpina, an angry goddess against ravishers. But Anaxius, seeing before his eyes the miserable end of his brother, fuller of despite than wrath, and yet fuller of wrath than sorrow, looking with a woeful eye upon his brother Lycurgus; “Brother,” said he, “chastise this vile creature, while I go down and take order lest further mischief arise:” and so went down to the ladies, whom he visited, doubting there had been some further practice than yet he conceived. But finding them only {424} strong in patience, he went and locked a great iron gate, by which only anybody might mount to that part of the castle; rather to conceal the shame of his brother, slain by a woman, than for doubt of any other annoyance: and then went up to receive some comfort of the execution, he was sure his brother had done of Zelmane. But Zelmane no sooner saw these brothers, of whom reason assured her she was to expect revenge, but that she leaped to a target, as one that well knew the first mark of valour to be defence. And then accepting the opportunity of Anaxius going away, she waited not the pleasure of Lycurgus, but without any words, which she ever thought vain, when resolution took the place of persuasion, gave her own heart the contentment to be the assailer. Lycurgus, who was in the disposition of his nature hazardous, and by the lucky passing through many dangers, grown confident in himself, went toward her, rather as to a spoil than to fight; so far from fear, that his assuredness disdained to hope. But when her sword made demonstrations above all flattery of arguments, and that he found she pressed so upon him, as showed that her courage sprang not from blind despair, but was guarded both with cunning and strength; self-love then first in him divided itself from vainglory, and made him find that the world of worthiness had not his whole globe comprised in his breast, but that it was necessary to have strong resistance against so strong assailing. And so between them, for a few blows, Mars himself might have been delighted to look on. But Zelmane, who knew that in her case, slowness of victory was little better than ruin, with the bellows of hate blew the fire of courage; and he striking a main blow at her head, she warded it with the shield, but so warded, that the shield was cut in two pieces while it protected her: and withal she ran in to him, and thrusting at his breast, which he put by with his target, as he was lifting up his sword to strike again, she let fall the piece of her shield, and with her left hand catching his sword on the inside of the pommel, with nimble and strong slight she had gotten his sword out of his hand, before his sense could convey to his imagination what was to be doubted. And having now two swords against one shield, meaning not foolishly to be ungrateful to good fortune, while he was no more amazed with his being unweaponed, than with the suddenness thereof, she gave him such a wound upon his head, in despite of the shield’s over-weak resistance, that withal he fell to the ground astonished with the pain, and aghast with fear. But seeing Zelmane ready to conclude her victory in his death, bowing up his head to her with a countenance that had forgotten all pride, “Enough, excellent lady,” said he, “the honour is yours; whereof you shall want the best witness if you kill me. {425} As you have taken from men the glory of manhood, return so now again to your own sex for mercy. I will redeem my life of you with no small services; for I will undertake to make my brother obey all your commandments. Grant life, I beseech you, for your own honour, and for the person’s sake that you love best.”

Zelmane repressed a while her great heart, either disdaining to be cruel or pitiful, and therefore not cruel; and now the image of the human condition began to be an orator unto her of compassion, when she saw, as if he lifted up his arms with a suppliant’s grace about one of them, unhappily tied a garter with a jewel, which, given to Pyrocles by his aunt of Thessalia, and greatly esteemed by him, he had presented to Philoclea, and with inward rage promising extreme hatred, had seen Lycurgus with a proud force, and not without some hurt to her, pull away from Philoclea, because at entreaty she would not give it him. But the sight of that was like a cypher, signifying all the injuries which Philoclea had of him suffered, and that remembrance feeding upon wrath, trod down all conceits of mercy. And therefore saying no more, but, “No, villain, die: it is Philoclea that sends thee this token for thy love.” With that she made her sword drink the blood of his heart, though he wresting his body, and with a countenance prepared to excuse, would fain have delayed the receiving of death’s ambassadors. But neither stayed Zelmane’s hand, nor yet Anaxius’s cry unto her; who having made fast the iron gate, even then came to the top of the stairs, when contrary to all his imaginations, he saw his brother lie at Zelmane’s mercy. Therefore crying, promising, and threatening to her to hold her hand: the last groan of his brother was the only answer he could get to his unrespected eloquence. But then pity would fain have drawn tears, which fury in their spring dried; and anger would fain have spoken, but that disdain sealed up his lips; but in his heart he blasphemed heaven, that it could have such a power over him, no less ashamed of the victory he should have of her, than of his brother’s overthrow: and no more spited that it was yet unrevenged, than that the revenge should be no greater than a woman’s destruction. Therefore with no speech, but such a groaning cry as often is the language of sorrowful anger, he came running at Zelmane; use of fighting then serving instead of patient consideration what to do. Guided wherewith, though he did not with knowledge, yet he did according to knowledge, pressing upon Zelmane in such a well-defended manner, that in all the combats that ever she had fought, she had never more need of quick senses, and ready virtue. For being one of the greatest men of stature then living; as he did fully answer that stature in greatness of might; so did he exceed both in greatness of {426} courage, which with a countenance formed by the nature both of his mind and body, to an almost horrible fierceness, was able to have carried fear to any mind that was not privy to itself of a true and constant worthiness. But Pyrocles, whose soul might well be separated from his body, but never alienated from the remembering of what was comely, if at the first he did a little apprehend the dangerousness of his adversary, whom once before he had something tried, and now perfectly saw as the very picture of forcible fury; yet was that apprehension quickly stayed in him, rather strengthening than weakening his virtue by that wrestling, like wine growing the stronger by being moved. So that they both prepared in hearts, and able in hands, did honour solitariness there with such a combat, as might have demanded, as a right of fortune, whole armies of beholders. But no beholders needed there, where manhood blew the trumpet, and satisfaction did whet as much as glory. There was strength against nimbleness: rage against resolution; fury against virtue; confidence against courage; pride against nobleness: love in both breeding mutual hatred, and desire of revenging the injuries of his brother’s slaughter, to Anaxius, being like Philoclea’s captivity to Pyrocles. Who had seen the one, would have thought nothing could have resisted: who had marked the other, would have marvelled that the other had so long resisted. But like two contrary tides, either of which are able to carry worlds of ships and men upon them, with such swiftness that nothing seems able to withstand them, yet meeting one another, with mingling their watery forces, and struggling together, it is long to say, whether stream gets the victory; so between these, if Pallas had been there, she could scarcely have told, whether she had nursed better in the feats of arms. The Irish greyhound against the English mastiff; the sword-fish against the whale; the rhinoceros against the elephant, might be models, and but models of this combat. Anaxius was better armed defensively: for (besides a strong casque bravely covered, wherewith he covered his head) he had a huge shield, such perchance, as Achilles showed to the pale walls of Troy, wherewithal that great body was covered. But Pyrocles utterly unarmed for defence, to offend had the advantage, for, in either hand he had a sword, and with both hands nimbly performed that office. And according as they were diversely furnished, so they did differ in the manner of fighting: for Anaxius most by warding, and Pyrocles oftenest by avoiding, resisted the adversary’s assault. Both hasty to end, yet both often staying for advantage. Time, distance and motion, custom made them so perfect in, that as if they had been fellow counsellors, and not enemies, each knew the other’s mind, and knew how to prevent it. So as their {427} strength failed them sooner than their skill, and yet their breath failed them sooner than their strength. And breathless indeed they grew, before either could complain of any loss of blood.

So that consenting by the meditation of necessity to a breathing time of truce, being withdrawn a little one from the other, Anaxius stood leaning upon his sword with his grim eye so settled upon Zelmane, as is wont to be the look of an earnest thought. Which Zelmane marking, and according to the Pyroclean nature, fuller of gay bravery in the midst than in the beginning of danger: “What is it,” said she, “Anaxius, that thou so deeply musest on? doth thy brother’s example make thee think of thy fault past, or of thy coming punishment?” “I think,” said he, “what spiteful god it should be, who envying my glory, hath brought me to such a wayward case, that neither thy death can be a revenge, nor thy overthrow a victory.” “Thou dost well indeed,” said Zelmane, “to impute thy case to the heavenly providence, which will have thy pride find itself, even in that whereof thou art most proud, punished by the weak sex which thou most contemnest.”

But then having sufficiently rested themselves, they renewed again their combat far more terrible than before: like nimble vaulters, who at the first and second leap do but stir, and, as it were, awake the fiery and airy parts, which after in the other leaps they do with more excellency exercise. For in this pausing, each had brought to his thoughts the manner of the other’s fighting, and the advantages, which by that, and by the quality of their weapons they might work themselves, and so again repeated the lesson they had said before, more perfectly by the using of it; Anaxius oftener used blows, his huge force, as it were, more delighting therein, and the large protection of his shield animating him unto it. Pyrocles, of a more fine and deliberate strength, watching his time, when to give fit thrusts, as, with the quick obeying of his body, to his eye’s quick commandment, he shunned any harm Anaxius could do to him: so would he soon have made an end of Anaxius, if he had not found him a man of wonderful and almost matchless excellency in matters of arms. Pyrocles used divers feignings to bring Anaxius on into some inconvenience, but Anaxius keeping a sound manner of fighting, never offered but seeing fair cause, and then followed it with well-governed violence. Thus spent they a great time, striving to do, and with striving to do, wearying themselves more than with the very doing. Anaxius finding Zelmane so near unto him, that with little motion he might reach her, knitting all his strength together, at that time mainly foiled at her face. But Zelmane strongly putting it by with her right-hand sword, coming in with her left foot and hand, would {428} have given a sharp visitation to his right side, but that he was fain to leap away. Whereat ashamed, as having never done so much before in his life.

The fire of rage then burning contempt out of his breast, did burst forth in flames through his eyes, and in smoke from his mouth; so that he was returning with a terrible madness (all the strength of his whole body transferred to the one hand for a singular service) which the resolute Zelmane did earnestly observe with a providently all despising courage, whilst the ears of Anaxius were suddenly arrested by a sound, whereof they were only capable, which, in consort with his own humour, could only of him with authority have challenged a due attendance: straight a martial noise (raised by the violence of invaders; and distractedness of others, dreadfully tumultuous) giving him intelligence what a bloody scene was acting without in the court of the castle, where he was expected as a special actor; though his eye, as harbinger of his blow, had already marked the room, where his bended arm threatened to lodge it; yet his feet did so suddenly ravish away the rest of his body, that even his own thoughts, much more Zelmane’s, were prevented by the suddenness of his flight, a flight indeed, not from the fighting with one, but to the fighting with many, where he did not look for an object worthy of the wrath of Anaxius. So that vanishing away, as carried in a cloud of whirlwind, Zelmane either could not, or else would not reach him: as disdaining the base advantage of these dishonourable wounds, which though greatest shame to the flying receiver, can give no glory to the unresisted giver.

The impetuous storm that transported the spirit of Anaxius, had quickly blown him down the stairs, and up the door, his sword ushering his way, till his eyes were encountered with the beams of the lightning weapons of a small number, which rather seemed surprised within the castle, than to have surprised the castle. Yet they had speedily purchased a great room for so small a company, challenging as their own all the bounds that their swords could compass: and in effect their enemies proved their fewness many, reckoning the black knight and his second (as cyphers are esteemed when valued by others, over which they are raised) not for the number which indeed they were, but for the number which they were worth. These three were quickly known by their wonted arms; but more by their wonted valour. The court had been a fitter list for two, than a field for so many, where the narrowness of the place, not giving place to sleight, there was no way but by plain force; so that the greatest cowards were as forward as the most courageous, fear making them bold, who saw no refuge but {429} by fighting; which made the conflict exceeding cruel, either of the parties having more spurs than one to draw blood.

The Amphialians, besides their rage for being abused by an unexpected stratagem, and their desire to defend the place, being bound both by private interest and public vows; they had added further, to make up the accomplishment of a just wrath, the means of revenge, as they thought, on their master’s murderer; looking no otherwise on the black knight than as on him who had buried all their hopes in the ruins of Amphialus, whereof to their further grief, they had been idle witnesses. All this made them desperately endeavour that the eyes of Anaxius might be entertained with their victory, before his ears could be burdened with their error; chiefly at his coming, those of his own train kindled their courage at the torches of his eyes, prodigious comets of a deluge of blood. As for the pursued pursuers, like those who landing to make war in an island burn the ships which brought them thither, by the impossibility of their return to show the desperate necessity of their victory; they were assured they could neither advance nor retire, but over the bellies of their enemies; yet were they not so desperate of their retreat, as confident of their victory. The black knight, though all the giants that fought against the gods had been there, he thought they could not hinder him from going where his heart was already, nor from prevailing where the prize was the delivery of his lady, and friend, the double treasures of his soul, whereof any was valued above his life, yea, both were balanced with his honour; so that he did show not only the height of valour, but a ravishing of his soul, and a transportation of magnanimity, far from the level of ordinary aims, and even scarce within the prospect of more lofty thoughts. Yet neither love nor courage could blind his judgment, in seeing his advantage: marching with his company ever the next wall, to prevent being compassed: though sometimes making brave sallies. Which Anaxius at his first approach espying, upbraided his own troop as unworthy of his attendance, and all as traitors in receiving, or dastards in not expelling that, in his eyes, contemned crew, oftentimes urging them by their retiring to make way for him, and he alone would either beat them over the walls, or in the walls: for the truth is, they seemed all too small a sacrifice to appease his high indignation. It was superfluous labour for Alecto to inflame his soul with poisonous inspirations; for his soul might have furnished all the infernal furies with fury, and yet have continued the most furious of all itself. Rage and disdain, burning his bosom, made him utter a roaring voice, as if his breath had been able to have blown away the world, which for the sound that his sword made, could not distinctly be understood.

The first whom he encountered, lifting up his hand to strike, and withal opening his mouth, as if intending some speech, his proposition was prevented by an active answer, cutting him from the lips to the ears, so by opening his mouth, restraining his speech. The knight of the sheep succeeding in his place, a vindictive heir, was exchanging blows with Anaxius with no disadvantage, when suddenly a dart, none knew to whose hand the honour of it was due, did wound him in the thigh, which he doubtful to whom he stood debtor, did pay back to many, an extraordinary interest, with the death of someone striving to defray every drop of his blood.

The black knight, black indeed to all his adversaries, when viewing the wonderful valour of Anaxius, with whom then rival in fame he entertained a terrible emulation, what bred terror in others, bred in him contentment; that his conquest, whereof he never doubted, might be endeared by the difficulty, and his victory be honoured by so honourable an enemy, with whom, above all others, he laboured to meet, by the ruin of many making a room where they might fight.

But in the meantime the torrent of the violence of Anaxius was interrupted by a sudden tumult; seeming to proceed from an ambushment broken forth from the houses behind them. And no wonder though all thought so: the two swords of Zelmane being riotous in their charges, were so covetous to extend their confines. She following, or rather, as a falcon in an earnest chase, flying down the stairs after him, did not overtake Anaxius but with her eyes till he was walled about with the armed multitude, and then, like a lioness lately enraged, that had been long famished in prison, she ranged over all for her prey: but yet like a cunning hound, that out of a whole herd of deer, doth only single him out with whom she had entered first in hostility (a little drop of his blood having betrayed all the rest) she disdained to fight with any other, but would be resisted by none till she might unbend all her forces on Anaxius, whose sight as soon as her eyes had greedily swallowed, she burst forth: “Base dastard, who hast abused the world with shadows of worth, yet art void of all valour, having doubly forfeited the usurped title of honour, in offering injurious violence to a woman, and yet flying the just violence of a woman, to hide thyself (being protected by the shield of some trusted attender) where the sufficiency of others may conceal thy cowardice: but all this shall not defraud my wrath, nor prevent thy punishment.”

Anaxius, more troubled with these words, than if all the swords of the enemies had lighted upon him (whom for the highest of all his wishes, would have but wished her a man, yea an army of men) {431} looked over his shoulder with an eye burning with disdain, as if one of his looks might have served to consume a woman, and at the same instant, uttering his rage another way, with a blow worthy of his arm, he did cleave one before him through the helmet to the shoulders, making him so, by being two headed, headless. But seeing Zelmane press near him, though he hoped for no honour from her, yet to prevent dishonour from her (shame kindling rage, and rage quenching reason) he commanded Armagines his nephew, a youth of great valour, to take these foolish fellows prisoners who durst adventure within that castle without his leave, and to shut all the gates, that none of them might escape; and therewith whirling about, and casting a sideward look on Zelmane, made an imperious sign with a threatening allurement (a disinviting inviting of her) to follow, which she performed with a countenance witnessing as great contentment, as ever Venus did to most with Mars; Mars and Venus at the same time having met within her mind, to make, though a less loving, yet a more martial meeting.

The crowds of people in their way were quickly dispersed by the tempestuous breath of Anaxius, so that they had no hindrance: he being feared of all, and she hated of none. Neither was their solitary retiring, in respect of their different seeming sex, suspiciously censured by any: the disdainfulness of their countenance bearing witness, that they were led by hate to honour, and not by love to the contrary.

The place appointed by fortune to be famous by the famousness of this combat, was a back court, which they found out at that time emptied of inhabitants; the stronger being gone to pursue others, and the weaker run to hide themselves: mediocrity being no more a virtue, where all was at height, to make excellency eminent in extremity.

They two came here alone, for they would have no seconds, or rather were so far first as they could have no seconds, and every one of them being confident in his own worth could not mistrust another’s. As if words had been too weak messengers of their wrath, and swords only worthy to utter their minds, they began with that wherewith they hoped to end; none of them now could flatter himself so far against the proof of his own experienced knowledge, as to contemn his fellow.

Anaxius at the first, rioting in rage, and burning with a voluptuous appetite of blood, did abandon his hands to their accustomed prodigality, which contrary to the nature of that vice, was hurtful to the receiver, and profitable for the spender. But Zelmane, well weighing with whom she had to deal, was more wary in her charges, and circumspectly managing the treasure {432} of her strength, would not idly bestow it, but was liberal when occasion offered. It was hard to say, whether the one was more frank, or the other more thankful: the guerdon never deferred, oft preventing the gift, above the desire of the receiver, yet short of the giver’s mind. Their thought, eye, hand, and foot seemed chained to one motion, as all being tuned by violence, to make up a harmony in horror. Never was courage better supported by skill and strength nor skill and strength better accompanied by courage; the blows of every one of them seemed not only to strive with the others, but even among themselves, for singularity; the latter still (by being more observable) seeking to bury the remembrance of the former.

It seemed that these two were not retired from the battle, but that the battle was transferred where they were. The eye might well have taken them to be two, but the ear would never have been persuaded that so mighty sounds could be sent but from the weapons of a number; the environing windows with a sad solitariness seemed to bewail their want of eyes, which defrauded them the entertainment of that delectable terror, transporting sports.

Anaxius more angry with himself than with his enemy, that he should be so long in vanquishing, where, when victorious, he would be but ashamed of the victory, all his active powers being highly bended, both by choler and courage, he thus discharged his tongue: “What spiteful god, jealous of my greatness, or envying my glory, hath sent this devil in a woman’s shape (as a cloud for Juno to Ixion) to mock me? but all this is one: though thou be a devil in a woman, or all the devils in one devil, I swear by this blow, I will beat thee hence to the hells, to the eternal terror of all the dark region;” and with that lighted on Zelmane with such a huge force, that all she could procure by the mediation of one of her swords, was, that what was intended wholly at her head, by the wrying of her body, did but wound her a little on the shoulder. This was so far from dismaying her, that it did confirm, increase it could not, her resolution already at a height: Yet, though not more courage, she pretended more fury, compassing him about to espy advantages, and oft giving him feigned alarms, as bragging to make a breach in his breast, advanced her right-hand sword, which Anaxius beat down, and withal encroached to usurp a room in her right side: but Zelmane suddenly inclining to the left, gave him a flat blow with that hand’s sword, which returned back clad with the spoils of that part of the body which it had forced.

Both thus being already allied by blood, yet did strive for a more strict affinity: wounds, in regard of their frequency, being no more respected than blows were before. Though they met in {433} divers colours, now both were clad in one livery, as most suitable to their present estate: being servants to one master, and rivals in preferment. Neither could showers of blood quench the winds of their wrath, which did blow it forth in great abundance, till faintness would have fain persuaded both that they were mortal, and though neither of them by another, yet both overcomable by death. Then despair came to reinforce the fight, joining with courage, not as a companion, but as a servant: for courage never grew desperate, but despair grew courageous; both being resolved, if not conquering, none of them should survive the other’s conquest, nor owe trophy but to death.

The greatest grief of the one was to die by a woman; and of the other, to die as a woman: both in respect of her apparel, and, as she thought, action; being matched by one man, who had o’ermatched multitudes of men. At last the great storm of blows being past, she rested one of her swords on the earth, either forced by faintness, or intending art, offering a thrust with the other, which Anaxius perceiving, did speedily repel: and with that (gathering his distressed strength together, as ready to remove, but first bent to give a gallant farewell) ran forward with such a violent violence on Zelmane (nought being able to resist his unresistable force) that she presently interposing her reposed sword, though it ran him through the heart, or rather he his heart upon it, it could not hinder him from running her through the body, and both to the earth, a brave flash of a dying light! a mighty thunder of a quenched lightning! Thus did he overthrow his overthrower: not falling till none was able to stand before him; whilst though he were vanquished, none could vaunt of the victory. His breast fell above the hand with the sword, as if he would needs die embracing it, even after death adoring that idol of his life, and his dead weight striving with Zelmane’s weak life, whilst she struggling to rise did break the sword, a part remaining under him, and the rest within her: thus hard it was to force Anaxius, though he was dead, and impossible while he lived.

Zelmane, after her rising, did draw the other sword out of him, as bent to return not interested in anything. She was stepping forward with a sword in each hand, and a part of one in her breast: a trophy of victory, yet a badge of ruin; never better weaponed, never more unfit for fighting; when lo all the followers of Anaxius, discomforted by his absence, but more by the black knight’s presence, Armagines having his death honoured by his hand, the rest were quickly discomfited, and, despairing to save the castle, sought to save themselves.

The black knight committed the following of their flight to others, as a dangerless action, and therefore not worthy of him; {434} then fearing that elsewhere for another which he could no more find there for himself, he went by the direction of his eyes, and the information of his ears, to seek out the two retired champions, when suddenly he encountered his other self, marching like Pallas from the giant’s overthrow.

As soon as the eyes of Pyrocles, no, his soul was ravished with the sight of Musidorus, it having infused a fresh vigour in his feeble members, and that physic applied to his mind, triumphing over the infirmity of his body; he threw away his swords, only conquerable by kindness, and pulled out that which was in his body, that nothing might hinder him from embracing the image of his soul, which reflected his own thoughts. Their souls by a divine sympathy did first join, preventing the elemental masses of the bodies: but ah! whilst they were clasped in each other’s arms (like two grafts grafted in one stock) the high tide of over-flowing affection restraining their tongues with astonishment, as unable to express an unexpressible passion.

Pyrocles weakened with the loss of blood, the effects of hate, and in that weakness surcharged with kindness, the fruits of love, not able to abide the interchoking of such extremities, the paleness of his face witnessed the parting of his spirits, so that not able to stand, Musidorus was forced to fall with him, or else would not stand after him. And at the suddenness of his unexpected adventure, or vehemently respectable misadventure; like one (who unawares slipping from a great height) is choked betwixt the height and the lowness, ere he can consider, either whence he fell, or where he falls. Being thrown from the top of contentment, to be drowned in the depths of misery, he had his reasonable part so hastily overwhelmed with confusion, that he remained dead alive, as the other was living in death. At last, re-assembling his confounded senses from the rocks of ruin, grief had gathered so much strength through weakness, as to attempt an impossibility in manifesting itself.

“O what a monster of misery am I! even when most fortunate, most unfortunate, who never had a lightning of comfort, but that it was suddenly followed with a thunder of confusion. Twice was my felicity by land (that it might be washed for ever away) made a prey to the inexorable waves, whilst the relenting destinies pitying the rigour of their own decrees, to prevent their threatened effects, would have drowned me in (respecting the ocean of sorrow prepared to swallow me) that little drop of the sea. And, O thrice happy I, if I had perished whilst I was altogether unhappy; then, when a dejected shepherd offensive to the perfection of the world, I could hardly, being oppressed by contempt, make myself worthy to be disdained, disdain to be despised, being a degree of grace. {435} O would to God that I had died obscurely, whilst my life might still have lived famous with others, and my death have died with myself; whilst my not being known might have kept my dishonour unknown, even then when matched, matched by one, and in the presence of many fighting for one who was more dear to me than all the world. Ah me! most miserable, in not being more miserable. Such a pestilentious influence poisoned the time of my nativity, that I have had a spark of happiness, to clear me the way to destruction. I was carried high to be fit for a precipice, and that from that height I might behold how low the dungeons were wherein I was to fall. Even now I was so far from fear, that I was higher than hope, being in imagination master of all my wishes; yet at an instant, as if all that could be inflicted on myself were not sufficient to afflict me, being armed with resolution, both to brave the terrors of death, and to contemn the flatteries of life, I am tormented in another, whose sufferings could only make me tenderly sensible. And with that, sorrow, as it were sorry to be interrupted by utterance, did damn itself up to swell higher, feeding on the contemplation of itself within: where, when absolute tyrant of the breast, it might rather burst him, than burst out.”

Then he was lying down senselessly on his senseless friend, as in all estates striving to be still like him, when lo he felt his breast beat, and thereafter saw his unclouded eyes weakly strive to shine again; thus first re-saluting the light, “Oh where am I?” Musidorus replied: “With him who is hasting to die with you.” “No,” said he, “I have hastened to live with you.” “Death or life,” said Musidorus, “either of them must join us, but neither of them is able to part us.” With that Pyrocles, weakly rising, entrusted his feet with their own burden, but Musidorus, jealous of the carriage of so precious a treasure, would needs aid them with his arm, his strength strengthening Pyrocles, and the weakness of Pyrocles weakening him.

Thus, whilst guided by one, who was acquainted with the castle, they were seeking out a room, where Pyrocles reposing might cause take a trial of the estate of his body, and repair the bloody breaches of the late battery; it being, though evil fortified, yet well defended: as they were walking along a gallery, they heard, from a chamber neighbouring the side of it, a dolorous sound, but so heavily delivered with a disorderly convoy, that choked with sobs, else drowned with tears, the pains of the bearer had so spoiled the birth that it could not be known; yet a secret sympathy, by an unexpressible working, did more wound the mind of Pyrocles, than it was wounded by all the wounds of his body, he pitying his complaint, though not knowing from whom, nor for what: “O how the soul, apt for all impressions transcending {436} reason, can comprehend unapprehensible things;” this was the lamentation of the lamentable Philoclea.

The ladies after the departure of Zelmane, by the inundation in their ears of horrible sounds, were violently invited to come fearfully to a window overlooking the court, where they beheld the bloody effects of that, whereof they were the innocent causes. At first the lilies of their cheeks overgrowing the roses, paleness had almost displaced beauty, were it not beauty was so powerful as to make paleness beautiful; yet their often travelled memory instructed their judgment, that misery being at a height, could not but of force either work the end of itself, or a beginning of comfort, and they could expect no worse estate than that in which they were.

Pamela would fain have flattered herself to think that it was Musidorus come to deliver her, but she had rather have still remained captive than to have drawn him to such a danger for her delivery; and having once apprehended that he was there, never a blow was given but that she was wounded with it, being ever sorry for the overthrown, never glad for the overthrower; either pity prevailing with the tenderness of her sex, or because she knew no danger could come by overcoming.

As for Philoclea, she who through the gentleness of her own nature would have smarted for any other who had been in danger, when she remembered the hazard of her treasure Zelmane, who, as she knew, did not use to be an idle spectator of so earnest a game, a multitude of thoughts, without art artificial, did paint fear in her face, and engrave grief in her bosom. Whilst they continued thus, Pamela, in vain striving to match majesty with affection, stood with a distracted stateliness, and with a stately astonishment, where grief and fear in Philoclea made easily a consort in sorrow, with watery eyes, like the sun shining in a shower, weakly clearing a cloudy countenance; when suddenly they heard one cry, since the castle was won to set the ladies at liberty; but they who were well acquainted both with the frowns and smiles of fortune, as they had ever triumphed over the one, would not suffer themselves to be led captives by the other; neither could this accomplish their contentment, till they had the lords of that pleasant bondage, which they did value more than unvaluable liberty; the constrained activity of the body having nothing diminished the voluntary thraldom of the mind.

But ah! this smooth calm came only to make them the more sensible of the succeeding tempest, which the breath of one from below, roaring forth the death of Zelmane, did thunder up upon them. Pamela (like a rock amidst the sea, beaten both with the winds and with the waves, yet itself immoveable) did receive this rigorous {437} charge with a constant, though sad countenance, and with fixed eyes witnessing the moving of her mind, yet neither uttering word, nor tear, as disdaining to employ their weakness in so great a grief. Such might have been the gesture of Niobe hearing the news of her children’s death, ere she was metamorphosed into a stone; like one, majesty triumphing over misery, who would rather burst strongly within than be disburdened by bursting out in an abject manner.

But, ah me, the confounded Philoclea, who, being the weaker, had received the sharpest assault, an affectionate fury forcing from her an absolute passion, which a dutiful kindness through compassion only provoked in her sister, she, smothered with so monstrous a weight, did sink down under it to the earth.

This made Pamela forget her other grief without any comfort, transferring her affection from her friend to her more than friendly sister; for whom she saw at that time her care might be more serviceable, wherewith she brought her to herself, and she herself to sorrow. At first the tongue and the eyes being too feeble instruments for so violent a passion, she used her hands, beating that breast which the most barbarous creature else in the world could not have done; offering those torn hairs as oblations to him after death, which had been the delights of his life; and deforming that face, the register of nature’s wonders, confirmed by the admiration of men. Which when Pamela, of a patient became a physician, sought to hinder, she thus said: “Alas! sister, you do not know what a treasure I have lost, even a treasure more worth than all the world was worthy to enjoy. Ah, pardon me thou, whom even death is not able to kill in my soul: pardon me, who have ever concealed thy secret, now to discover mine own, for while my life lasts, short may it be, and long it shall not be, I will show to all the world that, which, whilst thou livedst, I would have been ashamed to have shown to thyself even thy perfection and mine affection. Neither do I regard how the conceits of others censure my carriage in this; for there is no eye now, wherein I desire to appear precious, nor no opinion, whereof I crave to make a purchase; death may end my life, but not my love, which, as it is infinite, must be immortal. I would gladly use means to dispatch this miserable life; but it were a shame for me, if, after so great a disaster, sorrow only were not sufficient to kill me.” And with that beauty in the heaven of her face, two suns eclipsed, being wrapped up in paleness, she fell down grovelling on the ground.

Pyrocles, imagining what report might be made, and not doubting what effect it would work, bent to furnish physic for her mind, ere he sought any for his own body, came in at the door, whom Pamela, {438} her arms and her tongue rivals in kindness, embracing, said, “Never more welcome, though ever welcome, Zelmane; thou who ever art victorious, hast thou likewise brought thyself away a trophy from death?” “Sweet ladies,” replied she, “who would faint to fight for such divine creatures as you are? and who could have force to fight against you?”

Philoclea, who at first, either dull through excessive dolour, did not conceive her sister’s words; or else suspecting, as she thought, her impossible desire to please her, all being doubtful to trust what they do extremely affect, did misconceive her meaning. She was raising her eyes to examine her ears: but the most trusty of her senses preventing both, by a palpable proof, gave her an absolute assurance; so that ere she could think Zelmane was at all to be embraced, finding herself embraced by Zelmane, she was lifted up to a heaven of joy, as before she had been sunk down in a hell of grief; never absolutely her own; but either ravished or ruined. Spying the blood on Zelmane’s garment, not knowing whether her own, or her enemy’s, she grew pale; and then, looking on her sister, she blushed, suspecting that she suspected the cause of her paleness, conferring it with her former plaints, to be more than a friendly kindness; but Zelmane, fearing what might be the effects of her fear, said, that she expected a congratulation of her victory, and not condoling of past danger, which was acquitted with the speechless answer of an affectionate look, and a passionate pressing of her hand.

Then Pamela, inquiring the perilous course of her short progress, she told how fortified with their fortune, trusting more to it than to her own valour, which, like their beauty, could not but prevail, she had first overthrown the two brethren of Anaxius; and thereafter, fighting with himself, it was her chance, God strengthening her weakness to punish his injustice, to kill him; she could not say overcome him, no, she was not ashamed to affirm, that though he was killed, she thought him not overcome, seeing both he died with opinion, and in action of victory; death preventing the knowledge of his last success. A rare happiness, his life and fortune having both but one bound.

Both highly praising her valour, and admiring her modesty, and glad of their own delivery, whereof they thought her the author, thoughts striving to express themselves the more powerfully without words, they were acknowledging the fame with a grateful countenance, and kindly affecting looks, when Zelmane, not complementally hunting that which she fled, but like one who with a glass reflects the force of the sun somewhere else, earnestly protested that she would be loth to usurp that which was due to another, especially in the owner’s presence. And, turning towards {439} the black knight, who all the time stood aside as her attender, though armed, trembling for fear of one unarmed, who unarmed, would not have been so afraid of an army in arms, she freely affirmed, “There is the deliverer of us all, from whom we receive our liberty, to whom we owe ourselves, since it is that which makes us ourselves.”

Then the black knight, invited by the willing countenance of the princess, abasing his helmet, advanced more fearfully than to a battle, to kiss her hand: when Zelmane, courteously retired Philoclea a little distance from thence, as glad to confer with her, as to give her friend occasion to confer with Pamela, who presently, whilst the roses of his lips made a flower of affection with the lilies of her hands, knowing her own Dorus, at the suddenness of the assault, the moving of her mind was betrayed by the changes of her countenance, the blood of her face ebbing and flowing according to the tide of affection; yet borrowing a mask from hate, wherewith to hide love, she thus charged him, who already had yielded: “How durst you thus presume to present yourself in my presence, being discharged it, when you deserved the uttermost that reason could devise, or fury execute? Hath my dejected estate emboldened you to exalt yourself against me?” Then he, gathering courage from the extremity of despair, thus cleared his intention: “True it is, lady of my life, and shall be of my death, I was worthy then to have been banished from the world. But what of a world of worlds? I was banished from your sight, and, which is worst of all, deservedly. Neither come I now of contempt, but only to testify my obedience, which otherwise at this time might have been construed to a cowardice. Such a love as mine, wedded to virtue, can never be so adulterated by any accident, no, nor yet ravished by passion, as to bring forth a bastard disobedience, whereof my very conscience not being able to accuse my thoughts, I come to clear myself. But now, having performed all that was within the compass of my power, a part of my blood witnessing my affection, which I wish were confirmed by the rest: you may see, directness of my destiny, that no force can force me to anything, much less from your sight, save only your own will, which is unto me a law, yea, an oracle. And now when you see I do it not for fear of others, but only out of a reverence to you; if not for your satisfaction, yet for my punishment, so to persecute him whom you hate, I will go waste the remnant of my wretched days in some remote wilderness as not worthy to be seen of any, since odious in your sight: having, I hope, by many proofs prevailed thus much with your opinion, that after my death you will think there was some worth in me; though not worthy of your love.” When he, full of humble affection, was retiring himself with a courtesy as low {440} as his thoughts; she, thinking enough done to try him, yet without seeming to trust him, whilst, though guilty of grief, her countenance could accuse her of no care, as out of a fresh remembrance, said, “That she would not have Dametas to lose a servant, nor Mopsa a suitor, by her means; and if he would needs return towards the lodges, that he should first expect some employment homewards from her.” Then he, as one, who fallen in the bottom of some deep water, coming to float above, in sight of land, receiveth some comfort, though still in danger, began to re-assemble his dispersed spirits again, looking more cheerfully. But ere his thoughts, every one of them overflowing another, could settle themselves in words, she, preventing the violence of so sudden a change, did call to her sister, by accusing their indiscretion, in holding these two so long by talking with them, from looking to themselves. Which Philoclea allowed, trembling with an earnest fear, to know in what estate Zelmane stood.

They two, injured by this courtesy, with an unwilling obedience accepted of it; more respecting the pleasure of others, than their own necessity. Pamela as only affecting Zelmane, offered her either all, or a part of their chamber: and she, her tongue rebelling against her heart, refused what she desired, pretending a lothness to trouble them. Then the sisters offered to accompany them; but, after they had a while coloured true kindness with ordinary compliments, Zelmane prevailed against herself, to go accompanied as she came: yet both looking as if they would have left their eyes behind them, as well as their hearts; as soon as they were by themselves in a chamber, Zelmane disapparelling herself, the black knight, though better skilled in giving, than in curing of wounds, yet lately experienced by passing the like danger, he would needs prove a surgeon: and after he had purchased the things necessary, having considered his wounds, he found none, save the last that went through the body, dangerous; and yet not deadly: thereafter melting their minds in discourses, either of them had his own contentment doubled by hearing of the others.

Then the black knight, taking leave for a while, locking the door behind him, went down to the court, to try if any spark of the late fire remained as yet to quench. For after the opposite party, as if their arms were not sufficient to arm them, unless their arms were armed with walls, ran to fortify themselves within houses, which had no strength save that which men were to afford them: he, who thought his own good fortune no better than a misfortune, till he was assured that his friend had the like, without whom no happiness of his could be accomplished, recommending the remnant of the adversary’s ruins to his two {441} companions, had gone to learn if he were alike happy in all places: and they, fear freezing the courage, and dissolving the hearts of their scattered enemies, found quickly more throwing themselves weaponless at their feet, than they could have leisure severally to raise, so that they were more weary, though more contented with pardoning than they had been with punishing.

Some more crafty, or more fearful, cried out at the windows that they would surrender upon security of pardon. But they, scorning to capitulate with fugitives, who would not have done it with them when fighters: and disdaining all that, by the most large construction, could be wrested to the sense of constraint, they would not equal them with those who were already humble till they submitted in a more submissive manner, depending only on their free disposition. Which they, either trusting to the virtue of others, or mistrusting their own, having done the knight of the sheep was constrained, his wound bleeding in great abundance, which being made by an impoisoned dart, had inflamed all his body, to retire. The other, having received the keys of the gate, committed the chief captives to keepers, till the black knight’s coming, who presently thereafter exacting what conditions he pleased, did discharge them all. Then sentinels were set on the wall, and a company appointed to watch all night: when suddenly one came from their friend, to desire them to come and take their last farewell of him: a request wonderfully grieving them, yet quickly granted; yea, performed ere answered.

Being met, and all others retired, he with these words deeply wounded their souls. “Dear friends, whom I may justly call so, though none of us as yet doth know another; You see, I have acted my part, and the curtain must quickly be drawn. Death, the only period of all respects, doth dispense with a free speech. At a tilting in Iberia, where I was born, dedicated to the memory of the queen Andromana’s marriage, a novice in arms, amongst others, I ran in a pastoral show against the Corinthian knights, whom the success had preferred in the opinion of the beholders: till the worthily admirable princes, Musidorus and Pyrocles, drawn forth by the young prince Palladius, brought back the reputation to our party, and there did such things as might have honoured Mars, if he had been in any of their places, and made either of them worthy of his. Thereafter being drawn away from that country by an accident, the report whereof craves a longer time, and a stronger breath than the heavens are like to afford me, their glory tyrannizing over my rest, did kindle such flames in my bosom, that, burning with a generous ardour, I did resolve leaving my own country, as too strict a bound for my thoughts, to try my fortune, where I might either live famous, or die {442} unknown; vowing withal to travel, till these princes were either the subject or witnesses of my valour. What passed in my way I pass over: perchance others may remember. At last, invited by fame, I came to this fatal country, it the band of my heart was, and now must be of my body: where first carried with curiosity, the fever of youth, I went to the Arcadian pastorals for my recreation, but found the ruin of my rest. There, blinded with beholding, and tormented with delight, my earnest eyes surfeited on the excellencies of the pattern of perfection, the quintessence of worth, even the most divinely divine Philoclea. Ah too adventurous eyes! Neither could this content them, but they would needs offer up her picture on the altar of my heart; where, by my thoughts their choice might be allowed, yea, and idolatrously advanced. For they, scorning the simple rudeness of the eyes, as easily defrauded of their too forwardly affected object, would securely entreasure it in a more precious place, by a piercing apprehension sinking it in the soul for ever. For a time, suffered as a stranger, and a shepherd, known as you know, by the name of Philisides, amongst the rest, I had the means to pour forth my plaints before her, but never to her, and, though overthrown, not rendered, I had concluded never to have thrown the dice betwixt hope and despair, so betraying my estate to the tyranny of another’s will. No, I was resolved she should never know her power in me, till I had known her mind of me: so that, if she would not raise me, she should not have means to insult over me. Thus if I had not procured pity, I should not have exposed myself to disdain.

“In the haughtiness of my heart, thinking nothing impossible, I durst promise myself, that, my deeds having purchased reputation, with words worthy of respect, I might venture the process of my affection. In the meantime I joined joyful with you in this late war now ended: though professing a general desire of glory, yet for a particular end, and happy end, since I send for her. But since whilst I lived, I had not the means, as I wished, to content her. I crave not, by the knowledge of this, after death to discontent her. It shall satisfy me, that I die before my hopes; and she cannot grieve for the loss of that which she never knew to be hers.”

With this, the other sliding apart to bear and bury his sorrow privately, the black knight, weeping, embraced him in his arms, and told him what he was, saying, he was glad that his vow was performed; he being a benefitted witness, not the endangered subject of his valour. Then contentment, budding forth in his countenance, flourished in a smile, and having kissed his friends, desiring to live in their memory, wished them as contented lives, {443} as his was a death. He died as joyful as he left them sorrowful, who had known him a mirror of courage and courtesy, of learning and arms; so that it seemed that Mars had begotten him upon one of the Muses.

Musidorus, exceedingly sorrowful for this irreparable loss, was yet more sorrowful when he remembered himself to be in danger of a greater; and recommending the direction of all below to the knight of the pole, he went himself up to visit his patient, whom he found, though lying, yet resting; and though not sleeping, yet dreaming. As soon as he heard Musidorus, starting as one awakened out of a slumber, he looked on his face, grieved to see the impression of grief in it, he not knowing the cause, with an inquisitive amazement. But the other preventing that threatened tempest, did blow away the clouds that were gathered in his countenance; telling him that he had no interest in the anguish which then did afflict him. “What,” said Pyrocles, being passionately moved, “can Musidorus have anything wherein I have no interest?” “Aye,” said he, “and for the present a greater wonder; my grief may breed you joy, I having lost a friend, and you a rival.” Then he began to discourse unto him what was past. And beside that, which was justly deserved, pity adorning praise and praise augmenting pity, a generous passion so conquered the unconquerable Pyrocles, that he lamented him dead, whom he had not known; no, nor would never have loved alive, and undoubtedly would have wished him no better success than he had. Yea the very thing which before might have most discontented him, did then most content him; having his judgment confirmed by the like, in one of such worth.

After that, laid down in one bed together, friendship making them free, and solitariness bold, whilst their minds began to be delivered of all, wherewith they had a long time travelled, a maid came to the door, sent by the two sisters, to visit Zelmane, who hearing two, where she expected but one, and the one by the manner of his speech likely to be a man, did presently return, and reported to the ladies, who were lying together, that whereof her ears had given her sufficient assurance. At which news Pamela, burning within, sparkled forth these words to her sister: “What wonder though strangers ever wandering, wander from all things. Chiefly those of our sex, who being born to be bounded within houses, when they cannot be bounded within kingdoms, how can they be bounded by modesty? Yet, though I hate the deed, the respect of the doer, but more of us whose company she hath haunted, left her reproach, by the commentary of fame, be too largely extended, binds me to conceal her shame, that {444} we blush not at it. But we must either free ourselves from her, or she herself from this slander.”

“Oh,” but answered the ever (and now more than ever) mild Philoclea, “we must not, sister, rashly condemn those whom we have oftentimes considerately approved, lest the change be in our judgment, and not in them. No doubt, because of the indisposition of her body, it was necessary that she should have someone to accompany her; perchance a woman mistaken, and if a man, who knows for what end? She, who being sound would acquaint herself with none, in this estate could not be acquainted with any.”

“It is an easy matter,” replied Pamela, “for one who can deceive to dissemble; neither is this a new acquaintance. You might have seen her use that knight who did come in with her, rather kindly than courteously; a preceding friendship overpassing present respects: for where a great familiarity is, no ceremonial duty can be observed.” Then Philoclea, having found her, could hardly restrain the violence of a just laughter. “As for that which you affirm last,” said she, “I cannot deny it: no, I dare assure you, and assure yourself I will assure nothing without assurance, that knight is the man of the world whom Zelmane most dearly loves, and yet I know, that neither would he offer nor she suffer her honour to be wronged, as you imagine.” This last wound was too deep for Pamela to speak after it: so that she, abandoning her heart to throw itself over the rock of unkindness, in danger to be drowned with her own tears, was thus prevented by Philoclea: “Dear sister, and if any word can express more dearness more dear than that, your using me not only as a sister, but as a friend in the highest degree of trust, would make me ashamed to mistrust you, or that you should be beholden to any other than to me for my secret. So might my strangeness justify your unkindness, though you should discover and condemn that which I know you will conceal, perchance approve, and further being by my imparting of it to you, made of the party, ere the report of others make you a judge; be bold my tongue: though my cheeks blush, yet they cover you. Be not ashamed, nay even glory to tell that Zelmane is the prince Pyrocles: he, whom you have heard so oft, yet ever to his honour named; and, to define him unto you more particularly, the friend of Musidorus, over whom with him you are jealous; they lying now in one bed, with no less love than I told you. Why he goes disguised with others, and why I am plain with you I need not tell; you may imagine. One God hath metamorphosed both, the one in a shepherd, the other in a woman; and we only can restore them to themselves, and themselves to the world, that they may grace it with the glory of their actions as they were wont to do.”

Then Philoclea, exchanging estates with her sister, words arrested by thoughts, she became sad, and the other joyful; who thinking herself well revenged of the past scorn, and having a sufficient pledge of her sister’s secrecy, began to complain of their father’s strict using of them, by surmisings of his own minding to mar their fortunes, so that where he should rejoice at such an occasion, if coming to the knowledge thereof, he would not fail to disappoint it, perchance with the ruin of the princes; which would not only prove a particular loss for them, but, which she lamented more, a general loss for all the world; depriving it of these patterns of virtue, who in all their actions did but point out the height of perfection, and encourage others to follow their footsteps in the way of worth. Therefore it behoved them to regard themselves, and seriously to consider a matter of so great importance. Then, both beginning to muse, night did cast the nets of sleep over their eyes, yet could not hinder their earnest thoughts from prosecuting the course of their own fancies: for what they were thinking when waking, they still dreamed when sleeping.

But ere the morning star began to retire, as giving place to a greater light, whose coming, it, as a forerunner, had only warned the world to attend, both awaked complaining of the night’s length, and having with passionate discourses worn away darkness, as weary of them, they arose and hastily apparelled themselves, though not in a curious, yet in a comely manner. Then, with a pretended charity, they would needs go visit the diseased patient, being themselves impatient. A little before their coming, Musidorus being gone to give order for the burial of Philisides, and, at the earnest desire of Pyrocles, of Anaxius, whose valour now had the full praise, from which his own presumption had derogated much whilst he lived: as they approached to his chamber door, they heard Pyrocles preparing his voice for the convoy of a sadly conceived, and weakly delivered song, which they resolved not to interrupt, attending the letter which followed.

As soon as this song was ended, Pamela opened the door, saluting him still (so to disguise her knowledge) by the name of Zelmane; and asked in what estate she was with herself, who returned this answer; “How can I smart having such angels to give me comfort? Or how can I feel pain in their presence, whose faces are heavens of pleasure?” “Since,” said Pamela, “being only unfortunate by falling in our company, the hazard of your life hath procured our liberty, so that accidentally, though far from our intention, we have been the causes of all your trouble, how can we think of your pain, but as of our own? Or have any delight whilst you rest grieved?” “Wonders of worth,” said Zelmane, “I shall ever, whilst I live, reckon for my highest happiness my being honoured by your company; and as for my travels in this, they are by the success abundantly rewarded, since I could aspire to no higher good than I have compassed, having purchased you any contentment.”

Whilst that passionate Zelmane, with an animated fervency, did incorporate her hand with Philoclea’s, whose speaking looks, however some time out of modesty obliquely moving, had a continual revolution about his face; the black knight’s coming in drew Pamela’s spirits from her thoughts to her eyes. A gentleman followed him, directed from Basilius; who after his duty done to the ladies, having shown them that their father and mother were in good health, invited by their enquiring attendants, told how the first, whom prodigal fame had breathed forth with news, hastened by himself, as who carried an acceptable message in hope of benefit or thanks, certified the king how the castle was won, and his daughters delivered by the black knight, who before had put a period to the victories of Amphialus. At this Pamela looking on Musidorus, blushed; and he, though by no gesture betraying his joy, rejoiced, not because he heard himself praised, but because she heard him praised, and that Anaxius in a single combat was killed by Zelmane, she not long over-living the victory.

The king hearing this, who of his gracious nature would rather save one friend than destroy all his enemies, as if the delivery of his daughters had been a matter of small moment, and a gain too light to counterpoise so great a loss, did abandon his soul to the tyranny of sorrow, even more than majesty in a prince, or virtue in affliction, in the balances of reason, would have allowed of such weight. At this Zelmane’s smile was accompanied with Philoclea’s. {447} But when he spoke of Gynecia’s griefs overgrowing the other, they grew pale, being afraid of the fountain from whence her tears did flow, lest it should drown them.

But whilst Gynecia (the messenger insisted) as run mad with anguish, enclosed in a chamber, would suffer none to come unto her; all wondered that her children being safe, a stranger’s death, or her husband’s grief, could weaken the known strength of her mind so much. The next messenger came, being the latter, and thereby the better informed, who sugared the first news with the assurance of Zelmane’s safety. Then the queen coming forth as after a great tempest, the sky of her countenance cleared, looking brighter than before. The king would have come himself here in person, but he was persuaded to send Philanax with a number of chosen men, to receive the castle and ladies; eftsoons being curious to know who cured Zelmane; when it was told him that the knight who won the castle would trust none with that save himself, he was sorry that one of his worth should be put to such trouble, and would needs have an ordinary surgeon sought out to undertake the charge. “In the meantime the queen came and brought out of a box a sovereign balm, which she hath sent by me to be applied to your wounds, fair Zelmane, not doubting but they will quickly become sound if her direction be observed, which is only that you rest and keep yourself quiet from company now, and by the way till she herself may use other remedies. And for this effect she entreats you, miracles of nature, her daughters, to forbear her company during this time: that your example, whose authority abused might embolden the indiscretion of inferiors, may be a law for others: and she assured me that she would by a secret spy learn how she were obeyed in this. Such a care hath she of this sweet lady’s health.”

By the end of this commission well did Zelmane and Philoclea know at whom in particular those general injunctions did only aim. This enjoined abstinence did give Zelmane a surfeit in sorrow, who had rather have continued still infirm, than to have recovered by so cruel a physic. And yet her misery was multiplied when she remembered the cause, whereof this, in respect of that which she did expect, was a slender issue, and but a little fury, sent to afflict her out of that hell of Gynecia’s breast, into whose company she was shortly to enter. Now the black knight, purposing to depart before Philanax arrived, brought his companion, the knight of the pole, as a partner of his victory, to kiss the ladies’ hands extenuating his own part, and preferring his: Those who have true worth in themselves, can never envy it in another. Thereafter advising him privately to have their little company in a readiness, he went with an uncounterfeited {448} reverence, humbling himself before the idol of his soul, to know her will: telling her what he had done, being only done for her, he would attend thanks from no other; neither would he be known till he might be known for hers: and she, her countenance rather lightening courtesy than affection, desired him to return to his old master, and he should be restored to the estate which by his fault he had before justly forfeited; wishing that he would carry himself more moderately hereafter, if he would not incur her indignation, and raise all regard of him out of her memory.

Then Musidorus, as contented as one who had been brought from hell to heaven, with many vehement attestations to win trust with her, and imprecations against himself in case of perjury, wished, if ever his mind were so unhappy as to be surprised by any purpose tending in the least degree to grieve her, that he might never live till it took effect, but die ere it were discovered. And like a wary gamester, who having once advantage is loth to adventure again, willing to seal up his ears with the acceptable sounds which they had received, he took leave, leaving his heart with her, and taking hers with him. Then went he towards Pyrocles, the joy of his heart shining through his face, and acquainted him with his unwilling absenting himself, referring all further conference till their meeting at the arbour. And having in a complimental manner craved, but not desired employment from Philoclea, in any service after the funerals were performed, he marched with his troop away, the most part thinking that he went to meet Philanax: whilst Pamela from a window followed with her eyes, till clouds of dust did bury their object in the air.

Soon after their departure from the castle, about this time, Philanax arrived, who, immediately after he had received the castle in the king’s name, sought for the knight, whose gift, though not given by him, he esteemed it to be. For he, being generously judicious, thought it more fit that princes should defray obligations by rewards, every man being inferior to him to whom he stands indebted, than to be behind with any by being beholden; and hearing that he was gone by public enquiry for him, and praises of him, he witnessed to the world how highly his valour was valued. After he had saluted the princesses, he visited Zelmane, and told her how careful his master was to have those wounds cured, which in his service had been procured, that thereafter he might otherwise express his gratefulness. But Zelmane affirmed that though that blood which was shed had been followed by all the rest of her body; with the king’s former courtesies towards her, the deserving by the recompense was both preceded and exceeded. Then Philanax, loth to strive with deeds in words, {449} desired her, if her health might serve, to provide for her removing with the rest to-morrow, otherwise, that should be done for her which she herself would direct.

Immediately after his departure Zelmane arose; and having apparelled herself, began to walk, not so much to try how she might comport with the intended journey, as that she might pretend any means which might afford her the satisfaction of Philoclea’s presence; where, violently carried by her thoughts, she came soon, but not so soon as she wished, and was wished: where Pamela apart entertaining her thoughts, she thus entered with Philoclea: “Dear love, Oh in what an ocean of troubles doth our estate continually float, yet hath never so much as attained the sight of any secure port. I see that this freedom will but bring us to a greater bondage: we are led from captivity, only to become captives. For where before those senseless walls were thought sufficient to guard us, we shall be watched now by one more jealous than Juno, with more eyes than ever Argus had. I would willingly convey you where I might enjoy you, and you a kingdom: but this, my infirmity first hindered, and the coming of Philanax hath altogether prevented. In the meantime, till for performing of that, a longed for occasion come, I must arm myself against your father’s folly, and your mother’s fury. The one’s might easily be deluded, but the other’s cannot be resisted, but by a show of yielding, which I must cunningly counterfeit: and therefore trust no external show; for whoever have my countenance, you have my heart.” Philoclea’s words were, that she cared not where she went, so it were with him, nor what she did, so it were warranted by his direction, as bent rather to burn her breast, than to let it lodge any thought which durst but doubt of the sufficiency of his intentions, since whatever circle they made, having always for their centre the excellency of his own worth. So parting, as if they had been to go to live in sundry kingdoms; though going to live in one company, night invited them to repose.

The next morning being saluted by the trumpet’s sounds, and all ready to remove, they were quickly transported over the lake; and as quickly, when landed, mounted by the provident care of Philanax, to finish their journey. But ere they came two or three miles off the lodges, Basilius met them, who embraced his daughters; not that he would go first to them, but that he would be last with Zelmane, whom he had kissed with his eyes, ere his lips were drawn from his daughters. And as soon as he had shown as much affection, encountering her, as his state before so many would permit: he said, that notwithstanding her countenance was the treasure in the world whereof he was most covetous, {450} yet it grieved him that another should be so happy as to have procured her liberty rather than himself; and that it was his purpose, as a private adventurer, to have manifested his affection, fighting as a knight, not as a king, for her delivery.

Zelmane replying, that it had been against all reason, that so great a prince, on whom the lives of so many did depend, should have been hazarded for the life of one whose fall could extend no further than to her own ruin: “Your ruin,” said he, “I wish that mine were first; for it could not but follow after. And do not think that the black knight, or any other durst do more for you than I: yet such is the miserable estate of us kings, that we cannot prove men, but are compelled to move in our own sphere.”

The journey’s end cutting off their discourse, Gynecia was waiting on their alighting, and having first duty—tyrannizing over affection—carelessly kissed Pamela, disdainfully Philoclea, and vehemently Zelmane, thereafter enquiring of her wounds, thanks (though bestowing nothing defraying much) were courteously returned for the balm which was sent; she protesting that if no other thing could help, she would pull out her own heart, when Basilius interrupted them, coming to have lightened his heart, by burdening his body with his mistress’s alighting.

Dametas came starting and leaping like a giddy kid to meet with Pamela; and as soon as she was alighted, for the first salutation, told her how much she was beholden to him, having shown his manhood and goodwill as much as the best fellow in these bounds could have done, swearing that he had ventured more for her than he would do for all the world again, and for his own life too; “Aye,” quoth he, “and when my man Dorus durst not be seen, who was thought a brave fellow, yet he feigned a business far from the noise of war, to seek sheep; but the truth is, to hide himself, whilst my deeds made all our army laugh for joy: so that during all that time of trouble, which I tremble yet to think upon, I never heard of him, till even now he sent me word by a shepherd, whom he met on the way, that he had found the ewes which had strayed, with great difficulty, and was driving them at leisure, for fear they should miscarry. But when he comes, I promise I will make his cowardice be known for leaving me, when I would fain have left myself for fear.” “O but,” said Pamela, “you must not be offended, though every man be not so stout as you are; he may be an evil soldier, but yet a good shepherd: and I hope you keep him that he may keep sheep, not that he may kill men.” “Now in good faith,” said he, “I see you are not changed, for you were ever wise, and so you do continue still. I may well chide the fellow, but I will not beat him.”

Then all entering the lodge with Basilius, though the supper was ready, Gynecia would dress Zelmane’s wounds first, and Basilius would see them dressed; so by his despised importunateness restraining the torrent of Gynecia’s passions, which would but burst forth more furiously thereafter. This freeing Zelmane’s ears at that time, was but a relief to her, as they find who expel poison by counterpoison, she being as weary of him, as afraid of the other.

Then sitting down to the supper, more curious of a surfeit to their eyes, than for their sustenance to the rest of the body: the eyes of Basilius were ever feeding on the face of Zelmane with a fearful earnestness, save sometimes when they were constrained to retire by the violence of his wife’s looks, thinking that they with a jealous anger had upbraided his error, which she, otherwise busied, had never so much as observed. The one of her eyes was settled like a fixed star on Zelmane, the other like a wandering comet threatening confusion where it shined, strayed betwixt Zelmane, and her daughter Philoclea, watching and chastising with her look her stolen looks. Zelmane’s languishing lights made the table envied, whilst her dejected looks did only bless it, as scorning to look on any, since she might not look where she liked. Philoclea chained by thoughts to Zelmane, did imitate her being pensive, because she was pensive: yet like a cunning painter, who having fully fed his eyes with the affected object, turns back within himself, that his imagination may engrave it the more exactly within his memory, she would sometimes with a thievishly adventurous look spy Zelmane’s gesture, that she might the better counterfeit it in her countenance. As for Pamela, she kept her accustomed majesty, being absent where she was, and present where she was not. Then, the supper being ended, after some ambiguous speeches, which might, for fear of being mistaken, be taken in two senses, or else were altogether estranged from the speaker’s mind; speaking as in a dream, not what they thought, but what they would be thought to think: everyone retired to the lodge where they had used afore to lie; Basilius having first invited them the next morning to see a pastoral represented by the ordinary shepherds, to congratulate their prosperous return.

After that Basilius, according to the oracle’s promise, had received home his daughters, and settled himself again in his solitary course and accustomed company, there passed not many days ere the now fully recomforted Dorus, having waited a time of Zelmane’s walking alone towards her little arbour took leave of his master Dametas’s husbandry to follow her. Near whereunto overtaking her, and sitting down together among the sweet flowers, whereof that place was very plentiful, under the pleasant shade of a broad leaved sycamore, they recounted one to another their strange pilgrimage of passions, omitting nothing which open hearted friendship is wont to lay forth, where there is cause to communicate both joys and sorrows, for indeed there is no sweeter taste of friendship than the coupling of souls in this mutuality, either of condoling or comforting; where the oppressed mind finds itself not altogether miserable, since it is sure of one which is feelingly sorry for his misery: and the joyful spends not his joy, either alone, or there where it may be envied; but may freely send it to such a well-grounded object, from whence he shall be sure to receive a sweet reflection of the same joy, and, as in a clear mirror of sincere goodwill, see a lively picture of his own gladness. But after much discourse on either part, Dorus, his heart scarce serving him to come to the point whereunto his then coming had been wholly directed, as loth in the kindest sort to discover to his friend his own unkindness, at length, one word emboldening another, made known to Zelmane, how Pamela upon his vehement oath to offer no force unto her, till he had invested her in the duchy of Thessalia, had condescended to his stealing her away to the next seaport. That besides the strange humours she saw her father more and more falling into, and unreasonable restraint of her liberty, whereof she knew no cause but light-grounded jealousies, added to the hate of that manner of life, and confidence she had in his virtue, the chiefest reason had won her to this was the late danger she stood in of losing him, the like whereof, not unlike to fall if this course were continued, she chose rather to die than again to undergo. That now they waited for nothing else but some fit time for their escape, by the absence of their three loathsome companions, in whom folly engendered suspicion. “And therefore now,” said Dorus, “my dear cousin, to whom nature began my friendship, education confirmed it, and virtue hath made it eternal; here have I discovered the very foundation whereupon my life is built: be you the judge betwixt me and my fortune. The violence of love is not unknown to you, and I know my case shall never want pity in your consideration. How all the joys of my heart do leave me, in thinking I must for a time be absent from you, the eternal truth is witness unto me, I know I {453} should not so sensibly feel the pangs of my last departure. But this enchantment of my restless desire hath such authority in myself above myself, that I am become a slave unto it, I have no more freedom in mine own determination. My thoughts are now all bent how to carry away my burdenous bliss. Yet, most beloved cousin, rather than you should think I do herein violate that holy band of true friendship wherein I unworthy am knit unto you, command me stay. Perchance the force of your commandment may work such impression into my heart that no reason of mine own can imprint into it. For the gods forbid, the foul word of abandoning Pyrocles might ever be objected to the faithful Musidorus. But if you can spare my presence, whose presence no way serves you, and by the division of those two lodges is not oft with you: nay, if you can think my absence may, as it shall, stand you in stead, by bringing such an army hither, as shall make Basilius, willing or unwilling, to know his own hap, in granting you Philoclea, then I will cheerfully go about this my most desired enterprise, and shall think the better half of it already achieved, being begun in the fortunate hour of my friend’s contentment.”

These words, as they were not knit together with such a constant course of flowing eloquence as Dorus was wont to use, so was his voice interrupted with sighs, and his countenance with interchanging colour dismayed. So much his own heart did find him faulty to unbend any way the continual use of their dear friendship. But Zelmane, who had all this while gladly hearkened to the other tidings of their friends happy success, when this last determination of Dorus struck her attentive ears, she stayed a great while oppressed with a dead amazement. There came straight before her mind, made tender with woes, the images of her own fortune, her tedious longings, her causes to despair, the cumbersome folly of Basilius, the enraged jealousy of Gynecia, herself a prince without retinue; a man annoyed with the troubles of womankind, loathsomely loved, and dangerously loving. And now for the perfecting of all, her friend to be taken away by himself, to make the loss the greater by the unkindness. But within a while she resolutely passed over all inward objections; and preferring her friend’s profit to her own desire, with a quiet, but heavy look, she thus answered him: “If I bear thee this love, virtuous Musidorus, for mine own sake, and that our friendship grew, because I, for my part, might rejoice to enjoy such a friend, I should now so thoroughly feel my own loss, that I should call the heavens and earth to witness how cruelly you rob me of my greatest comfort, measuring the breach of friendship by mine own passion. But because indeed I love thee for thyself, and in my judgment judge of thy worthiness to be loved, I am content to {454} build my pleasure upon thy comfort, and then will I deem my hap in friendship great when I shall see thee, whom I love, happy. Let me be only sure thou lovest me still, the only price of true affection: go therefore on, worthy Musidorus, with the guide of virtue and service of fortune. Let thy love be loved, thy desires prosperous, thy escape safe, and thy journey easy. Let everything yield his help to thy desert, for my part absence shall not take thee from mine eyes, nor affliction shall bar me from gladding in thy good, nor a possessed heart shall keep thee from the place it hath for ever allotted unto thee.”

Dorus would fain have replied again, to have made a liberal confession that Zelmane had of her side the advantage of well-performing friendship: but partly his own grief of parting from one he loved so dearly, partly the kind care in what state she should leave Zelmane, bred such a conflict in his mind, that many times he wished he had either never attempted, or never revealed his secret enterprise. But Zelmane, who had now looked to the utmost of it, and established her mind upon an assured determination: “My only friend,” said she, “since to so good towardness your courteous destinies have conducted you, let not a ceremonial consideration of our mutual love be a bar unto it. I joy in your presence, but I joy more in your good: that friendship brings forth the fruits of enmity which prefers his own tenderness before his friend’s damage. For my part, my greatest grief herein shall be, I can be no further serviceable unto you.” “O Zelmane,” said Dorus, with his eyes even covered with water, “I did not think so soon to have displayed my determination unto you, but to have made my way first in your loving judgment. But alas! as your sweet disposition drew me so far, so doth it now strengthen me in it. To you therefore be the due commendation given; who can conquer me in love, and love in wisdom. As for me, then shall goodness turn to evil, and ungratefulness be the token of a true heart, when Pyrocles shall not possess a principal seat in my soul, when the name of Pyrocles shall not be held of me in devout reverence.”

They would never have come to the cruel instant of parting, nor to the ill-faring word of farewell, had not Zelmane seen afar off the old Basilius, who having performed a sacrifice to Apollo, for his daughters’, but principally for his mistress’s happy return, had since been everywhere to seek her. And now being come within compass of discerning her, he began to frame the loveliest countenance he could, stroking up his legs, setting his beard in due order, and standing bolt upright. “Alas!” said Zelmane, “behold an evil fore-token of your sorrowful departure. Yonder see I one of my furies, which doth daily vex me, farewell, farewell {455} my Musidorus, the gods make fortune to wait on thy virtues, and make me wade through this lake of wretchedness.” Dorus burst out into a flood of tears, wringing her fast by the hand. “No, no,” said he, “I go blindfold whither the course of my ill hap carries me: for now, too late, my heart gives me this our separating can never be prosperous. But if I live, attend me here shortly with an army.” Thus both apparelled with the grievous renting of their first combination, having first resolved with themselves that whatsoever fell upon them, they should never upon any occasion utter their names, for the conserving the honour of their royal parentage, but keep the names of Daiphantus and Palladius, as before had been agreed between them, they took divers ways: Dorus to the lodge-ward, where his heavy eyes might be something refreshed; Zelmane towards Basilius, saying to herself, with a scornful smiling, “Yet hath not my friendly fortune deprived me of a pleasant companion.” But he, having with much search come to her presence, doubt and desire bred a great quarrel in his mind. For his former experience had taught him to doubt; and true feeling of love made doubts dangerous, but the working of his desire had ere long won the field. And therefore, with the most submissive manner his behaviour could yield, “O goddess,” said he, “towards whom I have the greatest feeling of religion, be not displeased at some show of devotion I have made to Apollo, since he, if he knew anything, knows that my heart bears far more awful reverence to yourself, than to his, or any other the like deity.” “You will ever be deceived in me,” answered Zelmane; “I will make myself no competitor with Apollo, neither can blasphemies to him be duties to me.” With that Basilius took out of his bosom certain verses he had written, and kneeling down, presented them to her. They contained this:

“This is my hymn to you,” said he, “not left me by my ancestors, but begun in myself. The temple wherein it is daily sung is my soul; and the sacrifice I offer to you withal is all whatsoever I am.” Zelmane, who ever thought she found in his speeches the ill taste of a medicine, and the operation of a poison, would have suffered a disdainful look to have been the only witness of her good acceptation but that Basilius began afresh to lay before her many pitiful prayers and in the end to conclude that he was fully of opinion it was only the unfortunateness of that place that hindered the prosperous course of his desires. And therefore since the hateful influence, which made him embrace this solitary life was now passed over him, as he doubted not the judgment of Philanax would agree with his, and his late mishaps had taught him how perilous it was to commit a prince’s state to a place so weakly guarded, he was now inclined to return to his palace in Mantinea, and there he hoped he should be better able to show how much he desired to make all he had hers: with many other such honey words, which my pen grows almost weary to set down. This indeed nearly pierced Zelmane: for the good beginning she had obtained of Philoclea made her desire to continue the same trade, till the more perfecting of her desires; and to come to any public place she did deadly fear, lest her mask by many eyes might the sooner be discovered, and so her hopes stopped, and the state of her joys endangered. Therefore a while she rested, musing at the daily changing labyrinth of her own fortune, but in herself determined it was her only best to keep him there, and with favours to make him love the place where the favours were received, as disgraces had made him apt to change the soil.

Therefore, casting a kind of corner-look upon him, “It is truly said,” said she, “that age cooleth the blood. How soon, good man, you are terrified before you receive any hurt? Do you not know that daintiness is kindly unto us? And that hard obtaining, is the excuse of woman’s granting? Yet speak I not as though you were like to obtain, or I to grant. But because I would not have you imagine I am to be won by courtly vanities, or esteem a man the more because he hath handsome men to wait on him, when he is afraid to live without them.” You might have seen Basilius humbly swell, and, with a lowly look, stand upon his tiptoes; such diversity her words delivered unto him. “O Hercules,” answered he, “Basilius afraid? Or his blood cold that boils in such a furnace? Care I who is with me while I enjoy your presence? Or is any place good or bad to me, but as it pleaseth you to bless or curse it? O let me be but armed in your good grace, and I defy whatsoever there is or can be against me. No, no, your love is forcible, and my age is not without vigour.”

Zelmane thought it not good for his stomach to receive a surfeit of too much favour, and therefore thinking he had enough for the time to keep him from any sudden removing, with a certain gracious bowing down of her head towards him, she turned away, saying she would leave him at this time to see how temperately he could use so bountiful a measure of her kindness. Basilius, that thought every drop a flood that bred any refreshment, durst not further press her, but with ancient modesty left her to the sweet repast of her own fancies. Zelmane, as soon as he was departed, went toward Pamela’s lodge in hope to have seen her friend Dorus, to have pleased herself with another painful farewell, and further to have taken some advice with him touching her own estate, whereof before sorrow had not suffered her to think. But being come even near the lodge, she saw the mouth of a cave, made as it should seem by nature in despite of art, so fitly did the rich growing marble serve to beautify the vault of the first entry. Under foot the ground seemed mineral, yielding such a glistering show of gold in it as they say the river Tagus carries in his sandy bed. The cave framed out into many goodly spacious rooms, such as self-liking men have with long and learned delicacy found out the most easeful: there ran through it a little sweet river, which had left the face of the earth to drown herself for a small way in this dark but pleasant mansion. The very first show of the place enticed the melancholy mind of Zelmane, to yield herself over there to the flood of her own thoughts. And therefore, sitting down in the first entry of the cave’s mouth, with a song she had lately made, she gave a doleful way to her bitter affects, and sung to this effect:

Instead of an instrument, her song was accompanied with the wringing of her hands, the closing of her weary eyes, and even sometimes cut off with the swelling of her sighs, which did not suffer the voice to have his free and native passage. But, as she was a while musing upon her song, raising up her spirits, which were something fallen into the weakness of lamentation, considering solitary complaints do no good to him whose help stands without himself, she might afar off first hear a whispering sound, which seemed to come from the inmost part of the cave, and being kept together with the close hollowness of the place, had, as in a trunk, the more liberal access to her ears, and by and by she might perceive the same voice deliver itself into musical tunes, and with a base Lyra give forth this song:

“O Venus,” said Zelmane, “who is this so well acquainted with me, that can make so lively a portraiture of my miseries? It is surely the spirit appointed to have care of me, which doth now, in this dark place, bear part with the complaint of his unhappy charge. For if it be so, that the heavens have at all times a measure of their wrathful harms, surely so many have come to my {459} blissless lot that the rest of the world hath too small a portion to make with cause so wailful a lamentation. But,” said she, “whatsoever thou be, I will seek thee out, for thy music well assures me we are at least-hand fellow-prentices to one ungracious master.” So rose she and went, guiding herself by the still plaining voice, till she saw upon a stone a little wax-light set, and under it a piece of paper, with these verses very lately, as it should seem, written in it:

She did not long stay to read the words, for not far off from the stone she might discern in a dark corner, a lady lying with her face so prostrate upon the ground that she could neither know nor be known. But, as the general nature of man is desirous of knowledge, and sorrow especially glad to find fellows, she went, as softly as she could convey her feet, near unto her, where she heard these words come with vehement sobbings from her. “O darkness,” said she, “which dost lightsomely, methinks, make me see the picture of my inward darkness: since I have chosen thee to be {460} the secret witness of my sorrows, let me receive a false receipt in thee; and esteem them not tedious, but, if it be possible, let the uttering them be some discharge to my over-laden breast. Alas! sorrow, now thou hast the full sack of my conquered spirits, rest thyself awhile, and set not still new fire to thy own spoils: O accursed reason, how many eyes thou hast to see thy evils, and how dim, nay blind thou art in perceiving them? Forlorn creature that I am! I would I might be freely wicked, since wickedness doth prevail: but the footsteps of my overtrodden virtue lie still as bitter accusations against me. I am divided in myself, how can I stand? I am overthrown in myself, who shall raise me? Vice is but a nurse of new agonies, and the virtue I am divorced from, makes the hateful comparison the more manifest. No, no, virtue, either I never had but a shadow of thee, or thou thyself are but a shadow. For how is my soul abandoned? How are all my powers laid waste? My desire is pained because it cannot hope, and if hope came, his best should be but mischief. O strange mixture of human minds; only so much good left, as to make us languish in our own evils. Ye infernal furies, for it is too late for me to awake my dead virtue, or to place my comfort in the angry gods, ye infernal furies, I say, aid one that dedicates herself unto you; let my rage be satisfied, since the effect of it is fit for your service. Neither be afraid to make me too happy, since nothing can come to appease the smart of my guilty conscience, I desire but to assuage the sweltering of my hellish longing dejected Gynecia.”

Zelmane no sooner heard the name of Gynecia, but that, with a cold sweat all over her, as if she had been ready to tread upon a deadly stinging adder, she would have withdrawn herself, but her own passion made her yield more unquiet motions than she had done in coming. So that she was perceived, and Gynecia suddenly risen up, for indeed it was Gynecia, gotten into the cave, the same cave wherein Dametas had safely kept Pamela in the late uproar, to pass her pangs, with change of places. And as her mind ran still upon Zelmane, her piercing lover’s eye had soon found it was she. And seeing in her countenance to fly away, she fell down at her feet, and catching fast hold of her: “Alas!” said she, “whither, or from whom dost thou fly away? The savagest beasts are won with service, and there is no flint but may be mollified: how is Gynecia so unworthy in thine eyes? or whom cannot abundance of love make worthy? O think not that cruelty, or ungratefulness can flow from a good mind! O weigh, alas! weigh with thyself the new effects of this mighty passion, that I, unfit for my estate, uncomely for my sex, must become a suppliant at thy feet! By the happy woman that bare thee, by all the joys of thy {461} heart, and success of thy desire, I beseech thee turn thyself to some consideration of me, and rather show pity in now helping me, than in too late repenting my death, which hourly threatens me.” Zelmane imputing it to one of her continual mishaps, thus to have met with this lady, with a full weary countenance; “Without doubt, Madam,” said she, “where the desire is such as may be obtained, and the party well deserving as yourself, it must be a great excuse that may well colour a denial: but when the first motion carries with it a direct impossibility, then must the only answer be, comfort without help, and sorrow to both parties; to you not obtaining, to me not able to grant.” “O,” said Gynecia, “how good leisure you have to frame these scornful answers? Is Gynecia thus to be despised? Am I so vile a worm in your sight? No, no, trust to it hard-hearted tiger, I will not be the only actor of this tragedy: since I must fall, I will press down some others with my ruins; since I must burn, my spiteful neighbours shall feel my fire. Dost thou not perceive that my diligent eyes have pierced through the cloudy mask of thy disguisement? Have I not told thee, O fool (if I were not much more fool) that I knew thou wouldst abuse us with thy outward show? wilt thou still attend the rage of love in a woman’s heart? The girl, thy well-chosen mistress, perchance shall defend thee when Basilius shall know how thou hast sotted his mind with falsehood, and falsely sought the dishonour of his house. Believe it, believe it, unkind creature, I will end my miseries with a notable example of revenge, and that accursed cradle of mine shall feel the smart of my wound, thou of thy tyranny, and lastly (I confess) myself of mine own work.”

Zelmane that had long before doubted herself to be discovered by her, and now plainly finding it was, as the proverb saith, like them that hold the wolf by the ears, bitten while they hold, and slain if they loose. If she held her off in these wonted terms, she saw rage would make her love work the effects of hate; to grant unto her, her heart was so bound upon Philoclea, it had been worse than a thousand deaths. Yet found she it was necessary for her to come to a resolution, for Gynecia’s sore could bide no leisure, and once discovered, besides the danger of Philoclea, her desires should be for ever utterly stopped. She remembered withal the words of Basilius, how apt he was to leave this life, and return to his court, a great bar to her hopes. Lastly, she considered Dorus’s enterprise might bring some strange alteration of this their well-liked fellowship. So that encompassed with these instant difficulties, she bent her spirits to think of a remedy, which might at once both save her from them, and serve her to the accomplishment of her only pursuit. Lastly, she {462} determined thus, that there was no way but to yield to the violence of their desires, since striving did the more chafe them. And that following their own current, at length of itself it would bring her to the other side of her burning desires.

Now in the meanwhile, the divided Dorus, long divided between love and friendship, and now for his love divided from his friend, though indeed without prejudice of friendship’s loyalty, which doth never bar the mind from his free satisfaction: yet still a cruel judge over himself, thought he was some ways faulty, and applied his mind how to amend it with a speedy and behoveful return. But then was his first study, how to get away, whereto already he had Pamela’s consent confirmed and concluded under the name of Mopsa in her own presence: Dorus taking this way, that whatsoever he would have of Pamela he would ask her, whether in such a case it were not best for Mopsa so to behave herself, in that sort making Mopsa’s envy an instrument of that she did envy. So having passed over his first and most feared difficulty, he busied his spirits how to come to the harvest of his desires, whereof he had so fair a show. And thereunto (having gotten leave for some days of his master Dametas, who now accounted him as his son-in-law) he roamed round about the desert, to find some unknown way that might bring him to the next seaport, as much as might be out of all course of other passengers: which all very well succeeding him, and he having hired a barque for his life’s traffic, and provided horses to carry her thither, returned homeward, now come to the last point of his care, how to go beyond the loathsome watchfulness of these three uncomely companions, and therein did wisely consider how they were to be taken with whom he was to deal, remembering that in the particularities of everybody’s mind and fortune, there are particular advantages, by which they are to be held. The muddy mind of Dametas he found most easily stirred with covetousness. The cursed mischievous heart of Miso, most apt to be tickled with jealousy, as whose rotten brain could think well of nobody. But young mistress Mopsa, who could open her eyes upon nothing that did not all to be-wonder her, he thought curiosity the fittest bait for her. And first for Dametas, Dorus having employed a whole day’s work, about a ten mile off from the lodge, quite contrary way to that he meant to take with Pamela, in digging and opening the ground under an ancient oak that stood there, in such sort as he might longest hold Dametas’s greedy hopes in some show of comfort, he came to his master with a countenance mixed between cheerfulness and haste, and taking him by the right hand, as if he had a great matter of secrecy to reveal unto him: “Master,” said he, “I did never think that the gods had appointed my mind freely brought up to have so {463} longing a desire to serve you, but that they minded thereby to bring some extraordinary fruit to one so beloved of them as your honesty makes me think you are. This binds me even in conscience to disclose that which I persuade myself is allotted unto you, that your fortune may be of equal balance with your deserts.” He said no further, because he would let Dametas play upon the bit a while, who not understanding what his words intended, yet well finding they carried no evil news, was so much the more desirous to know the matter, as he had free scope to imagine what measure of good hap himself would. Therefore putting off his cap to him, which he never had done before, and assuring him he should have Mopsa, though she had been all made of cloth of gold, he besought Dorus not to hold him long in hope, for that he found a thing his heart was not able to bear. “Master,” answered Dorus, “you have so satisfied me with promising me the utmost of my desired bliss, that if my duty bound me not, I were in it sufficiently rewarded. To you therefore shall my good hap be converted, and the fruit of my labour dedicated.” Therewith he told him, how under an ancient oak (the place he made him easily understand by sufficient marks he gave to him) he had found digging but a little depth, scatteringly lying a great number of rich medals, and that, piercing further into the ground he had met with a great stone, which, by the hollow sound it yielded, seemed to be the cover of some greater vault, and upon it a box of cypress, with the name of the valiant Aristomenes, graven upon it: and that within the box he found certain verses, which signified that some depth again under that all his treasures lay hidden, what time for the discord fell out in Arcadia, he lived banished. Therewith he gave Dametas certain medals of gold he had long kept about him, and asked him, because it was a thing much to be kept secret, and a matter one man in twenty hours might easily perform, whether he would have him go and seek the bottom of it, which he refrained to do till he knew his mind, promising he would faithfully bring him what he found, or else that he himself would do it, and be the first beholder of that comfortable spectacle; no man need doubt which part Dametas would choose, whose fancy had already devoured all this great riches, and even now began to grudge at a partner, before he saw his own share. Therefore taking a strong jade, laden with spades and mattocks, which he meant to bring back otherwise laden, he went in all speed thitherward, taking leave of nobody, only desiring Dorus he would look well to the princess Pamela, promising him mountains of his own labour, which nevertheless he little meant to perform, like a fool, not considering, that no man is to be moved with part, that neglects the whole. Thus away went Dametas, {464} having already made an image in his fancy, what palaces he would build, how sumptuously he would fare, and among all other things imagined what money to employ in making coffers to keep his money; his ten miles seemed twice so many leagues, and yet contrary to the nature of it, though it seemed long, it was not wearisome. Many times he cursed his horse’s want of consideration, that in so important a matter would make no greater speed: many times he wished himself the back of an ass to help to carry away the new sought riches (an unfortunate wisher, for if he had as well wished the head, it had been granted him). At length being come to the tree, which he hoped should bear so golden acorns, down went all his instruments, and forthwith to the renting up of the hurtless earth, where by and by he was caught with the lime of a few promised medals, which was so perfect a pawn unto him of his further expectation that he deemed a great number of hours well employed in groping further into it, which with logs and great stones was made as cumbersome as might be, till at length, with sweaty brow, he came to the great stone. A stone, God knows, full unlike to the cover of a monument, but yet there was the cypress box with “Aristomenes” graven upon it, and these verses written in it.

He opened the box, and to his great comfort read them, and with fresh courage went about to lift up that stone. But in the meantime, ere Dametas was half-a-mile gone to the treasure-ward, Dorus came to Miso, whom he found sitting in the chimney’s end, babbling to herself, and showing by all her gestures that she was loathsomely weary of the world, not for any hope of a better life, but finding no one good, neither in mind nor body, whereout she might nourish a quiet thought, having long since hated each thing else, began now to hate herself. Before this sweet humoured dame Dorus set himself, and framed towards her such a smiling countenance, as might seem to be mixed between a tickled mirth and a forced pity. Miso, to whom cheerfulness in others was ever a sauce of envy in herself, took quickly mark of his behaviour, {465} and with a look full of forworn spite: “Now the devil,” said she, “take these villains that can never leave grinning, because I am not so fair as mistress Mopsa, to see how this skipjack looks at me.” Dorus, that had the occasion he desired, “Truly mistress,” answered he, “my smiling is not at you, but at them that are from you, and indeed I must needs a little accord my countenance with others’ sport.” And therewithal took her in his arms, and rocking her to and fro, “In faith mistress,” said he, “it is high time for you to bid us good night for ever, since others can possess your place in your own time.” Miso, that was never void of malice enough to suspect the uttermost evil, to satisfy a further shrewdness, took on a present mildness, and gently desired him to tell her what he meant; “For,” said she, “I am like enough to be knavishly dealt with by that churl my husband.” Dorus fell off from the matter again, as if he had meant no such thing, till by much refusing her entreaty, and vehemently stirring up her desire to know, he had strengthened a credit in her to that he should say. And then with a formal countenance, as if the conscience of the case had touched himself. “Mistress,” said he, “I am much perplexed in mine own determination, for my thoughts do ever will me to do honestly, but my judgment fails me what is honest, betwixt the general rule, that entrusted secrecies are holily to be deserved, and the particular exception, that the dishonest secrecies are to be revealed; especially there, where by revealing they may either be prevented, or at least amended. Yet in this balance your judgment weighs me down, because I have confidence in it, that you will use what you know moderately, and rather take such faults as advantage to your own good desert, than by your bitter using it be contented to be revenged on others with your own harms. So it is, mistress,” said he, “that yesterday driving my sheep up to the stately hill which lifts his head over the fair city of Mantinea, I happened upon the side of it, in a little falling of the ground, which was a rampier against the sun’s rage, to perceive a young maid, truly of the finest stamp of beauty; and that which made her beauty the more admirable, there was at all no art added to the helping of it: for her apparel was but such as shepherds’ daughters are wont to wear; and as for her hair, it hung down at free liberty of his goodly length, but that sometimes falling before the clear stars of her sight, she was forced to put it behind her ears, and so open again the treasures of her perfection, which that for a while had in part hidden. In her lap there lay a shepherd so wrapped up in that well-liked place, that I could discern no piece of his face, but as mine eyes were intent in that, her angel-like voice struck mine ears with this song.

“But as if the shepherd that lay before her had been organs, which were only to be blown by her breath, she had no sooner ended with the joining her sweet lips together, but that he recorded to her music this rural poesy.

“And with the conclusion of his song he embraced her about the knees. ‘O sweet Charita,’ said he, ‘when shall I enjoy the rest of my toiling thoughts; and when shall your blissful promise, now due, be verified with just performance?’ With that I drew nearer to them and saw, for now he had lifted up his face {467} to glass himself in her fair eyes, that it was my master Dametas”; but here Miso interrupted his tale with railing at Dametas, with all those exquisite terms, which I was never good scold enough to imagine. But Dorus, as if he had been much offended with her impatiency, would proceed no further till she had vowed more stillness: “For,” said he, “if the first drum thus chafe you, what will you be when it comes to the blows.” Then he told her, how after many familiar entertainments betwixt them, Dametas, laying before her his great credit with the king, and withal giving her very fair presents, with promise of much more, had at length concluded together to meet that night at Mantinea in the Oudemian Street, at Charita’s uncle’s house, about ten of the clock. After which bargain Dametas had spied Dorus, and, calling him to him, had with great bravery told him all his good hap, willing him in any case to return to the old witch Miso; “for so indeed, mistress of liveliness, and not of ill-will, he termed you, and to make some honest excuse of his absence. ‘For,’ said he, kissing Charita, ‘if thou didst know what a life I lead with that drivel, it would make thee even of pity receive me into thy only comfort.’ ‘Now mistress,’ said he, ‘exercise your discretion, which if I were well assured of, I would wish you to go yourself to Mantinea, and (lying secret in some one of your gossip’s houses till the time appointed come) so may you find them together, and using mercy reform my master from his evil ways.’”

There had nothing more enraged Miso than the praises Dorus gave to Charita’s beauty, which made her jealousy swell the more with the poison of envy. And that being increased with the presents she heard Dametas had given her, which all seemed torn out of her bowels, her hollow eyes yielded such wretched looks, as one might well think Pluto at that time might have had her soul, very good, cheap. But when the fire of spite had fully caught hold of all her inward parts, then whosoever would have seen the picture of Alecto, or with what manner of countenance Medea killed her own children, needed but take Miso for the full satisfaction of that point of his knowledge. She that could before scarce go but supported by crutches, now flew about the house, borne up by the wings of anger; there was no one sort of mortal revenge that had ever come to her ears, but presented itself now to her gentle mind. At length with few words, for her words were choked up with the rising of her revengeful heart, she ran down, and with her own hands saddled a mare of hers; a mare that seven years before had not been acquainted with the saddle, and so to Mantinea she went, casting with herself how she might couple shame with the punishment of her accursed husband: but the person is not worthy in whose passion I should too long stand.

Therefore now must I tell you that mistress Mopsa, who was the last party Dorus was to practice his cunning withal, was at the parting of her parents attending upon the princess Pamela, whom, because she found to be placed in her father’s house, she knew it was for suspicion the king had of her. This made Mopsa with a right base nature, which joys to see any hard hap happen to them they deem happy, grow proud over her, and use great ostentation of her own diligence, in prying curiously into each thing that Pamela did. Neither is there anything sooner overthrows a weak heart than opinion of authority, like too strong a liquor for so feeble a glass; which joined itself to the humour of envying Pamela’s beauty, so far that oft she would say to herself, if she had been born a princess as well as Pamela, her perfections then should have been as well seen as Pamela’s. With this manner of woman, and placed in these terms, had Dorus to play his last part, which he would have quickly dispatched in tying her up in such a manner that she should little have hindered his enterprise. But that the virtuous Pamela, when she saw him so minded, by countenance absolutely forbid it, resolutely determining she would not leave behind her any token of wrong: since the wrong done to herself was the best excuse of her escape: so that Dorus was compelled to take her in the manner he first thought of, and accordingly Pamela sitting musing at the strange attempt she had condescended unto, and Mopsa hard by her (looking in a glass with very partial eyes) Dorus put himself between them, and casting up his face to the top of the house, struggling all over his body, and stamping sometimes upon the ground, gave Mopsa occasion (who was as busy as a bee to know anything) to ask her lover Dorus what ailed him, that made him use so strange a behaviour: he, as if his spirits had been ravished with some supernatural contemplation, stood still mute, sometimes rubbing his forehead, sometimes starting in himself, that he set Mopsa in such an itch of inquiry that she would have offered her maidenhead, rather than be long kept from it. Dorus not yet answering to the purpose, still keeping his amazement: “O Hercules,” said he, “resolve me in this doubt. A tree to grant one’s wishes! Is this the cause of the king’s solitary life? which part shall I take? happy in either, unhappy because I cannot know which were my best hap.” These doubtful self-speeches, made Mopsa yet in a further longing of knowing the matter: so that the pretty pig, laying her sweet burden about his neck, “My Dorus,” said she, “tell me these words, or else I know not what will befall me, honey Dorus, tell them me.” Dorus having stretched her mind upon a right last: “Extremely loved Mopsa,” said he, “the matters be so great, as my heart fails me in the telling them: but since {469} you hold the greatest seat in it, it is reason your desire should add life unto it.” Therewith he told her a far-fetched tale; how that many millions of years before, Jupiter fallen out with Apollo, had thrown him out of heaven, taking from him the privilege of a god. So that poor Apollo was fain to lead a very miserable life, unacquainted to work, and never used to beg, that in this order having in time learned to be Admetus’s herdsman, he had upon occasion of fetching a certain breed of beasts out of Arcadia, come to that very desert, where wearied with travel, and resting himself in the boughs of a pleasant ash tree, which stood a little off from the lodge, he had with pitiful complaints, gotten his father Jupiter’s pardon, and so from that tree was received again to his golden sphere. But having that right nature of a god, never to be ungrateful, to Admetus he had granted a double life: and because that tree was the chapel of his prosperous prayers, he had given it this quality, that whatsoever of such estate, and in such manner as he then was, sat down in that tree, they should obtain whatsoever they wished. This Basilius having understood by the oracle, was the only cause which had made him try, whether framing himself to the state of an herdsman, he might have the privilege of wishing only granted to that degree; but that having often in vain attempted it, because indeed he was not such, he had now opened the secret to Dametas, making him swear he should wish according to his direction. “But because,” said Dorus, “Apollo was at that time with extreme grief, muffled round about his face, with a scarlet cloak Admetus had given him, and because they that must wish, must be muffled in like sort, and with like stuff, my master Dametas is gone I know not whither, to provide him a scarlet cloak, and to-morrow doth appoint to return with it. My mistress, I cannot tell how, having gotten some inkling of it, is trudged to Mantinea, to get herself a cloak before him, because she would have the first wish. My master at his parting, of great trust told me this secret, commanding me to see nobody should climb that tree. But now Mopsa,” said he, “I have here the like cloak of mine own, and am not so very a fool, as though I keep his commandments in others, to bar myself. I rest only extremely perplexed, because having nothing in the world I wish for, but the enjoying you and your favour, I think it a much pleasanter conquest to come to it by your own consent, than to have it by such a charming force as this is. Now therefore choose, since have you I will, in what sort I shall have you.” But never child was so desirous of a gay puppet, as Mopsa was to be in the tree, and therefore without squeamishness, promising all he would, she conjured him by all her precious loves that she might have the first possession of the wishing tree, assuring him that for the {470} enjoying her, he would never need to climb far. Dorus, to whom time was precious, made no great ceremonies with her; but helping her up to the top of the tree, from whence likewise she could ill come down without help, he muffled her round about the face, so truly, that she herself could not undo it. And so he told her the manner was, she should hold her mind in continual devotion to Apollo, without making at all any noise, till at the farthest within twelve hours’ space, she should hear a voice call her by name three times, and that till the third time she must in no wise answer; “and then you shall not need to doubt your coming down, for at that time,” said he, “be sure to wish wisely, and in what shape soever he come unto you, speak boldly unto him, and your wish shall have as certain effects as I have a desire to enjoy your sweet love.” In this plight did he leave Mopsa, resolved in her heart to be the greatest lady in the world, and never after to feed on worse than frumenty.

Thus Dorus having delivered his hands of his three tormentors, took speedily the benefit of his device, and mounting the gracious Pamela upon a fair horse he had provided for her, he thrust himself forthwith into the wildest part of the desert, where he had left marks to guide him from place to place to the next seaport, disguising her very fitly with scarfs; although he rested assured he should meet that way with nobody, till he came to his bark, into which he meant to enter by night. But Pamela, who all this while transported with desire and troubled with fear, had never free scope of judgment to look with perfect consideration into her own enterprise, but even by the laws of love, had bequeathed the care of herself upon him, to whom she had given herself; now that the pang of desire, with evident hope was quieted, and most part of the fear passed, reason began to renew his shining in her heart, and make her see herself in herself; and weigh with what wings she flew out of her country; and upon what ground she built so strong a determination. But love, fortified with her lover’s presence, kept still his own in her heart; so that as they rode together, with her hand upon her faithful servant’s shoulder, suddenly casting her bashful eyes to the ground, and yet binding herself towards him (like the client that commits the cause of all his worth to a well-trusted advocate) from a mild spirit said unto him these sweetly delivered words: “Prince Musidorus, for so my assured hope is I may justly call you, since with no other my heart would ever have yielded to go; and if so I do not rightly term you, all other words are as bootless, as my deeds miserable, and I as unfortunate, as you wicked, my prince Musidorus, I say now that the vehement shows of your faithful love towards me have brought my mind to answer it in so due a proportion, that contrary to {471} all general rules of reason, I have laid in you my estate, my life, my honour: it is your part to double your former care, and make me see your virtue no less in preserving, than in obtaining: and your faith to be a faith as much in freedom, as bondage. Tender now your own workmanship, and so govern your love towards me, that I may still remain worthy to be loved. Your promise you remember, which here by the eternal givers of virtue I conjure you to observe, let me be your own as I am, but by no unjust conquest; let not our joys which ought ever to last, be stained in our own consciences, let no shadow of repentance steal into the sweet consideration of our mutual happiness; I have yielded to be your wife, stay then till the time that I may rightly be so; let no other defiled name burden my heart, what should I more say? if I have chosen well, all doubt is past, since your action only must determine, whether I have done virtuously or shamefully in following you.”

Musidorus, that had more abundance of joy in his heart than Ulysses had what time with his own industry he stole the fatal Palladium, imagined to be the only relic of Troy’s safety, taking Pamela’s hand, and many times kissed it. “What I am,” said he, “the gods I hope will shortly make your own eyes judge; and of my mind towards you, the meantime shall be my pledge unto you; your contentment is dearer to me than mine own, and therefore doubt not of his mind, whose thoughts are so thralled unto you, as you are to bend or slack them as it shall seem best unto you. You do wrong to yourself, to make any doubt that a base estate could ever undertake so high an enterprise or a spotted mind be able to behold your virtues. Thus much only I confess, I can never do, to make the world see you have chosen worthily, since all the world is not worthy of you.” In such delightful discourses, kept they on their journey, maintaining their hearts in that right harmony of affection, which doth interchangeable deliver each to other the secret workings of their souls, till with the unusual travel, the princess being weary, they alighted down in a fair thick wood, which did entice them with the pleasantness of it to take their rest there. It was all of pine trees, whose broad heads meeting together, yielded a perfect shade to the ground, where their bodies gave a spacious and pleasant room to walk in, they were set in so perfect an order that every way the eye being full, yet no way was stopped. And even in the midst of them, were there many sweet springs which did lose themselves upon the face of the earth. Here Musidorus drew out such provisions of fruits and other cates, as he had brought for that day’s repast, and laid it down upon the fair carpet of the green grass. But Pamela had much more pleasure to walk under {472} those trees, making in their barks pretty knots, which tied together the names of Musidorus and Pamela, sometimes intermixedly changing them, to Pammidorus and Musimela, with twenty other flowers of her travelling fancies, which had bound themselves to a greater restraint than they could without much pain well endure: and to one tree more beholding to her than the rest, she entrusted the treasure of her thoughts in these verses:

Upon a root of the tree, that the earth had left something barer than the rest, she wrote this couplet:

Musidorus, seeing her fancies drawn up to such pleasant contemplations, accompanied her in them, and made the trees as well bear badges of his passions, as this song engraved in them did testify:

While Pamela sitting her down under one of them, and making a poesy of the fair undergrowing flowers, filled Musidorus’s ears with the heavenly sound of her music, which before he had never heard, so that it seemed unto him a new assault given to the castle of his heart, already conquered: which to signify, and withal reply to her sweet notes, he sung in a kind of still, but ravishing tune, a few verses: her song was this, and his reply follows.

In this virtuous wantonness, suffering their minds to descend to each tender enjoying their united thoughts, Pamela having tasted of the fruits, and growing extreme sleepy, having been long kept from it with the perplexity of her dangerous attempt, laying her head in his lap, was invited by him to sleep with these softly uttered verses:

The sweet Pamela was brought into a sweet sleep with this song, which gave Musidorus opportunity at leisure to behold her excellent beauties. He thought her fair forehead was a field where all his fancies fought, and every hair of her head seemed a strong chain that tied him. Her fairer lids then hiding her fairer eyes, seemed unto him sweet boxes of mother-of-pearl, rich in themselves, but containing in them far richer jewels. Her cheeks with their colour most delicately mixed, would have entertained his eyes some while, but that the roses of her lips, whose separating was wont to be accompanied with most wise speeches, now by force drew his sight to mark how prettily they lay one over the other, uniting their divided beauties: and through them the eye of his fancy delivered to his memory the lying, as in ambush, under her lips of those armed ranks, all armed in most pure white, and keeping the most precise order of military discipline. And lest this beauty might seem the picture of some excellent artificer, forth there stole a soft breath, carrying good testimony of her inward sweetness: and so stealing it came out, as it seemed loath to leave his contentful mansion, but that it hoped to be drawn in again to that well-closed paradise, which did so tyrannize over Musidorus’s effects, that he was compelled to put his face as low to hers, as he could, sucking the breath with such joy that he did determine in himself there had been no life {475} to a Chameleon’s if he might be suffered to enjoy that food. But long he was not suffered, being within a while interrupted by the coming of a company of clownish villains, armed with divers sorts of weapons, and for the rest both in face and apparel so forewasted that they seemed to bear a great conformity with the savages; who, miserably in themselves, taught to increase their mischiefs in other bodies’ harms, came with such cries that they both awaked Pamela, and made Musidorus turn unto them full of a most violent rage, with the look of a she-tiger when her whelps are stolen away.

But Zelmane, whom I left in the cave hardly bestead, having both great wits and stirring passions to deal with, makes me lend her my pen a while to see with what dexterity she could put by her dangers. For having in one instant both to resist rage, and go beyond wisdom, being to deal with a lady that had her wits awake in everything but in helping her own hurt, she saw now no other remedy in her case, but to qualify her rage with hope, and to satisfy her wit with plainness: Yet lest too abrupt falling into it, should yield too great advantage unto her, she thought good to come to it by degrees with this kind of insinuation. “Your wise, but very dark speeches, most excellent lady, are woven up in so intricate a manner that I know not how to proportion mine answer unto them: so are your prayers mixed with threats, and so is the show of your love hidden with the name of revenge, the natural effect of mortal hatred; you seem displeased with the opinion you have of my disguising, and yet if I be not disguised, you must needs be much more displeased. Hope then, the only succour of perplexed minds, being quite cut off, you desire my affection, and yet you yourself think my affection already bestowed. Your pretend cruelty, before you have the subjection, and are jealous of keeping that which as yet you have not gotten. And that which is strangest in your jealousy, is both the injustice of it, in being loth that should come to your daughter, which you deem good; and the vainness, since you two are so in divers respects, that there is no necessity one of you should fall to be a bar to the other. For neither, if I be such as you fancy, can I marry you, which must needs be the only end I can aspire to in her: neither need the marrying of her keep me from a grateful consideration, how much you honour me in the love you vouchsafe to bear me.” Gynecia, to whom the fearful agonies she still lived in made any small reproval sweet, did quickly find her words falling to a better way of comfort, and therefore, with a mind ready to show nothing could make it rebellious against Zelmane but too extreme tyranny, she thus said: “Alas, too much beloved Zelmane, the thoughts are but overflowings of the mind, and the {476} tongue is but a servant of the thoughts; therefore marvel not that my words suffer contrarieties, since my mind doth hourly suffer in itself whole armies of mortal adversaries. But, alas, if I had the use of mine own reason, then should I not need, for want of it, to find myself in this desperate mischief: but because my reason is vanished, so have I likewise no power to correct my unreasonableness. Do you therefore accept the protection of my mind which hath no other resting place, and drive it not, by being unregarded, to put itself into unknown extremities. I desire but to have my affection answered, and to have a right reflection of my love in you. That granted, assure yourself mine own love will easily teach me to seek your contentment; and make me think my daughter a very mean price to keep still in mine eyes the food of my spirits. But take heed that contempt drive me not into despair, the most violent cause of that miserable effect.”

Zelmane who already saw some fruit of her last determined fancy, so far as came to a mollifying of Gynecia’s rage, seeing no other way to satisfy suspicion which was held open with the continual pricks of love, resolved now with plainness to win trust, which trust she might after deceive with a greater subtlety. Therefore looking upon her with a more relenting grace than ever she had done before, pretending a great bashfulness before she could come to confess such a fault, she thus said unto her: “Most worthy lady, I did never think till now, that pity of another could make me betray myself, nor that the sound of words could overthrow any wise body’s determination. But your words, I think, have charmed me, and your grace bewitched me. Your compassion makes me open my heart to you, and leave unharboured my own thoughts; for proof of it, I will disclose my greatest secret, which well you might suspect, but never know, and so have your wandering hope in a more painful wilderness, being neither way able to be lodged in a perfect resolution. I will, I say, unwrap my hidden estate, and after make you judge of it, perchance director. The truth is, I am a man: nay, I will say further to you, I am born a prince. And to make up your mind in a thorough understanding of me since I came to this place, I may not deny I have had some sprinkling of I know not what good liking to my lady Philoclea. For how could I ever imagine the heavens would have rained down so much of your favour upon me, and of that side there was a show of possible hope, the most comfortable counsellor of love. The cause of this my changed attire, was a journey two years ago I made among the Amazons, where, having sought to try my unfortunate valour, I met not one in all the country but what was too hard for me, till in the end, in the presence of their queen {477} Marpesia, I hoping to prevail against her, challenged an old woman of fourscore years, to fight on horseback to the uttermost with me. Who having overthrown me, for the saving of my life, made me swear I should go like an unarmed Amazon, till the coming of my beard did, with the discharge of my oath deliver me of that bondage.”

Here Zelmane ended, not coming to a full conclusion, because she would see what it wrought in Gynecia’s mind, having in her speech sought to win a belief of her, and, if it might be, by disgrace of herself to diminish Gynecia’s affection. For the first it had much prevailed: but Gynecia, whose end of loving her was not her fighting, neither could her love, too deeply grounded, receive diminishment; and besides, she had seen herself sufficient proofs of Zelmane’s admirable prowess. Therefore slightly passing over that point of her feigned dishonour, but taking good hold of the confessing her manly sex, with the shamefaced look of that suitor, who having already obtained much, is yet forced by want to demand more, put forth her sorrowful suit in these words: “The gods,” said she, “reward thee for thy virtuous pity of my over-laden soul, who yet hath received some breath of comfort, by finding thy confession to maintain some possibility of my languishing hope. But alas! as they who seek to enrich themselves by mineral industry, the first labour is to find the mine, which to their cheerful comfort being found, if after any unlooked for stop, or casual impediment keep them from getting the desired ore, they are so much the more grieved, as the late conceived hope adds torment to their former want. So falls it out with me happy or hapless woman, as it pleaseth you to ordain, who am now either to receive some guerdon of my most woeful labours, or to return into a more wretched darkness, having had some glimmering of my blissful sun. O Zelmane, tread not upon a soul that lies under your foot: let not the abasing of myself make me more base in your eyes, but judge of me according to that I am, and have been, and let my errors be made excusable by the immortal name of love.” With that, under a feigned rage, tearing her clothes, she discovered some parts of her fair body, which if Zelmane’s heart had not been so fully possessed that there was no place left for any new guest, no doubt it would have yielded to that gallant assault. But Zelmane so much the more arming her determination, as, she saw such force threatened, yet still remembering she must wade betwixt constancy and courtesy, embracing Gynecia, and once or twice kissing her, “Dear lady,” said she, “he were a great enemy to himself, that would refuse such an offer, in the purchase of which a man’s life were blessedly bestowed. Nay, how can I ever yield due recompense for so excessive a favour? but having {478} nothing to give you but myself, take that: I must confess a small but a very free gift: what other affection so ever I have had shall give place to as great perfection, working besides upon the bond of gratefulness. The gods forbid I should be so foolish as not to see, or so wicked, as not to remember, how much my small deserts are over-balanced by your unspeakable goodness. Nay, happy may I well account my mishap among the Amazons, since that dishonour hath been so true a path to my greatest honour, and the changing of my outward raiment hath clothed my mind in such inward contention. Take therefore, noble lady, as much comfort to your heart, as the full commandment of me can yield you: wipe your fair eyes, and keep them for nobler services. And now I will presume thus much to say unto you, that you make much of yourself for my sake, that my joys of my new obtained riches may be accomplished in you. But let us leave this place, lest you be too long missed, and henceforward quiet your mind from any further care, for I will now, to my too much joy, take the charge upon me, within few days to work your satisfaction, and my felicity.” Thus much she said, and withal led Gynecia out of the cave, for well she saw the boiling mind of Gynecia did easily apprehend the fitness of that lonely place. But indeed this direct promise of a short space, joined with the cumbersome familiarness of womankind, I mean modesty, stayed so Gynecia’s mind that she took thus much at that present for good payment, remaining with a painful joy, and a wearisome kind of comfort, not unlike to the condemned prisoner, whose mind still running upon the violent arrival of his death, hears that his pardon is promised, but not yet signed. In this sort they both issued out of that obscure mansion: Gynecia already half persuaded in herself, O weakness of human conceit, that Zelmane’s affection was turned towards her. For such, alas! we are all, in such a mould are we cast, that with the too much love we bear ourselves, being first our own flatterers, we are easily hooked with others’ flattery, we are easily persuaded of others’ love.

But Zelmane, who had now to play her prize, seeing no way things could long remain in that state, and now finding her promise had tied her trial to a small compass of time, began to throw her thoughts into each corner of her invention, how she might achieve her life’s enterprise: for well she knew deceit cannot otherwise be maintained but by deceit: and how to deceive such heedful eyes, and how to satisfy, and yet not satisfy such hopeful desires, it was no small skill. But both their thoughts were called from themselves with the sight of Basilius, who then lying down by his daughter Philoclea, upon the fair, though natural, bed of green grass, seeing the sun what speed he made to leave our west {479} to do his office in the other hemisphere, his inward muses made him in his best music, sing this Madrigal.

And having ended; “Dear Philoclea,” said he, “sing something that may divert my thoughts from the continual task of their ruinous harbour:” she, obedient to him, and not unwilling to disburden her secret passion, made her sweet voice be heard in these words.

Philoclea broke off her song as soon as her mother with Zelmane came near unto them, rising up with a kindly bashfulness, being not ignorant of the spite her mother bare her, and stricken with the sight of that person, whose love made all those troubles seem fair flowers of her dearest garland, nay, rather all those troubles made the love increase. For as the arrival of enemies makes a town to fortify itself as ever after it remains stronger, so that {480} a man may say, enemies were no small cause of the town’s strength: so to a mind once fixed in a well-pleased determination, who hopes by annoyance to overthrow it, does but teach it to knit together all his best grounds, and so perchance of a chanceable purpose, make an unchangeable resolution. But no more did Philoclea see the wonted signs of Zelmane’s affection towards her, she thought she saw another light in her eyes, with a bold and careless look upon her, which was wont to be dazzled with her beauty; and the framing of her courtesies rather ceremonious than affectionate, and that which worst liked her, was, that it proceeded with such quiet settledness, that it rather threatened a full purpose than any sudden passion. She found her behaviour bent altogether to her mother, and presumed in herself she discerned the well-acquainted face of his fancies now turned to another subject. She saw her mother’s worthiness, and too well knew her affection. These joining their divers working powers together in her mind, but yet a prentice in the painful mystery of passions, brought Philoclea into a new traverse of her thoughts, and made her keep her careful look the more attentive upon Zelmane’s behaviour, who indeed, though with much pain, and condemning herself to commit a sacrilege against the sweet saint that lived in her inmost temple, yet strengthening herself in it; being the surest way to make Gynecia bite of her other baits, did so quite over-rule all wonted shows of love to Philoclea, and convert them to Gynecia, that the part she played did work in both a full and lively persuasion: to Gynecia, such excessive comfort, as the being preferred to a rival doth deliver to swelling desire, but to the delicate Philoclea, whose calm thoughts were unable to nourish any strong debate, it gave so stinging a hurt, that, fainting under the force of her inward torment, she withdrew herself to the lodge, and there, weary of supporting her own burden, cast herself upon her bed, suffering her sorrow to melt itself into abundance of tears; at length closing her eyes, as if each thing she saw was a picture of her mishap, and turning upon her heart-side, which, with vehement panting did summon her to consider her fortune, she thus bemoaned herself.

“Alas! Philoclea, is this the price of all thy pains? is this the reward of thy given-way liberty? hath too much yielding bred cruelty? or can too great acquaintance make me held for a stranger? hath the choosing of a companion made me left alone; or doth granting desire, cause the desire to be neglected? alas! despised Philoclea, why didst thou not hold thy thoughts in their simple course, and content thyself with the love of thine own virtue, which would never have betrayed thee? Ah, silly fool, didst thou look for truth in him that with his own mouth confessed {481} his falsehood? for plain proceeding in him that still goes disguised? They say the falsest men will yet bear outward shows of a pure mind. But he that even outwardly bears the badge of treachery, what hells of wickedness must needs in the depth be contained? But O wicked mouth of mine, how darest thou thus blaspheme the ornament of the earth, the vessel of all virtue? O wretch that I am, that will anger the gods in dispraising their most excellent work: O no, no, there was no fault but in me, that could ever think so high eyes would look so low, or so great perfections would stain themselves with my unworthiness. Alas! why could I not see I was too weak a band to tie so heavenly an heart? I was not fit to limit the infinite course of his wonderful destinies. Was it ever like that upon only Philoclea his thoughts should rest? Ah silly fool, that couldst please thyself with so impossible an imagination! an universal happiness is to flow from him. How was I so inveigled to hope, I might be the mark of such a mind? He did thee no wrong, O Philoclea, he did thee no wrong, it was thy weakness to fancy the beams of the sun should give light to no eyes but to thine! And yet, O Prince Pyrocles, for whom I may well begin to hate myself, but can never leave to love thee, what triumph canst thou make of this conquest? What spoils wilt thou carry away of this my undeserved overthrow? could thy force find out no fitter field than the feeble mind of a poor maid, who at the first sight did wish thee all happiness? Shall it be said, the mirror of mankind hath been employed to destroy a hurtless gentlewoman? O Pyrocles, Pyrocles, let me yet call thee before the judgment of thy virtue, let me be accepted for a plaintiff in cause which concerns my life: what need hadst thou to arm thy face with the enchanting mask of thy painted passions? what need hadst thou to fortify thy excellencies with so exquisite a cunning, in making our own arts betray us? what needest thou descend so far from thy incomparable worthiness, as to take on the habit of weak womankind. Was all this to win the undefended castle of a friend, which being won, thou wouldst after raze? Could so small a cause allure thee? or did not so unjust a cause stop thee? O me, what say I more? this is my case, my love hates me, virtue deals wickedly with me, and he does me wrong, whose doings I can never account a wrong.” With that the sweet lady turning herself upon her weary bed she happily saw a lute, upon the belly of which Gynecia had written this song, what time Basilius imputed her jealous motions to proceed of the doubt she had of his untimely loves. Under which veil she, contented to cover her never ceasing anguish, had made the lute a monument of her mind, which Philoclea had never much marked, till now the fear of a competitor more stirred her, than before the care of a mother. {482} The verses were these:

Philoclea read them, and throwing down the lute, “Is this the legacy you have bequeathed me, O kind mother of mine?” said she, “did you bestow the light upon me for this? or did you bear me to be the author of my burial? a trim purchase you have made of your own shame, robbed your daughter to ruin yourself? the birds unreasonable, yet use so much reason, as to make nests for their tender young ones; my cruel mother turns me out of mine own harbour; alas, plaint boots not, for my case can receive no help; for who should give me help? shall I fly to my parents? they are my murderers: shall I go to him, who already being won and lost, must needs have killed all pity? alas! I can bring no new intercessions; he knows already what I am is his. Shall I come home again to myself? O me, contemned wretch; I have given away myself.” With that the poor soul beat her breast, as if that had been guilty of her faults, neither thinking of revenge, nor studying for remedy, but, sweet creature, gave grief a free dominion, keeping her chamber a few days after, not needing to feign herself sick, feeling even in her soul the pangs of extreme pain.

But little did Gynecia reck that, neither when she saw her go away from them, neither when she after found that sickness made her hide her fair face, so much had fancy prevailed against nature. But O you that have ever known, how tender to every motion love makes the lover’s heart, how he measures all his joys upon her contentment: and doth with respectful eye hang his behaviour upon her eyes: judge I pray you now of Zelmane’s troubled thoughts when she saw Philoclea, with an amazed kind of sorrow, {483} carry away her sweet presence, and easily found, so happy a conjecture unhappy affection hath, that her demeanour was guilty of that trespass. There was never foolish soft-hearted mother, that, forced to beat her child, did weep first for his pains, and doing that she was loth to do, did repent before she began, did find half that motion in her weak mind that Zelmane did, now that she was forced by reason to give an outward blow to her passions, and for the lending of a small time, to seek the usury of her desires. The unkindness she conceived Philoclea might conceive, did wound her soul, each tear she doubted she spent, drowned all her comfort. Her sickness was a death unto her. Often would she speak to the image of Philoclea, which lived and ruled in the highest of her inward part, and use vehement oaths, and protestations unto her; that nothing should ever falsify the free chosen vow she had made. Often would she desire her, that she would look well to Pyrocles’s heart, for as for her she had no more interest in it to bestow it any way: “Alas!” would she say, “only Philoclea hast thou not so much feeling of thine own force as to know no new conqueror can prevail against thy conquests? Was ever any dazzled with the moon that used his eyes to the beams of the sun? Is he carried away with a greedy desire of acorns that hath had his senses ravished with a garden of most delightful fruits? O Philoclea, Philoclea, be thou but as merciful a princess to my mind as thou art a true possessor, and I shall have as much cause of gladness, as thou hast no cause of misdoubting? O no, no, when a man’s own heart is the gage of his debt, when a man’s own thoughts are willing witnesses to his promise; lastly, when a man is the jailor over himself; there is little doubt of breaking credit, and less doubt of such an escape.”

In this combat of Zelmane’s doubtful imaginations, in the end reason, well-backed with the vehement desire to bring her matter soon to the desired haven, did over-rule the boiling of her inward kindness, though as I say with such a manifest strife, that both Basilius and Gynecia’s well-waiting eyes, had marked her muses had laboured in deeper subjects than ordinary: which she likewise perceiving they had perceived, awaking herself out of those thoughts, and principally caring how to satisfy Gynecia, whose judgment and passion she stood most in regard of, bowing her head to her attentive ears. “Madam,” said she, “with practice of my thoughts, I have found out a way, by which your contentment shall draw on my happiness.” Gynecia delivering in her face as thankful a joyfulness as her heart could hold, said, “It was then time to retire themselves to their rest, for what with riding abroad the day before, and late sitting up for eclogues, their bodies had {484} dearly purchased that night’s quiet.” So went they home to their lodge, Zelmane framing of both sides bountiful measures of loving countenances to either’s joy, and neither’s jealousy, to the special comfort of Basilius, whose weaker bowels were straight full with the least liquor of hope. So that still holding her by the hand, and sometimes tickling it, he went by her with the most gay conceits that ever had entered his brains, growing now so hearted in his resolution that he little respected Gynecia’s presence. But with a lustier note than wonted, clearing his voice, and cheering his spirits, looking still upon Zelmane, whom now the moon did beautify with her shining almost at the full, as if her eyes had been his song-book, he did the message of his mind in singing these verses.

And by that time being come to the lodge, and visited the sweet Philoclea, with much less than natural care of the parents, and much less than wanted kindness of Zelmane, each party full fraught with diversly working fancies, made their pillows weak props of their over-laden heads. Yet of all other were Zelmane’s brain most turmoiled, troubled with love both active and passive; and lastly, and especially with care, how to use her short limited time to the best purpose, by some wise and happy diverting her two lovers’ unwelcome desires. Zelmane having had the night, her only counsellor in the busy enterprise she was to undertake, and having all that time mused, and yet not fully resolved, how she might join prevailing with preventing, was offended with the day’s bold entry into her chamber, as if he had now by custom grown an assured bringer of evil news. Which she taking a cittern to her, did lay to Aurora’s charge, with these well-sung verses:

“Alas!” said she, “am I not run into a strange gulf, that am fain for love to hurt her I love? and because I detest the others, to please them I detest? O only Philoclea, whose beauty is matched with nothing but with the unspeakable beauty of thy fairest mind, if thou didst see upon what rack my tormented soul is set, little would you think I had any scope now to leap to any new change.” With that with hasty hands she got herself up, turning her sight to everything, as if change of objects might help her invention. So went she again to the cave, where forthwith it came into her head that should be the fittest place to perform her exploit, of which she had now a kind of confused conceit, although she had not set down in her fancy, the meeting with each particularity that might fall out. But as the painter doth at the first but show a rude proportion of the thing he imitates, which after with more curious hand he draws to the representing each lineament, so had her thoughts, beating about it continually, received into them a ground-plot of her device, although she had not in each part shaped it according to a full determination. But in this sort having early visited the morning’s beauty in those pleasant deserts, she came to the king and queen, and told them that for the performance of certain country devotions, which only were to be exercised in solitariness, she did desire their leave she might for a few days lodge herself in the cave, the fresh sweetness of which did greatly delight her in that hot country; and that for that small space they would not otherwise trouble themselves in visiting her, but at such times as she would come to wait upon them, which should be every day at certain hours; neither should it be long, she would desire this privileged absence of them. They, whose minds had already taken out that lesson, perfectly to yield a willing obedience {486} to all her desires, with consenting countenance made her soon see her pleasure was a law unto them. Both indeed inwardly glad of it, Basilius hoping that her dividing herself from them, might yet give him some fitter occasion of coming in secret to her, whose favourable face had lately strengthened his fainting courage. But Gynecia of all other most joyous, holding herself assured that this was but a prologue to the play she had promised her.

Thus both flattering themselves with diversly grounded hopes, they rang a bell, which served to call certain poor women which ever lay in cabins not far off, to do the household services of both lodges, and never came to either but being called for, and commanded them to carry forthwith Zelmane’s bed and furniture of her chamber into the pleasant cave, and to deck it up as finely as it was possible for them, that their soul’s rest might rest her body to her best pleasing manner: that was with all diligence performed of them, and Zelmane already in possession of her new-chosen lodging; where she like one of Vesta’s nuns, entertained herself for a few days in all show of straightness, yet once a day coming to her duty to the king and queen, in whom the seldomness of the sight increased the more unquiet longing, though somewhat qualified, as her countenance was decked to either of them with more comfort than wonted; especially to Gynecia, who seeing her, wholly neglected her daughter Philoclea, had now promised herself a full possession of Zelmane’s heart, still expecting the fruit of the happy and hoped for invention. But both she and Basilius kept such a continual watch about the precincts of the cave, that either of them was a bar to the other from having any secret communing with Zelmane.

While in the meantime the sweet Philoclea forgotten of her father, despised of her mother, and in appearance left of Zelmane, had yielded up her soul to be a prey to sorrow and unkindness, not with raging conceit of revenge, as had passed through the wise and stout heart of her mother, but with a kindly meekness taking upon her the weight of her own woes, and suffering them to have so full a course, as it did exceedingly weaken the estate of her body; as well for which cause, as for that she could not see Zelmane, without expressing, more than she would, how far now her love was imprisoned in extremity of sorrow, she bound herself first to the limits of her own chamber, and after (grief breeding sickness) of her bed. But Zelmane having now a full liberty to cast about every way how to bring her conceived attempt to a desired success, was oft so perplexed with the manifold difficulty of it, that sometimes she would resolve by force to take her away, though it were with the death of her parents, sometimes to go away with Musidorus, and bring both their forces, so to win her. {487} But lastly, even the same day that Musidorus by feeding the humour of his three loathsome guardians, had stolen away the princess Pamela (whether it were that love meant to match them every way, or that her friend’s example had helped her invention, or that indeed Zelmane forbare to practise her device till she found her friend had passed thro’ his): the same day, I say, she resolved on a way to rid out of the lodge her two cumbersome lovers, and in the night to carry away Philoclea: whereunto she was assured her own love no less than her sister’s, would easily win her consent; hoping that although their abrupt parting had not suffered her to demand of Musidorus which way he meant to direct his journey; yet either they should by some good fortune find him; or if that course failed, yet they might well recover some town of the Helots, near the frontiers of Arcadia, who being newly again up in arms against the nobility, she knew would be as glad of her presence, as she of their protection. Therefore having taken order for all things requisite for their going, and first put on a slight under-suit of man’s apparel, which before for such purposes she had provided, she curiously trimmed herself to the beautifying of her beauties, that being now at her last trial she might come unto it in her bravest armour. And so putting on that kind of mild countenance, which doth encourage the looker on to hope for a gentle answer, according to her received manner, she left the pleasant darkness of her melancholy cave, to go take her dinner of the King and Queen, and give unto them both a pleasant food of seeing the owner of their desires. But even as the Persians were anciently wont to leave no rising-sun unsaluted, but as his fair beams appeared clearer unto them, would they more heartily rejoice, laying upon them a great foretoken of their following fortune: so was there no time that Zelmane encountered their eyes with her beloved presence, but that it bred a kind of burning devotion in them, yet so much the more gladding their greedy souls, as her countenance was cleared with more favour unto them; which now being determinately framed to the greatest descent of kindness, it took such hold of her unfortunate lovers, that like children about a tender father from a long voyage returned, with lovely childishness hang about him, and yet with simple fear measure by his countenance, how far he accepts their boldness, so were these now thrown into so serviceable an affection, that the turning of Zelmane’s eyes was a strong stern enough to all their motions, winding no way but as the enchanting force of it guided them. But having made a light repast of the pleasant fruits of that country, interlarding their food with such manner of general discourses as lovers are wont to cover their passion, when respect of a third person keeps them from plain particulars, at the {488} earnest entreaty of Basilius, Zelmane first saluting the Muses with a base viol hung hard by her, sent this ambassage in versified music to both her ill-requited lovers.

And after her song with an affected modesty she threw down her eye, as if the conscience of a secret grant her inward mind made, and suddenly cast a bashful veil over her. Which Basilius finding, and thinking now was the time to urge his painful petition, beseeching his wife with more careful eye to accompany his sickly daughter Philoclea, being rid for that time of her; who was content to grant him any scope, that she might after have the like freedom; with a gesture governed by the force of his passions, making his knees best supporters, he thus said unto her: “If either,” said he, “O lady of my life, my deadly pangs could bear delay, or that this were the first time the same were manifested unto you, I would now but maintain still the remembrance of my misfortune, without urging any further reward, than time and pity might procure for me. But, alas! since my martyrdom is no less painful than manifest, and that I no more feel the miserable danger, than you know the assured truth thereof, why should my tongue deny his service to my heart? Why should I fear the breath of my words, who daily feel the flame of your works? Embrace in your sweet consideration, I beseech you, the misery of my case, acknowledge yourself to be the cause, and think it is reason for you to redress the effects. Alas! let no certain imaginative rules whose truth stands but upon opinion, keep so wise a mind from gratefulness and mercy, whose never failing laws nature hath planted in us. I plainly lay my death unto you, the death of him that loves you, the death of him whose life you {489} may save; say your absolute determination, for hope itself is a pain, while it is over-mastered with fear; and if you do resolve to be cruel, yet is the speediest condemnation, as in evils, most welcome.” Zelmane, who had fully set to herself the train she should keep, yet knowing that who soonest means to yield, doth well to make the bravest parley, keeping countenance aloft; “Noble prince,” said she, “your words are too well couched to come out of a restless mind, and thanked be the Gods, your face threatens no danger of death. These are but those swelling speeches which give the uttermost name to every trifle, which all were worth nothing, if they were not enamelled with the goodly outside of love. Truly love were very unlovely if it were half so deadly, as you lovers, still living, term it. I think well it may have a certain childish vehemency, which for the time to one desire will engage all the soul, so long as it lasteth. But with what impatience you yourself show, who confess the hope of it a pain, and think your own desire so unworthy that you would fain be rid of it; and so with over-much love sue hard for a hasty refusal.” “A refusal!” cried out Basilius, amazed with all, but pierced with the last, “Now assure yourself whensoever you use that word definitively it will be the undoubted doom of my approaching death. And then shall your own experience know in me, how soon the spirits dried up with anguish leave the performance of their ministry, whereupon our life dependeth. But alas! what a cruelty is this, not only to torment but to think the torment slight? The terriblest tyrants would say by no man they killed, he died not; nor by no man they punished, that he escaped free: for of all other, there is least hope of mercy where there is no acknowledging of the pain; and with like cruelty are my words breathed out from a flamy heart, accounted as messengers of a quiet mind. If I speak nothing I choke myself, and am in no way of relief; if simply, neglected: if confusedly, not understood: if by the bending together all my inward powers, they bring forth any lively expressing of that they truly feel, that is a token, forsooth, the thoughts are at too much leisure. Thus is silence desperate, folly punished, and wit suspected: but indeed it is vain to try any more, for words can bind no belief. Lady, I say, determine of me, I must confess I cannot bear this battle in my mind, and therefore let me soon know what I may account of myself; for it is a hell of dolours when the mind still in doubt for want of resolution, can make no resistance.”

“Indeed,” answered Zelmane, “if I should grant to your request, I should show an example in myself that I esteem the holy band of chastity to be but an imaginative rule, as you termed it, and not the truest observance of nature, the most noble commandment {490} that mankind can have over themselves, as indeed both learning teacheth, and inward feeling assureth. But first shall Zelmane’s grave become her marriage bed, before my soul shall consent to his own shame, before I will leave a mark in myself of an unredeemable trespass. And yet must I confess that if ever my heart were stirred, it hath been with the manifest and manifold shows of the misery you live in for me. For in truth so it is, nature gives not to us her degenerate children any more general precept than one to help the other, one to feel a true compassion of the other’s mishap. But yet if I were never so contented to speak with you (for further, never, O Basilius, never look for at my hands) I know not how you can avoid your wife’s jealous attendance but that her suspicion shall bring my honour into question.” Basilius, whose small sails the least wind did fill, was forthwith as far gone into a large promising himself his desire, as before he was stricken down with a threatened denial. And therefore bending his brows, as though he were not a man to take the matter as he had done; “What,” said he, “shall my wife become my mistress? Think you not that thus much time hath taught me to rule her? I will mew the gentlewoman till she have cast all her feathers if she rouse herself against me.” And with that he walked up and down, nodding his head, as though they mistook him much that thought he was not his wife’s master. But Zelmane now seeing it was time to conclude: “Of your wisdom and manhood,” said she, “I doubt not, but that sufficeth not me, for both they can hardly tame a malicious tongue, and impossibly bar the freedom of thought, which be the things that must be only witnesses of honour or judges of dishonour. But that you may see I do not set light your affection, if to-night after your wife be assuredly asleep, whereof by your love I conjure you to have a most precise care, you will steal handsomely to the cave unto me, there do I grant you as great proportion as you will take of free conference with me, ever remembering you seek no more, for so shall you but deceive yourself, and for ever lose me.”

Basilius, who was old enough to know that women are wont to not appoint secret night meetings for the purchasing of land, holding himself already an undoubted possessor of his desires, kissing her hand, and lifting up his eyes to heaven, as if the greatness of the benefit did go beyond all measure of thanks, said no more, lest stirring of more words might bring forth some, perhaps, contrary matter. In which trance of joy Zelmane went from him, saying she would leave him to the remembrance of their appointment, and for her, she would go visit the Lady Philoclea, into whose chamber being come, keeping still her late taken-on gravity, and asking her how she did, rather in the way of {491} dutiful honour than in any special affection, with extreme inward anguish to them both, she turned from her, and taking the Queen Gynecia, led her into a bay window of the same chamber, determining in herself, not to utter to so excellent a wit as Gynecia had, the uttermost point of her pretended device, but to keep the clause of it for the last instant, when the shortness of the time should not give her spirits leisure to look into all those doubts that easily enter to an open invention. But with smiling eyes, and with a delivered over grace, feigning as much love to her, as she did counterfeit little love to Philoclea, she began with more credible, than eloquent speech, to tell her, that with much consideration of a matter so nearly importing her own fancy, and Gynecia’s honour, she had now concluded that the night following should be the fittest time for the joining together their several desires, what time sleep should perfectly do his office upon the king her husband, and that the one should come to the other into the cave: which place as it was the first receipt of their promised love, so it might have the first honour of the due performance. That the cause why those few days past, she had not sought the like, was, lest the new change of her lodging might make the king more apt to mark any sudden event; which now the use of it would take out of his mind. “And therefore most excellent lady,” said she, “there resteth nothing, but that quickly after supper, you train up the king to visit his daughter Philoclea, and then feigning yourself not well at ease, by your going to bed, draw him not long to be after you. In the meantime I will be gone home to my lodging, where I will attend you, with no less devotion, but as I hope with better fortune than Thisbe did the too much loving, and too much loved Pyramus.” The blood that quickly came into Gynecia’s fair face, was the only answer she made, but that one might easily see, contentment and consent were both to the full in her; which she did testify with the wringing Zelmane fast by the hand, closing her eyes, and letting her head fall, as if she would give her to know, she was not ignorant of her fault, although she were transported with the violence of her evil.

But in this triple agreement did the day seem tedious of all sides, till his never erring course had given place to the night’s succession: and the supper by each hand hasted, was with no less speed ended, when Gynecia presenting a heavy sleepiness in her countenance, brought up both Basilius and Zelmane to see Philoclea, still keeping her bed, and far more sick in mind than body, and more grieved than comforted with any such visitation. Thence Zelmane wishing easeful rest to Philoclea, did seem to take that night’s leave of this princely crew, when Gynecia likewise seeming somewhat diseased, desired Basilius to stay a while with {492} his daughter, while she recommended her sickness to her bed’s comfort, indeed desirous to determine again of the manner of her stealing away; to no less comfort to Basilius, who the sooner she was asleep, the sooner hoped to come by his long pursued prey. Thus both were bent to deceive each other, and to take the advantage of either other’s disadvantage. But Gynecia having taken Zelmane into her bed-chamber, to speak a little with her of their sweet determination; Zelmane upon a sudden, as though she had never thought of it before. “Now the Gods forbid,” said she, “so great a lady as you are should come to me; or that I should leave it to the hands of fortune, if by either the ill-governing of your passion, or your husband’s sudden waking, any danger might happen unto you: no, if there be any superiority in the points of true love, it shall be yours; if there be any danger, since myself am the author of this device, it is reason it should be mine. Therefore do you but leave with me the keys of the gate, and upon yourself take my upper garment, that if any of Dametas’s house see you they may think you be myself, and I will presently lie down in your place, so muffled for your supposed sickness, as the king shall nothing know me. And then as soon as he is asleep, will I, as it much better becomes me, wait upon you. But if the uttermost of mischiefs should happen, I can assure you the king’s life shall sooner pay for it than your honour.” And with the ending of her words she threw off her mantle, not giving Gynecia any space to take the full image of this new change into her fancy. But seeing no ready objection against it in her heart, and knowing that there was no time then to stand long disputing; besides remembering the giver was to order the manner of his gift, yielded quickly to this conceit, indeed not among the smallest causes tickled thereunto by a certain wanton desire that her husband’s deceit might be the more notable. In this sort did Zelmane nimbly disarraying herself, possess Gynecia’s place hiding her head in such a close manner, as grievous and over watched sickness is wont to invite to itself the solace of sleep. And of the other side the queen putting on Zelmane’s outmost apparel, went first into her closet, there quickly to beautify herself with the best and sweetest night-deckings. But there casting an hasty eye over her precious things, which ever since Zelmane’s coming, her head otherwise occupied, had left unseen, she happened to see a bottle of gold, upon which down along were graved these verses:

She remembered the bottle, for it had been kept of long time by the kings of Cyprus, as a thing of rare virtue, and given to {493} her by her mother, when she being very young married to her husband of much greater age, her mother persuaded it was of property to force love with love effects, had made a precious present of it to this her beloved child, though it had been received rather by tradition to have such a quality than by any approved experiment. This Gynecia (according to the common disposition, not only, though especially of wives, but of all other kinds of people, not to esteem much one’s own, but to think the labour lost employed about it) had never cared to give her husband, but suffered his affection to run according to his own scope. But now that love of her particular choice had awakened her spirits, and perchance the very unlawfulness of it had a little blown the coal, among her other ornaments with glad mind she took most part of this liquor, putting it into a fair cup all set with diamonds: for what dares not love undertake armed with the night, and provoked with lust? And thus down she went to the cave-ward, guided only by the moon’s fair shining, suffering no other thought to have any familiarity with her brains, but that which did present under her a picture of her approaching contentment. She that had long disdained this solitary life her husband had entered into, now wished it much more solitary, so she might only obtain the private presence of Zelmane. She that before would not have gone so far, especially by night, and to so dark a place, now took a pride in the same courage, and framed in her mind a pleasure out of the pain itself. Thus with thick doubled paces she went to the cave, receiving to herself, for her first contentment, the only lying where Zelmane had done; whose pillow she kissed a thousand times, for having born the print of that beloved head. And so keeping with panting heart her travelling fancies so attentive that the wind could stir nothing, but that she stirred herself, as if it had been the space of the longed for Zelmane, she kept her side of the bed, descending only and cherishing the other side with her arms, till after a while waiting, counting with herself how many steps were betwixt the lodge and the cave, and of accusing Zelmane of more curious stay than needed, she was visited with an unexpected guest.

For Basilius, after his wife was departed to her feigned repose, as long as he remained with his daughter, to give his wife time of unreadying herself, it was easily seen it was a very thorny abode he made there: and the discourses with which he entertained his daughter, not unlike to those of earnest players, when in the midst of their game, trifling questions be put unto them, his eyes still looking about, and himself still changing places, beginning to speak of a thing, and breaking it off before it were half done. To any speech Philoclea ministered unto him, {494} with a sudden starting and casting up his head, made an answer far out of all grammar; a certain deep musing, and by and by out of it: uncertain motions, unstayed graces. Having borne out the limit of a reasonable time, with as much pain as might be, he came darkling into his chamber, forcing himself to tread as softly as he could. But the more curious he was, the more he thought everything creaked under him; and his mind being out of the way with another thought, and his eyes not serving his turn in that dark place, each coffer or cupboard he met, one saluted his shins, another his elbows; sometimes ready in revenge to strike them again with his face. Till at length, fearing his wife were not fully asleep, he came lifting up the clothes as gently as I think poor Pan did, when, instead of Ioles’s bed, he came into the rough embracing of Hercules; and laying himself down, as tenderly as a new bride, rested a while with a very open ear, to mark each breath of his supposed wife. And sometimes he himself would yield a long-fetched sigh, as though that had been a music to draw on another to sleep, till within a very little while, with the other party’s well-counterfeit sleep, who was as willing to be rid of him as he was to be gone thence, assuring himself he left all safe there, in the same order stole out again, and putting on his night gown, with much groping and scrambling he got himself out of the little house, and then did the moonlight serve to guide his feet. Thus, with a great deal of pain, did Basilius go to her whom he fled, and with much cunning left the person for whom he had employed all his cunning. But when Basilius was once gotten, as he thought, into a clear coast, what joy he then made, how each thing seemed vile in his sight, in comparison of his fortune, how far already he deemed himself in the chief towers of his desires, it were tedious to tell: once his heart could not choose but yield this song, as a fairing of his contentment.

Thus imagining as then with himself, his joys so held him up, that he never touched ground. And like a right old beaten soldier, that knew well enough the greatest captains do never use long orations, when it comes to the very point of execution, as soon as he was gotten into the cave, to the joyful, though silent, expectation of Gynecia, come close to the bed, never recking his promise to look for nothing but conference, he leaped in that side reserved for a more welcome guest. And laying his loving’st hold upon Gynecia: “O Zelmane,” said he, “embrace in your favour this humble servant of yours: hold within me my heart, which pants to leave his master to come unto you.” In what case poor Gynecia was, when she knew the voice, and felt the body of her husband, fair ladies, it is better to know by imagination than experience. For straight was her mind assaulted, partly with the being deprived of her unquenched desire, but principally with the doubt that Zelmane had betrayed her to her husband, besides the renewed sting of jealousy, what in the meantime might befall her daughter. But of the other side her love with a fixed persuasion she had taught her to seek all reason of hopes. And therein thought best before discovering of herself, to mark the behaviour of her husband; who, both in deeds and words still using her, as taking her to be Zelmane, made Gynecia hope that this might be Basilius’s own enterprise, which Zelmane had not stayed, lest she should discover the matter which might be performed at another time. Which hope accompanied with Basilius’s manner of dealing, he being at that time fuller of livelier fancies than many years before he had been, besides the remembrance of her daughter’s sickness, and late strange countenance betwixt her and Zelmane, all coming together into her mind, which was loth to condemn itself of an utter overthrow, made her frame herself, not truly with a sugared joy, but with a determinate patience to let her husband think he had found a very gentle and supple-minded Zelmane; which he good man making full reckoning of, did melt in as much gladness as she was oppressed with divers ungrateful burdens.

But Pyrocles, who had at this present no more to play the part of Zelmane, having so naturally measured the manner of his breathing, that made no doubt of his sound sleeping, and lain a pretty while with the quiet unquietness to perform his intended enterprise, as soon as by the debate between Basilius’s shins and the unregarding forms, he perceived that he had fully left the {496} lodge: after him went he with his stealing steps, having his sword under his arm, still doubting lest some mischance might turn Basilius back again, down to the gate of the lodge. Which not content to lock fast, he barred and fortified with as many devices, as his wit and haste would suffer him, that so he might have full time both for making ready Philoclea, and conveying her to her horse, before any might come in to find them missing. For further ends of those ends, and what might ensue of this action, his love and courage well-matched never looked after, holding for an assured ground, that “whatsoever in great things will think to prevent all objections must lie still and do nothing.” This determination thus weighed, the first part was thus performed, up to Philoclea’s chamber door when Pyrocles, rapt from himself with the excessive fore-feeling of his, as he assured himself, near-coming contentment. Whatever pains he had taken, what dangers he had run into, and especially those saucy pages of love, doubts, griefs, languishing hopes, and threatening despairs, came all now to his mind, in one rank to beautify his expected blissfulness, and to serve for a most fit sauce, whose sourness might give a kind of life to the delightful cheer his imagination fed upon. All the great estate of his father, all his own glory, seemed unto him but a trifling pomp, whose good stands in other men’s conceit, in comparison of the true comfort he found in the depth of his mind, and the knowledge of any misery that might ensue his joyous adventure, was recked of but as a slight purchase of possessing the top of happiness; for so far were his thoughts passed through all perils, that already he conceived himself safely arrived with his lady at the stately palace of Pella, among the exceeding joys of his father, and infinite congratulations of his friends, giving order for the royal entertaining of Philoclea, and for sumptuous shows and triumphs, against their marriage. In the thought whereof as he found extremity of joy, so well found he that the extremity is not without a certain joyful pain, by extending the heart beyond his wonted limits, and by so forcible a holding all the senses to one object, that it confounds their mutual working, not without a charming kind of ravishing them from the free use of their own function. Thus grieved only with too much gladness, being come to the door which should be the entry to his happiness, he was met with the latter end of a song, which Philoclea like a solitary nightingale, bewailing her guiltless punishment, and helpless misfortune, had newly delivered over, meaning none should be judge of her passion, but her own conscience. The song having been accorded to a sweetly played on lute, contained these verses, which she had lately with some art curiously written, to enwrap her secret and resolute woes.

The force of love to those poor folk that feel it is many ways very strange, but no way stranger than that it doth so enchain the lover’s judgment upon her that holds the reins of his mind, that whatsoever she doth is ever in his eyes best. And that best, being the continual motion of our changing life, turned by her to any other thing that thing again becometh best. So that nature in each kind suffering but one superlative, the lover only admits no positive. If she sits still, that is best, for so is the conspiracy of her several graces, held best together to make one perfect figure of beauty. If she walk, no doubt that is best, for, besides, the making happy the more places by her steps, the very stirring adds a pleasing life to her native perfections. If she be silent, that without comparison is best, since by that means the untroubled eye most freely may devour the sweetness of his object. But if she speak, he will take it upon his death that is best, the quintessence of each word being distilled down into his affected soul: example of this was well to be seen in the given-over Pyrocles, who with panting breath, and sometimes sighs, not such as sorrow restraining the inward parts doth make them glad to deliver, but such as the impatience of delay, with the unsurety of never so sure hope, is {498} wont to breathe out. Now being at the door, of the one side hearing her voice, which he thought if the philosopher said true of the heavenly seven-sphered harmony, was by her not only represented, but far surmounted, and of the other having his eyes over-filled with her beauty, for the king at his parting had left the chamber open, and she at that time lay, as the heat of that country did well suffer, upon the top of her bed, having her beauties eclipsed with nothing but with a fair smock, wrought all in flames of ash-colour silk and gold lying so upon her right side, that the left thigh down to the foot, yielded his delightful proportion to the full view, which was seen by the help of a rich lamp, which through the curtains a little drawn cast forth a light upon her, as the moon doth when it shines into a thin wood: Pyrocles I say was stopped with the violence of so many darts cast by Cupid altogether upon him, that quite forgetting himself, and thinking therein already he was in the best degree of felicity, he would have lost much of his time, and with too much love omitted the enterprise undertaken for his love, had not Philoclea’s pitiful accusing of him forced him to bring his spirits again to a new bias; for she laying her hand under her fair cheek, upon which there did privily trickle the sweet drops of her delightful, though sorrowful tears, made these words wait upon her moanful song. “And hath that cruel Pyrocles,” said she, “deserved thus much of me, that I should for his sake lift up my voice in my best tunes, and to him continually, with pouring out my plaint, make a disdained oblation? shall my soul still do this honour to his unmerciful tyranny, by my lamenting his loss, to show his worthiness and my weakness? He hears thee not, simple Philoclea, he hears thee not; and if he did, some hearts grow the harder the more they find their advantage. Alas! what a miserable constitution of mind have I! I disdain my fortune, and yet reverence him that disdains me. I accuse his ungratefulness, and have his virtue in admiration. O ye deaf heavens, I would either his injury could blot out mine affection, or my affection could forget his injury.” With that giving a pitiful but sweet shriek, she took again the lute, and began to sing this sonnet, which might serve as an explaining to the other.

But Pyrocles, that had heard his name accused and condemned by the mouth, which of all the world, and more than all the world, he most loved, had then cause enough to call his mind to his home, and with the most haste he could, for true love fears the accident of an instant, to match the excusing of his fault, with declaration of his errand thither. And therefore blown up and down with as many contrary passions as Aeolus sent out winds upon the Trojan relics guided upon the sea by the valiant Aeneas, he went into her chamber with such a pace as reverend fear doth teach, where kneeling down, and having prepared a long discourse for her, his eyes were so filled with her sight, that as if they would have robbed all their fellows of their services, both his heart fainted, and his tongue failed in such sort that he could not bring forth one word, but referred her understanding to his eyes’ language. But she in extremity amazed to see him there, at so undue a season, and ashamed that her beautiful body made so naked a prospect, drawing in her delicate limbs into the weak guard of the bed, and presenting in her face to him such a kind of pitiful anger, as might show this was only a fault; therefore, because she had a former grudge unto him, turning away her face from him, she thus said unto him:

“O Zelmane or Pyrocles, for whether name I use, it much skills not, since by the one I was first deceived, and by the other now betrayed, what strange motion is the guide of thy cruel mind hither? Dost thou not think the day-torments thou hast given me sufficient, but that thou dost envy me the night’s quiet? Wilt thou give my sorrows no truce, but by making me see before mine eyes how much I have lost, offer me due cause of confirming my plaint? or is thy heart so full of rancour that thou dost desire to feed thine eyes with the wretched spectacle of thine overthrown enemy, and so to satisfy the full measure of thy undeserved rage with the receiving into thy sight the unrelievable ruins of my desolate life! O Pyrocles, Pyrocles, for thy own virtue’s sake, let miseries be no music unto thee, and be content to take to thyself some colour of excuse, that thou didst not know to what extremity thy inconstancy, or rather falsehood hath brought me.”

Pyrocles, to whom every syllable she pronounced was a thunderbolt to his heart, equally distracted betwixt amazement and sorrow, abashed to see such a stop of his desires, grieved {500} with her pain, but tormented to find himself the author of it, with quaking lips, and pale cheer, “Alas! divine lady,” said he, “your displeasure is so contrary to my desert, and your words so far beyond all expectations that I have least ability now I have most need to speak in the cause upon which my life dependeth. For my troth is so undoubtedly constant unto you, my heart is so assured a witness to itself, of his unspotted faith, that having no one thing in me, whereout any such sacrilege might arise; I have likewise nothing in so direct a thing to say for myself, but sincere and vehement protestations; for in truth there may most words be spent, where there is some probability to breed of both sides conjectural allegations. But so perfect a thing as my love is of you, as it suffers no question, so it seems to receive injury by any addition of any words unto it. If my soul could have been polluted with treachery it would likewise have provided for itself due furniture of colourable answers, but as it stood upon the naked conscience of his untouched duty, so I must confess it is altogether unarmed against so unjust a violence as you lay upon me. Alas! let not the pains I have taken to serve you, be now accounted injurious unto you, let not the dangerous cunning I have used to please you, be deemed a treason against you: since I have deceived them whom you fear for your sake, do not you destroy me for their sake; what can I without you further do? or to what more forwardness can any counsel bring our desired happiness? I have provided whatsoever is needful for our going, I have rid them both out of the lodge, so that there is none here to be hinderers or knowers of our departure, but only the almighty powers, whom I invoke as triers of mine innocency, and witnesses of my well-meaning. And if ever my thoughts did receive so much as a fainting in their affections, if they have not continually with more and more ardour from time to time pursued the possession of your sweetest favour, if ever in that possession they received either spot or falsehood, then let their most horrible plagues fall upon me, let mine eyes be deprived of the light, which did abase the heavenly beams that struck them, let my falsified tongue serve to no use but to bemoan mine own wretchedness, let my heart impoisoned with detestable treason, be the seat of infernal sorrow, let my soul with the endless anguish of his conscience become his own tormentor.” “O false mankind!” cried out the sweet Philoclea. “How can an imposthumed heart but yield forth evil matter by his mouth? are oaths there to be believed, where vows are broken? No, no, who doth wound the eternal justice of the gods, cares little for abusing their names, and who in doing wickedly doth not fear due recompensing plagues, doth little fear that invoking of plagues will make them come {501} ever a whit the sooner. But alas! what aileth this new conversation, have you yet another sleight to pay, or do you think to deceive me in Pyrocles’s form, as you have done in Zelmane’s: or rather, now you have betrayed me in both, is some third sex left you, to transform yourself into, to inveigle my simplicity? enjoy, enjoy the conquest you have already won: and assure yourself you are to come to the farthest point of your cunning. For my part, unkind Pyrocles, my only defence shall be belief of nothing, my comfort my faithful innocency, and the punishment I desire of you, shall be your own conscience.”

Philoclea’s hard persevering in this unjust condemnation of him, did so overthrow all the might of Pyrocles’s mind, who saw that time would not serve to prove by deeds, and that the better words he used, the more they were suspected of deceitful cunning. That void of all counsel, and deprived of all comfort, finding best deserts punished, and nearest hopes prevented, he did abandon the succour of himself, and suffered grief so to close his heart, that his breath failing him with a dreadful shutting of his eyes, he fell down at her bedside. Having had time to say no more but, “oh! whom dost thou kill Philoclea?” she that little looked for such an extreme event of her doings, started out of her bed, like Venus rising from her mother the sea, not so much stricken down with amazement and grief of her fault, as lifted up with the force of love, and desire to help, she laid her fair body over his breast, and throwing no other water in his face, but the stream of her tears, not giving him other blows, but the kissing of her well-formed mouth, her only cries were these lamentations: “O unfortunate suspicion,” said she, “the very mean to lose what we most suspect to lose. O unkind kindness of mine, which returns an imagined wrong with an effectual injury. O fool to make quarrel my supplication, or to use hate as the mediator of love: childish Philoclea, hast thou thrown away the jewel wherein all thy pride consisted? Hast thou with too much haste over-run thyself?” Then would she renew her kisses, and yet not finding the life return, redouble her plaints in this manner. “O divine soul,” said she, “whose virtue can possess no less than the highest place in heaven, if for mine eternal plague thou hast utterly left this most sweet mansion, before I follow thee with Thisbe’s punishment for my rash unweariness, hear this protestation of mine: that as the wrong I have done thee proceeded of a most sincere, but unresistable affection, so led with this pitiful example, it shall end in the mortal hate of myself, and, if it may be, I will make my soul a tomb of thy memory.” At that word with anguish of mind and weakness of body increased one by the other, and both augmented by this fearful accident, she had fallen down in a swoon, but that Pyrocles, {502} then first severing his eyelids and quickly apprehending her danger, to him more than death, beyond all powers striving to recover the commandment of all his powers, stayed her from falling, and then lifting the sweet burden of her body in his arms, laid her again in her bed. So that she, but then the physician, was now become the patient, and he to whom her weakness had been serviceable, was now enforced to do service to her weakness, which performed by him with that hearty care which the most careful love on the best loved subject in greatest extremity could employ, prevailed so far, that ere long she was able, though in strength exceedingly dejected, to call home her wandering senses, to yield attention to that her beloved Pyrocles had to deliver. But he lying down on the bed by her, holding her hand in his, with so kind an accusing her of unkindness, as in accusing her he condemned himself, began from point to point to discover unto her all that had passed between his loathed lovers and him. How he had entertained, and by entertaining deceived, both Basilius and Gynecia; and that with such a kind of deceit, as either might see the cause in the other, but neither espy the effect in themselves. That all his favours to them had tended only to make them strangers to this his action; and all his strangeness to her, to the final obtaining of her long promised, and now to be performed favour. Which device seeing it had so well succeeded to the removing all other hindrances, that only her resolution remained for the taking their happy journey, he conjured her by all the love she had ever borne him, she would make no longer delay to partake with him whatsoever honours the noble king of Macedon, and all other Euarchus’s dominions might yield him, especially since in this enterprise he had now waded so far, as he could not possibly retire himself back, without being overwhelmed with danger and dishonour: he needed not have used further persuasion: for that only conjuration had so forcibly bound all her spirits that could her body have seconded her mind, or her mind have strengthened her body, without respect of any worldly thing, but only fear to be again unkind to Pyrocles, she had condescended to go with him. But raising herself a little in her bed, and finding her own inability in any sort to endure the air: “My Pyrocles,” said she, with tearful eyes and a pitiful countenance, such as well witnessed she had no will to deny anything, she had power to perform, “if you can convey me hence in such plight as you see me, I am most willing to make my extremest danger a testimony, that I esteem no danger in regard of your virtuous satisfaction.” But she fainted so fast that she was not able to utter the rest of her conceived speech; which also turned Pyrocles’s thoughts from expecting further answer, to the necessary care of reviving her, in {503} whose fainting, himself was more than overthrown. And that having affected with all the sweet means his wits could devise, though his highest hopes were by this unexpected downfall sunk deeper than any degree of despair: yet lest the appearance of his inward grief might occasion her further discomfort, having wracked his face to a more comfortable semblance, he sought some show of reason, to show she had no reason, either for him, or for herself to be afflicted. Which in the sweet-minded Philoclea, whose consideration was limited by his words, and whose conceit pierced no deeper than his outward countenance, wrought within a while such quietness of mind, and that quietness again such repose of body, that sleep by his harbinger’s weakness, weariness, and watchfulness, had quickly taken up his lodging in all her senses. Then indeed had Pyrocles leisure to sit in judgment on himself, and to hear his reason accuse his rashness, who, without forecast of doubt, without knowledge of his friend, without acquainting Philoclea with his purpose, or being made acquainted with her present estate, had fallen headlong into that attempt, the success whereof he had long since set down to himself as the measure of all his other fortunes. But calling to mind how weakly they do, that rather find fault with what cannot be mended than seek to amend wherein they have been faulty: he soon turned him from remembering what might have been done, to considering what was now to be done, and when that consideration failed, what was now to be expected. Wherein having run over all the thoughts, his reason, called to the strictest accounts, could bring before him, at length he lighted on this. That as long as Gynecia betrayed not the matter, which he thought she would not do, as well for her own honour and safety, as for the hope she might still have of him, which is loth to die in a lover’s heart, all the rest might turn to a pretty merriment, and inflame his lover Basilius, again to cast about for the missed favour. And as naturally the heart stuffed up with woefulness, is glad greedily to suck the thinnest air of comfort, so did he at first embrace this conceit, as offering great hope, if not assurance of well-doing, till looking more nearly into it, and not able to answer the doubts and difficulties he saw therein more and more arising, the night being also far spent, his thoughts even weary of his own burdens, fell to a straying kind of uncertainty; and his mind standing only upon the nature of inward intelligences, left his body to give a sleeping respite to his vital spirits, which he according to the quality of sorrow received with greater greediness than ever in his life before: according to the nature of sorrow, I say, which is past care’s remedy; for care stirring the brains, and making thin the spirits, breaketh rest: but those griefs wherein one is determined there is no preventing, {504} do breed a dull heaviness which easily clothes itself in sleep, so as laid down so near, the beauty of the word, Philoclea, that their necks were subjects each to other’s chaste embracements, it seemed love had come thither to lay a plot in that picture of death, how gladly, if death came, their souls would go together.

THE THIRD ECLOGUES

Thyrsis not with many painted words nor falsified promises had won the consent of his beloved Kala, but with a true and simple making her know he loved her, not forcing himself beyond his reach to buy her affection, but giving her such pretty presents, as neither could weary him with the giving, nor shame her for the taking. Thus, the first strawberries he could find, were ever in a clean washed dish, sent to Kala; thus posies of the spring flowers were wrapped up in a little green silk, and dedicated to Kala’s breasts; thus sometimes his sweetest cream, sometimes the best cakebread his mother made, were reserved for Kala’s taste. Neither would he stick to kill a lamb when she would be content to come over the way unto him. But then lo, how the house was swept, and rather no fire than any smoke left to trouble her. Then love songs were not dainty, when she would hear them, and as much mannerly silence, when she would not: in going to church great worship to Kala. So that all the parish said, never a maid they knew so well waited on: and when dancing was about the may-pole, nobody taken out but she, and he after a leap or two to show her his own activity, would frame all the rest of his dancing only to grace her. As for her father’s sheep, he had no less care of them than his own: so that she might play her as she would, warranted with Thyrsis’s carefulness. But if he spied Kala favoured any one of the flock more than his fellows, then that was cherished: shearing him so (when shorn he must be) as might most become him: but while the wood was on, wrapped within it some verses, wherein Thyrsis had a special gift, and making the innocent beast his unweeting messenger. Thus constantly continuing, though he were none of the fairest, at length he won Kala’s heart, the honestest wench in all those quarters. And so with consent of both parents, without which neither Thyrsis would ask, nor Kala grant, their marrying day was appointed, which because it fell out in this time I think it shall not be impertinent, to remember a little our shepherds, while the other great persons, are either sleeping or otherwise troubled. Thyrsis’s marriage-time once known, there needed no inviting of the neighbours in that valley, for so well was {505} Thyrsis beloved, that they were all ready to do him credit, neither yet came they like harpies to devour him; but one brought a fat pig, the other a tender kid, the third a great goose; as for cheese, milk and butter, were the gossips’ presents. Thither came of strange shepherds only the melancholy Philisides; for the virtuous Corydon had long since left off all joyful solemnities. And as for Strephon and Claius, they had lost their mistress, which put them into such extreme sorrows, as they could scarcely abide the light of the day, much less the eyes of men. But of the Arcadian born shepherds, thither came good old Geron, young Histor, though unwilling, and upright Dicus, merry Pas, and jolly Nico. As for Dametas, they durst not presume, his pride was such, to invite him, and Dorus they found might not be spared. And thereunder a bower was made of boughs, for Thyrsis’s house was not able to receive them, every one placed according to his age. The women, for such was the manner of the country, kept together to make good cheer among themselves, from which otherwise a certain painful modesty restrains them, and there might the sadder matrons give good counsel to Kala, who poor fool wept for fear of that she desired. But among the shepherds was all honest liberty, no fear of dangerous telltales, who hunt greater preys, nor indeed minds in them to give telltales any occasion, but one questioning with another of the manuring his ground, and governing his flock, the highest point they reached to, was, to talk of the holiness of marriage; to which purpose, as soon as their sober dinner was ended, Dicus instead of thanks, sung this song, with a clear voice and cheerful countenance.

“Truly Dicus,” said Nico, “although thou didst not grant me the prize the last day, when undoubtedly I won it, yet must I needs say thou for thy part hast sung well and thriftily.” Pas straight desired all the company they would bear witness that Nico had once in his life spoken wise: “For,” said he, “I will tell it his Father, who will be a glad man when he hears such news.” “Very true,” said Nico, “but indeed so would not thine in like case, for he would look thou should’st live but one hour longer {508} than a discreet word wandered out of thy mouth.” “And I pray thee,” said Pas, “gentle Nico, tell me, what mischance it was that brought thee to taste so fine a meat?” “Marry goodman blockhead,” said Nico, “because he speaks against jealousy, the filthy traitor to true affection, and yet disguising itself in the raiment of love.” “Sentences, sentences,” cried Pas. “Alas, how ripe witted these young folks be nowadays but well counselled shall that husband be, when this man comes to exhort him not to be jealous.” “And so shall he,” answered Nico, “for I have seen a fresh example, though it be not very fit to be known.” “Come, come,” said Pas, “be not so squeamish, I know thou longest more to tell it than we to hear it.” But for all his words, Nico, would not bestow his voice, till he was generally entreated of all the rest. And then with a merry marriage-look he sung this following discourse, for with a better grace he could sing than tell.

“Behold,” said Pas, “a whole dicker of wit: he had picked out such a tale with intention to keep a husband from jealousy, which was enough to make a sanctified husband jealous, to see subtilities so much in the feminine gender. But,” said he, “I will strike Nico dead, with the wise words that shall flow out of my gorge.” And without further entreaty thus sang:

“Well concluded,” said Nico, “when he hath done all, he leaves the matter to his wife’s discretion. Now whensoever thou marriest, let her discretion deck thy head with Actaeon’s ornament.” Pas {512} was so angry with his wish, being indeed towards marriage, that they might perchance have fallen to buffets, but that Dicus desired Philisides, who as a stranger sat among them, revolving in his mind all the tempests of evil fortune he had passed, that he would do so much grace to the company, as to sing one of his country songs. Philisides, knowing it no good manners to be squeamish of his coming, having put himself into their company, without further study began to utter that, wherewith his thoughts were then, as always, most busied: and to show what a stranger he was to himself, spoke of himself, as of a third person in this sort:

The whole company would gladly have taken this occasion of requesting Philisides in plainer sort to discover unto them his estate. Which he willing to prevent, as knowing the relation thereof more fit for funerals than the time of a marriage, began to sing this song he had learned before he had ever subjected his thoughts to acknowledge no master, but a mistress.

According to the nature of divers ears, divers judgments soon followed: some praising his voice, others his words fit to frame a pastoral style, others the strangeness of the tale, and scanning what he should mean by it. But old Geron, who had borne him a grudge ever since in one of their eclogues he had taken him up over-bitterly, took hold of this occasion to make his revenge, and said, he never saw a thing worse proportioned, than to bring in a {519} tale of he knew not what beasts at such a sport-meeting, when rather some song of love, or matter for joyful melody was to be brought forth. “But,” said he, “this is the right conceit of young men, who think then they speak wiseliest, when they cannot understand themselves.” But little did the melancholic shepherd regard either his dispraises, or the other’s praises, who had set the foundation of his honour there, where he was most despised. And therefore he returning again to the train of his desolate pensiveness, Geron invited Histor to answer him in eclogue-wise; who indeed having been long in love with the fair Kala, and now by Lalus over-gone, was grown into a detestation of marriage. But thus it was.

He spoke these words with such affection, as a curious eye might easily have perceived he liked Thyrsis’ fortune better than he loved his person. But then indeed did all arise, and went to the women, where spending all the day, and good part of the night in dancing, carolling and wassailing; lastly, they left Thyrsis, where he long desired to be left, and with many unfeigned thanks returned every man to his home. But some of them having to cross the way of the two lodges, might see a lady making doleful lamentation over a body which seemed dead unto them. But methinks Dametas cries unto me, if I come not the sooner to comfort him, he will leave off his golden work, that hath already cost him so much labour and longing.

ARCADIA
BOOK IV

The almighty wisdom evermore delighting to show the world that by unlikeliest means greatest matters may come to conclusion; that human reason may be the more humbled, and more willingly give place to divine providence; as at the first it brought in Dametas to play a part in this royal pageant, so having continued him still an actor, now that all things were grown ripe for an end, made his folly the instrument of revealing that which far greater cunning had sought to conceal. For so it fell out that Dametas having spent the whole day in breaking up the cumbersome work of the pastor Dorus, and feeling in all his labour no pain so much as that his hungry hopes received any stay, having with the price of much sweat and weariness gotten up the huge stone, which he thought should have such a golden lining, the good man in the great bed that stone had made, found nothing but these two verses written upon a broad piece of vellum.

What an inward discontentment it was to master Dametas, to find his hope of wealth turned to poor verses, for which he never cared much, nothing can describe, but either the feeling in one’s self the state of such a mind Dametas had, or at least the bethinking what was Midas’s fancy, when after the great pride he conceived to be made judge between the Gods, he was rewarded with the ornament of an ass’s ears. Yet the deep apprehension he had received of such riches, could not so suddenly lose the colour that had so thoroughly dyed his thick brain, but that he turned and tossed the poor bowels of the innocent earth, till the {524} coming on of the night, and the tediousness of his fruitless labour made him content rather to exercise his discontentation at home than there. But forced he was, his horse being otherwise burdened with digging instruments, to return as he came, most part of the way on foot, with such grudging lamentations as a nobler mind would, but more nobly, make for the loss of his mistress. For so far had he fed his foolish soul with the expectation of that which he reputed felicity, that he no less accounted himself miserable, than if he had fallen from such an estate his fancy had embraced. So then home again went Dametas, punished in conceit, as in conceit he had erred, till he found himself there from a fancied loss fallen to essential misery: for entering into his house three hours before night, instead of the lightsome countenance of Pamela, which gave such an inward decking to that lodge, as proudest palaces might have cause to envy it, and of the grateful conversation of Dorus, whose witty behaviour made that loneliness to seem full of good company, instead of the loud scolding of Miso, and the busy rumbling up and down of Mopsa, which though they were so short, as quite contrary to the others’ praiseworthiness, yet were they far before them in filling of a house, he found nothing but a solitary darkness, which as naturally it breeds a kind of irksome ghastfulness, so it was to him a most present terror, remembering the charge he had left behind, which he well knew imported no less than his life unto him. Therefore lighting a candle, there was no place a mouse could have dwelled in but that he with quaking diligence sought into. But when he saw he could see nothing of that he most cared for, then became he the right pattern of a wretch dejected with fear: for crying and howling, knocking his head to the wall, he began to make pitiful complaints, where nobody could hear him: and, with too much dread he should not recover her, leave all consideration how to recover her. But at length looking like a she-goat when she casts her kid, for very sorrow he took in his own behalf, out of the lodge he went running as hard as he could, having now received the very form of hanging into his consideration. Thus running, as a man that would gladly have run from himself, it was his foolish fortune to espy, by the glimmering light the moon did then yield him, one standing aloft among the boughs of a fair ash. He that would have asked counsel at that time of a dog, cast up his face, as if his tooth had been drawing; and with much bending his sight, perceived it was Mopsa, fitly seated there for her wit and dignity. There, I will not say with joy, for how could he taste of joy, whose imagination was fallen from a palace to the gallows? But yet with some refreshing of comfort, in hopes he should learn better tidings of her, he began to cry out, {525} “O Mopsa, my beloved chicken, here am I thine own father Dametas, never in such a towardness of hanging if thou canst not help me.” But never a word could his eloquence procure of Mopsa, who indeed was there attending for greater matters. This was yet a new burden to poor Dametas, who thought all the world was conspiring against him, and therefore with a silly choler he began another tune. “Thou vile Mopsa,” said he, “now the vengeance of my fatherly curse overthwart thee if though do not straightways answer me.” But neither blessing nor cursing could prevail. Mopsa, who was now great with child with the expectation of her may-game hopes did long to be delivered with the third time of being named. Which by and by followed, for Dametas rubbing his elbow, stamping and whining, seeing neither of these take place, he began to throw stones at her, and withal to conjure her by the name of hellish Mopsa. But when he had named her the third time, no chime can more suddenly follow the striking of a clock, than she verily thinking it was the god that used her father’s voice, throwing her arms abroad, and not considering that she was muffled upon so high a tree, came fluttering down like a hooded hawk, likely enough to have broken her neck but that the tree full of boughs tossed her from one bough to another, and lastly, well bruised, brought her to receive an unfriendly salutation of the earth. Dametas, as soon as she was down, came running to her, and finding her so close wrapt, pulled off the scarlet cloak, in good time for her, for with the soreness of the fall, if she had not had breath given her, she had delivered a foolish soul to Pluto.

But when Dametas began afresh to desire his daughter not to forget the pains he had taken for her in her childhood, which he was sure she could remember, and to tell where Pamela was. “O good Apollo,” said Mopsa, “if ever thou didst bear love to Phaeton’s mother let me have a king to my husband.” “Alas, what speakest thou of Phaeton?” said Dametas. “If by thy circumspect means I find not out Pamela, thy father will be hanged to-morrow.” “It is no matter though he be hanged,” answered Mopsa, “do but thou make Dorus a king, and let him be my husband, good Apollo, for my courage doth much prick me toward him.” “Ah Mopsa,” cried out Dametas, “where is thy wit? Dost thou not know thy father? How hast thou forgotten thyself?” “I do not ask wit of thee, mine own God,” said she, “but I see thou wouldst have me remember my father, and indeed forget myself. No, no, a good husband.” “Thou shalt have thy fill of husbands,” said Dametas, “and do but answer me my question.” “O I thank thee,” said Mopsa, “with all my heart heartily, but let them be all kings.” Dametas seeing no other {526} way prevail, fell down on his knees, “Mopsa, Mopsa,” said he, “do not thus cruelly torment me; I am already wretched enough, alas! either help me, or tell me thou canst not.” She that would not be behind Apollo in courtesy, kneeled down on the other side; “I will never leave tormenting thee,” said Mopsa, “until thou hast satisfied my longing; but I will proclaim thee a promise-breaker, that even Jupiter shall hear it.” “Now by the fostering thou hast received in this place, save my life,” said Dametas. “Now by the fair ash,” answered Mopsa, “where thou didst receive so great a good turn, grant post haste to my burning fancy.” “O where is Pamela?” said Dametas. “O a lusty husband,” said Mopsa. Dametas, who now verily assured himself his daughter was mad, began utterly to despair of his life; and therefore amazedly catching her in his arms, to see whether he could bring her to herself, he felt the weight of a great cudgel light upon his shoulder, and for the first greeting he knew his wife Miso’s voice, by the calling him ribald villain, and asking him whether she could not serve his turn as well as Charita? For Miso having, according to Dorus’s counsel, gone to Mantinea, and there harboured herself in an old acquaintance’s house of hers, as soon as ten of the clock had stricken (where she had remained closely all that while, I think with such an amiable cheer, as when jealous Juno sat cross-legged to hinder the child-birth of her husband’s love) with open mouth she went to the magistrate appointed over such matters, and there, with the most scolding invective, her rage rather than eloquence could bring forth, she required his aid to take Dametas, who had left his duty to the king and his daughter, to commit adultery in the house of Charita’s uncle, in the Oudemian Street. But neither was the name of Charita remembered, nor any such street known. Yet such was the general mislike all men had of Dametas’s unworthy advancement, that every man was glad to make himself a minister of that which might redound to his shame; and therefore, with panic cries and laughters, there was no suspected place in all the city but was searched for under the title of Dametas, Miso ever foremost, encouraging them with all the shameful blazings of his demeanour, increasing the sport of hunting her husband, with her diligent barking, till at length, having done both him and herself as much infamous shame as such a tongue in such an action might perform, in the end not being able to find a thing that was not, to her mare again she went, having neither suspicion nor rage anything mitigated. But, leaving behind her a sufficient comedy of her tragical fancies, away homeward she came, imputing the not finding her husband, to any chance rather than to his innocency. For her heart being apt to receive and nourish a bitter thought, it had so swallowed {527} up a determinate condemnation, that in the very anatomy of her spirits one should have found nothing but devilish disdain, and hateful jealousy. In this sort grunting out her mischievous spite, she came by the tree, even as Dametas was making that ill-understood intercession to his foolish Mopsa. As soon as she heard her husband’s voice, she verily thought she had her play; and therefore stealing from her mare as softly as she could, she came creeping and halting behind him, even as he (thinking his daughter’s little wits had quite left her great noll) began to take her in his arms, thinking perchance her feeling sense might call her mind’s parts unto her. But Miso, who saw nothing but through the choler of revengeful anger, established upon the fore-judgment of his trespass, undoubtedly resolving that Mopsa was Charita, Dorus had told her of, mumping out her hoarse chafe, she gave him the wooden salutation you heard of; Dametas, that was not so sensible in anything as in blows, turned up his blubbered face like a great lout new whipped: “Alas! thou woman,” said he, “what hath thy poor husband deserved to have his own ill luck loaden with displeasure? Pamela is lost, Pamela is lost.” Miso still holding on the course of her former fancy, “What tellest thou me, naughty varlet, of Pamela; Dost thou think that doth answer me for abusing the laws of marriage? Have I brought thee children, have I been a true wife unto thee, to be despised in mine old age?” And ever among she would sauce her speeches with such bastinadoes, that poor Dametas began now to think, that either a general madding was fallen, or else that all this was but a vision. But as for visions the smart of the cudgel put out of his fancy; and therefore again turning to his wife, not knowing what in the world she meant, “Miso,” said he, “hereafter thou mayest examine me, do but now tell me what is become of Pamela.” “I will first examine this drab,” said she, and withal let fall her staff as hard as she could upon Mopsa, still taking her for Charita. But Mopsa that was already angry, thinking that she had hindered her from Apollo, leaped up and caught her by the throat, like to have strangled her, but that Dametas from a condemned man was fain to become a judge, and part this fray, such a picture of rude discord, where each was out with the other two. And then getting the opportunity of their falling out to hold himself in surety, who was indeed the veriest coward of the three, he renewed his earnest demand of them.

But it was a sport to see, how the former conceits Dorus had printed in their imaginations, kept still such dominion in them, that Miso, though now she found and felt it was her daughter Mopsa, yet did Charita continually pass through her thoughts, {528} which she uttered with such crabbed questions to Dametas, that he not possibly conceiving any part of her doubt, remained astonished, and the astonishment increased her doubt. And as for Mopsa, as first she did assuredly take him to be Apollo, and thought her mother’s coming did but mar the bargain: so now much talking to and fro had delivered so much light into the misty mould of her capacity, as to know him to be her father. Yet remained there such footsteps of the foretaken opinion that she thought verily her father and mother were hasted thither to get the first wish. And therefore to whatsoever they asked of her, she would never answer, but embracing the tree, as if she feared it had been running away, “Nay,” says she, “I will have the first wish, for I was here first;” which they understood no more than Dametas did what Miso meant by Charita; till at length with much urging them, being indeed better able to persuade both, than to meet hand to hand with either, he prevailed so much with them, as to bring them into the lodge to see what loss their negligence had suffered. Then indeed the near neighbourhood they bare to themselves, made them leave other toys, and look into what dangerous plight they were all fallen, as soon as the king should know his daughter’s escape. And as for the women, they began afresh to enter into their brawling, whether were in the fault. But Dametas, who did fear that among his other evils, the thunderbolt of that storm would fall upon his shoulders, slipped away from them, but with so maugre a cheer, as might much sooner engender laughter than pity. “O true Arcadia,” would he say (tearing his hair and beard, and sometime for too much woe, making unwieldy former-faults) “how darest thou bear upon thee such a felonious traitor as I am? And, you false-hearted trees, why would you make no noise to make her ungracious departure known? Ah Pamela, Pamela, how often when I brought thee in fine poesies of all coloured flowers, wouldst thou clap me on the cheek, and say thou wouldst be one day even with me? Was this thy meaning, to bring me to an even pair of gallows? ah ill-taught Dorus, that camest hither to learn good manners of me? did I ever teach thee to make thy master sweat out his heart for nothing, and in the meantime to run away with thy mistress? O my dun cow, I did think some evil was towards me ever since the last day thou didst run away from me, and held up thy tail so pitifully: did I not see an eagle kill a cuckoo, which was a plain foretoken unto me, Pamela should be my destruction? O wise Miso, if I durst say it to thy face, why didst thou suspect thy husband that loveth a piece of cheese better than a woman? and thou little Mopsa, that shall inherit the shame of thy father’s death, was it time for thee to climb trees, which should so shortly be my best burial? O that {529} I could live without death, or die before I were aware! O heart, why hast thou no hands at commandment to dispatch thee? O hands, why want you a heart to kill this villain?” In this sort did he inveigh against everything, sometimes thinking to run away, while it was yet night: but he that had included all the world within his sheep-cote, thought that worse than any death; sometime for dread of hanging he meant to hang himself; finding, as indeed it is, that fear is far more painful to cowardice, than death to a true courage.

But his fingers were nothing nimble in that action, and anything was let enough thereto, he being a true lover of himself without any rival. But, lastly, guided by a far greater constellation than his own, he remembered to search the other lodge, where it might be Pamela that night had retired herself. So thither with trembling hams he carried himself; but employing his double key, which the king for special credit had unworthily bestowed upon him, he found all the gates so barred, that his key could not prevail, saving only one trap door which went down into the vault by the cellar, which as it was unknown of Pyrocles, so had he left it unregarded. But Dametas, that ever knew the buttery better than any other place, got in that way, and passing softly to Philoclea’s chamber, where he thought most likely to find Pamela; the door being left open, he entered in, and by the light of the lamp he might discern one on the bed by her; which although he took to be Pamela, yet thinking no surety enough in a matter touching his neck, he went hard to the bedside of these unfortunate lovers, who at that time being not much before the break of day (whether it were they were so divinely surprised, to bring this whole matter to the destined conclusion, or that the unresistable force of their sorrows had overthrown the wakeful use of their senses) were as then possessed with a mutual sleep, yet not forgetting with viny embracements to give any eye a perfect model of affection. But Dametas looking with the lamp in his hand, but neither with such a face nor mind upon these excellent creatures, as Psyche did upon her unknown lover, and giving every way freedom to his fearful eyes, did not only perceive it was Zelmane, and therefore much different from the lady he sought: but that this same Zelmane did more differ from the Zelmane he and others had ever taken her for, wherein the change of her apparel chiefly confirmed his opinion; satisfied with that, and not thinking it good to awake the sleeping lion, he went down again, taking with him Pyrocles’s sword (wherewith upon his slight under-suit Pyrocles came only apparelled thither) being sure to leave no weapon in the chamber, and so making the doors as fast as he could on the outside, hoping with the revealing of this, as he {530} thought greater fault, to make his own the less, or at least that this injury would so fill the king’s head, that he should not have leisure to chastise his negligence (like a fool, not considering, that the more rage breeds the crueller punishment), he went first into the king’s chamber, and not finding him there, he ran down crying with open mouth, the king was betrayed, and that Zelmane did abuse his daughter. The noise he made, being a man of no few words, joined to the yelping sound of Miso, and his unpleasant inheritrix, brought together some number of the shepherds, to whom he without any regard of reserving it for the king’s knowledge, spattered out the bottom of his stomach, swearing by him that he never knew that Zelmane, whom they had taken all the while to be a woman, was as arrant a man as himself was, whereof he had seen sufficient signs and tokens, and that he was as close as a butterfly with the lady Philoclea.

The poor men jealous of their prince’s honour, were ready with weapons to have entered the lodge; standing yet in some pause, whether it were not best, first to hear some news from the king himself, when by the sudden coming of other shepherds, which with astonished looks ran from the one cry to the other, their griefs were surcharged with the evil tidings of the king’s death. Turning therefore all their minds and eyes that way, they ran to the cave where they said he lay dead, the sun beginning now to send some promises of coming light, making haste, I think, to be a spectator of the following tragedies. For Basilius having passed over the night more happy in contemplation than action, having had his spirits sublimed with the sweet imagination of embracing the most desired Zelmane, doubting lest the cave’s darkness might deceive him in the day’s approach, thought it now season to return to his wedlock-bed, remembering the promises he had made to Zelmane, to observe true orders towards Gynecia. Therefore departing, but not departing without bequeathing by a will of words, sealed with many kisses, a full gift of all his love and life to his misconceived bedfellow, he went to the mouth of the cave, there to apparel himself; in which doing, the motion of his joy could not be bridled from uttering such like words: “Blessed be thou, O night,” said he, “that hast with thy sweet wings shrouded me in the vale of bliss, it is thou that art the first gotten child of time, the day hath been but an usurper upon thy delightful inheritance, thou invitest all living things to comfortable rest, thou art the stop of strife, and the necessary truce of approaching battles.” And therewith he sung these verses to confirm his former praises.

And yet further would his joys needs break forth. “O Basilius,” said he, “the rest of thy time hath been but a dream unto thee; it is now only thou beginnest to live, now only thou hast entered into the way of blissfulness. Should fancy of marriage keep me from this paradise? or opinion of I know not what promise bind me from paying the right duties to nature and affection? O who would have thought there could have been such difference betwixt women? Be jealous no more, O Gynecia, but yield to the pre-eminence of more excellent gifts, support thyself with such marble pillars as she doth, deck thy breast with those alabaster bowls that Zelmane doth; then accompanied with such a title, perhaps thou mayest recover the possession of my otherwise inclined love. But alas! Gynecia thou canst not show such evidence, therefore thy plea is vain.” Gynecia heard all this he said, who had cast about her Zelmane’s garment, wherein she came thither, and had followed Basilius to the cave entry, full of inward vexation, betwixt the deadly accusation of her own guiltiness, and the spiteful doubt she had Zelmane had abused her. But because of the one side, finding the king did think her to be Zelmane, she had liberty to imagine it might rather be the king’s own unbridled enterprise, which had barred Zelmane, than Zelmane’s cunning deceiving of her; and that of the other, if she should headily seek a violent revenge, her own honour might be as much interested, as Zelmane endangered; she fell to this determination: First with fine handling of the king to settle in him a perfect good opinion of her, and then as she should learn how things had passed, to take into herself new devised counsel: but this being her first action, having given unlooked for attendance to the king, she heard with what partiality he did prefer her to herself, she saw in him how much fancy doth {532} not only darken reason, but beguile sense, she found opinion mistress of the lover’s judgment, which serving as a good lesson to her good conceit, she went out to Basilius, setting herself in a grave behaviour and stately silence before him; until he (who at the first thinking her by so much shadow as he could see to be Zelmane, was beginning his loving ceremonies) did now being helped by the peeping light wherewith the morning did overcome the night’s darkness, know her face and his error, which acknowledging in himself with starting back from her, she thus with a modest bitterness spoke unto him: “Alas! my Lord, well did your words decipher your mind, and well be those words confirmed with this gesture. Very loathsome must that woman be from whom a man hath cause to go back; and little better liked is that wife, before whom the husband prefers them he never knew. Alas! hath my faithful observing my part of duty made you think yourself ever a whit the more exempted? hath that which should claim gratefulness, been a cause of contempt? Is the being mother of Pamela become an odious name unto you? if my life hitherto led have not avoided suspicion, if my violated truth to you be deserving of any punishment, I refuse not to be chastised with the most cruel torment of your displeasure; I refuse not misery, purchased by mine own merit. Hard I must needs say (although till now I never thought I should have had cause to say) is the destiny of womankind, the trial of whose virtue must stand upon the loving of them that employ all their industry not to be beloved. If Zelmane’s young years had not had so much gravity hidden under a youthful face, as your gray hairs have been but the vizor of unfitting youthfulness, your vicious mind had brought some fruits of repentance, and Gynecia might then have been with much more right so basely despised.”

Basilius, that was more ashamed to see himself overtaken, than Vulcan was, when with much cunning he proved himself a cuckold, began to make certain extravagant excuses: but the matter in itself hardly brooking any purgation, with the suddenness of the time, which barred any good conjoined invention, made him sometimes allege one thing, to which by and by, he would bring in a contrary, one time with flat denial, another time with mitigating the fault; now brave, then humble, use such a stammering defensive that Gynecia, the violence of whose sore indeed ran another way, was content thus to fasten up the last stitch of her anger. “Well, well, my Lord,” said she, “it shall well become you to govern yourself, as you may be fit rather to direct me than to be judged of me, and rather to be a wise master of me, that an unskilful pleader before me. Remember the wrong you have done, is not only to me, but to your children whom you {533} had of me: to your country, when they shall find they are commanded by him that cannot command his own indecent appetites: lastly, to yourself, since with these pains you do but build up a house of shame to dwell in: if from those movable goods of nature (wherewith, in my first youth my royal parents bestowed me upon you) bearing you children, and increase of years have withdrawn me, consider I pray you that as you are the cause of the one, so in the other, time hath not left to work his never-failing effects in you. Truly, truly, Sir, very untimely are these fires in you; it is time for us both to let reason enjoy his due sovereignty. Let us not plant anew those weeds, which by nature’s course are content to fade.”

Basilius that would rather than his life the matter had been ended, the best rhetoric he had, was flat demanding pardon of her, swearing it was the very force of Apollo’s destiny which had carried him thus from his own bias; but that now like as far travellers were taught to love their own country, he had such a lesson without book, of affection unto her, as he would repay the debt of this error with the interest of a great deal more true honour than ever before he had done her. “Neither am I to give pardon to you, my Lord,” said she, “nor you to bear honour to me. I have taken this boldness for the unfeigned love I owe unto you, to deliver my sorrow unto you; much more for the care I have of your well-doing, than for any other self-fancy. For well I know that by your good estate my life is maintained, neither, if I would, can I separate myself from your fortune. For my part therefore I claim nothing but that which may be safest for yourself; my life, will, honour, and whatsoever else, shall be but a shadow of that body.” How much Basilius’s own shame had found him culpable, and had already even in soul read his own condemnation, so much did this unexpected mildness of Gynecia captive his heart unto her, which otherwise perchance would have grown to a desperate carelessness. Therefore embracing her, and confessing that her virtue shined in his vice, he did even with a true resolved mind vow unto her, that as long as he, unworthy of her, did live, she should be the furthest and only limit of his affection. He thanked the destinies that had wrought her honour out of his shame, and that made his own striving to go amiss, to be the best means ever after to hold him in the right path. Thus reconciled to Basilius’s great contentation, who began something to mark himself in his own doings his hard hap guided his eye to the cup of gold wherein Gynecia had put the liquor meant for Zelmane, and having failed of that guest, was now carrying it home again. But he whom perchance sorrow, perchance some long disaccustomed pains, had made extremely thirsty, took it out of her hands, although she {534} directly told him both of whom she had it, what the effect of it was, and the little proof she had seen thereof: hiding nothing from him, but that she meant to minister it to another patient. But the king, whose belly had no ears, and much drought kept from the desiring a taster, finding it not unpleasant to his palate, drank it almost off, leaving very little to cover the cup’s bottom. But within a while that from his stomach the drink had delivered to his principal veins his noisome vapours, first with a painful stretching, and forced yawning, then with a dark yellowness dying his skin, and a cold deadly sweat principally about his temples, his body by natural course longing to deliver his heavy burden to his earthly dam, wanting force in his knees, which utterly abandoned him, with a heavy fall gave some proof whether the operation of that unknown potion tended. For, with pang-like groans, and ghastly turning of his eyes, immediately all his limbs stiffened, and his eyes fixed, he having had time to declare his case only in these words: “O Gynecia, I die; have care.” Of what, or how much further he would have spoken, no man can tell: For Gynecia having well perceived the changing of his colour, and those other evil signs, yet had not looked for such a sudden overthrow, but rather had bethought herself what was best for him, when she suddenly saw the matter come to that period, coming to him, and neither with any cries getting a word of him, nor with any other possible means, able to bring any living action from him; the height of all ugly sorrows did so horribly appear before her amazed mind, that at the first it did not only distract all power of speech from her, but almost wit to consider, remaining as it were quick buried in a grave of miseries. Her painful memory had straight filled her with the true shapes of all the fore-past mischiefs; her reason began to cry out against the filthy rebellion of sinful sense, and to tear itself with anguish for having made so weak a resistance, her conscience a terrible witness of the inward wickedness, still nourishing this debateful fire; her complaint now not having an end to be directed unto, from something to disburthen sorrow, but a necessary downfall of inward wretchedness. She saw the rigour of the laws was like to lay a shameful death upon her, which being for that action undeserved, made it the more insupportable, and yet in depth of her soul most deserved, made it more miserable. At length, letting her tongue go as dolorous thoughts guided it, she thus with lamentable demeanour spoke:

“O bottomless pit of sorrow, in which I cannot contain myself, having the firebrands of all furies within me, still falling, and yet by the infiniteness of it never fallen. Neither can I rid myself, being fettered with the everlasting consideration of it. For {535} whither should I recommend the protection of my dishonored fall? to the earth? it hath no life, and waits to be increased by the relics of my shamed carcass: to men? who are always cruel in their neighbour’s faults, and make others’ overthrow become the badge of their ill-masked virtue? to the heavens? O unspeakable torment of conscience, which dare not look unto them. No sin can enter there, O there is no receipt for polluted minds. Whither then wilt thou lead this captive of thine, O snaky despair! Alas, alas, was this the free-holding power that accursed poison hath granted unto me, that to be held the surer it should deprive life? was this the folding in mine arms promised, that I should fold nothing but a dead body, O mother of mine what a dreadful suck have you given me? O Philoclea, Philoclea, well hath my mother revenged upon me my unmotherly hating of thee. O Zelmane, to whom yet, lest any misery should fail me, remain some sparks of my detestable love, if thou hast, as now alas! now my mind assures me thou hast, deceived me, there is a fair stage prepared for thee, to see the tragical end of thy hated lover.” With that word there flowed out two rivers of tears out of her fair eyes, which before were dry, the remembrance of her other mischiefs being dried up in a furious fire of self detestation, love only, according to the tempter of it, melting itself into those briny tokens of passion. Then turning her eyes again upon the body, she remembered a dream she had had some nights before, wherein thinking herself called by Zelmane, passing a troublesome passage; she found a dead body which told her there should be her only rest: This no sooner caught hold of her remembrance, than she determined with herself, it was a direct vision of her fore-appointed end, took a certain resolution to embrace death, as soon as it should be offered unto her, and no way seek the prolonging of her annoyed life. And therefore kissing the cold face of Basilius; “And even so will I rest,” said she, “and join this faulty soul of mine to thee, if so much the angry gods will grant me.”

As she was in this plight, the sun now climbing over the horizon; the first shepherds came by, who seeing the king in that case, and hearing the noise Dametas made of the Lady Philoclea, ran with the doleful tidings of Basilius’s death unto him, who presently with all his company came to the cave’s entry, where the king’s body lay; Dametas for his part more glad for the hope he had of his private escape, than sorry for the public loss of his country received for a prince not to be misliked. But in Gynecia nature prevailed above judgment, and the shame she conceived to be taken in that order, overcame for that instant the former resolution; so that as soon as she saw the foremost of the pastoral troop, the wretched princess ran to have hid her face in the next woods; but with such {536} a mind, that she knew not almost herself what she could wish to be the ground of her safety. Dametas that saw her run away in Zelmane’s upper raiment, and judging her to be so, thought certainly all the spirits in hell were come to play a tragedy in these woods, such strange change he saw every way. The king dead at the cave’s mouth; the queen, as he thought, absent; Pamela fled away with Dorus; his wife and Mopsa in divers frenzies. But of all other things Zelmane conquered his capacity, suddenly from a woman grown to a man; and from a locked chamber gotten before him into the fields, which he gave the rest quickly to understand; for instead of doing anything as the exigent required, he began to make circles, and all those fanatical defences that he had ever heard were fortification against devils. But the other shepherds who hath both better wits, and more faith, forthwith divided themselves, some of them running after Gynecia, and esteeming her running away a great condemnation of her own guiltiness: others going to their prince, to see what service was left for them, either in recovery of his life, or honouring his death. They that went after the queen, had soon overtaken her, in whom now the first fears were staid, and the resolution to die had repossessed his place in her mind. But when they saw it was the queen, to whom besides the obedient duty they owed to her state, they had always carried a singular love, for her courteous liberalities, and other wise and virtuous parts, which had filled all that people with affection and admiration. They were all suddenly stopped, beginning to ask pardon for their following her in that sort; and desiring her to be their good lady, as she had ever been. But the queen, who now thirsted to be rid of herself, whom she hated above all things; with such an assured countenance as they have, who already have dispensed with shame and digested the sorrows of death, she thus said unto them, “Continue, continue, my friends; your doing is better than your excusing; the one argues assured faith, the other want of assurance. If you loved your prince, when he was able and willing to do you much good, which you could not then requite to him; do you now publish your gratefulness, when it shall be seen to the world, there are no hopes left to lead you unto it. Remember, remember you have lost Basilius, a prince to defend you, a father to care for you, a companion in your joys, a friend in your wants. And if you loved him, show you hate the author of his loss. It is I, faithful Arcadians, that have spoiled the country of their protector. I, none but I, was the minister of his unnatural end. Carry therefore my blood in your hands, to testify your own innocency, neither spare for my title’s sake, but consider it was he that so entitled me. And if you think of any benefits by my means, think {537} with it that I was but the instrument and he the spring. What, stay ye, shepherds, whose great shepherd is gone? you need not fear a woman, reverence your lord’s murderer, nor hath pity of her, who hath no pity of herself.”

With this she presented her fair neck to some by name, others by signs, desiring them to do justice to the world, duty to their good king, honour to themselves, and favour to her. The poor men looked one upon the other, unused to be arbiters in princes’ matters, and being now fallen into a great perplexity, between a prince dead, and a princess alive. But once for them she might have gone whither she would, thinking it a sacrilege to touch her person, when she finding she was not a sufficient orator to persuade her own death by their hands; “Well,” said she, “it is but so much more time of misery; for my part, I will not give my life so much pleasure from henceforward as to yield to his desire of his own choice of death; since all the rest is taken away, yet let me excel in misery. Lead me therefore whither you will; only happy, because I cannot be more wretched.” But neither so much would the honest shepherds do, but rather with many tears bemoaned this increase of their former loss, till she was fain to lead them with a very strange spectacle, either that a princess should be in the hands of shepherds, or a prisoner should direct her guardians: lastly, before either witness or accuser, a lady condemn herself to death. But in such moanful march they went towards the other shepherds, who in the meantime had left nothing unassayed to revive the king, but all was bootless: and their sorrow increased the more they had suffered any hopes vainly to arise. Among other trials they made to know at least the cause of his end, having espied the unhappy cup, they gave the little liquor that was left to a dog of Dametas, in which within a short time it wrought the like effect; although Dametas did so much to recover him, that for very love of his life he dashed out his brains. But now altogether, and having Gynecia among them, who, to make herself the more odious, did continually record to their minds the access of their loss, they yielded themselves over to all those forms of lamentation, that doleful images do imprint in the honest, but over-tender hearts; especially when they think the rebound of the evil falls to their own smart. Therefore after the ancient Greek manner, some of them remembering the nobility of his birth, continued by being like his ancestors; others his shape, which though not excellent, yet favour and pity drew all things now to the highest point; others his peaceable government, the thing which most pleaseth men, resolved to live of their own; others his liberality, which though it cannot light upon all men, yet all men naturally hoping it may {538} be, they make it a most amiable virtue. Some calling in question the greatness of his power, which increased the comparison to see the present change, having a doleful memory how he had tempered it with such familiar courtesy among them, that they did more feel the fruits than see the pomps of his greatness, all with one consent giving him the sacred titles of good, just, merciful, the father of the people, the life of his country, they ran about his body, tearing their beards and garments; some sending their cries to heaven, others inventing particular howling music; many vowing to kill themselves at the day of his funeral, generally giving a true testimony that men are loving creatures when injuries put them not from their natural course: and how easy a thing it is for a prince by succession, deeply to sink into the souls of his subjects, a more lively monument than Mausolus’s tomb. But as with such hearty lamentation, they dispersed among those words their resounding shrieks, the sun, the perfectest mark of time, having now gotten up two hours’ journey in his daily changing circle, their voice helped with the only answering echo, came to the ears of the faithful and worthy gentleman Philanax: who at that time was coming to visit the king, accompanied with divers of the worthy Arcadian lords, who with him had invited the place adjoining for the more assurance of Basilius’s solitariness, a thing after the late mutiny he had usually done: and since the princess’s return more diligently continued; which having now likewise performed, thinking it as well his duty to see the king, as of a good purpose, being so near, to receive his further direction: accompanied as above-said he was this morning coming unto him, when these unpleasant voices gave his mind an uncertain presage of his near approaching sorrow. For by and by he saw the body of his dearly esteemed prince, and heard Gynecia’s lamenting: not such as the turtle-like dove is wont to make for the over-soon loss of her only beloved mate, but with cursings of her life, detesting her own wickedness, seeming only therefore not to desire death, because she would not show a love of anything. The shepherds, especially Dametas, knowing him to be the second person in authority, gave forthwith relation unto him, what they knew and had proved of this dolorous spectacle, besides the other accidents of his children. But he principally touched with his master’s loss, lighting from his horse with a heavy cheer, came and kneeled down by him, where, finding he could do no more than the shepherds had for his recovery, the constancy of his mind, surprised before he might call together his best rules, could not refrain such like words. “Ah dear master,” said he, “what change it hath pleased the Almighty justice to work in this place. How soon, not to your loss, who having lived long to nature, {539} and to time longer by your well-deserved glory, but longest of all in the eternal mansion you now possess. But how soon I say to our ruin, have you left the frail bark of your estate? O that the words I in most faithful duty delivered unto you, when you first entered this solitary course might have wrought as much persuasion in you, as they sprang from truth in me, perchance your servant Philanax should not now have cause in your loss to bewail his own overthrow.” And therewith taking himself: “And indeed evil fitteth it me,” said he, “to let go my heart to womanish complaints, since my prince being undoubtedly well, it rather shows love of myself, which makes me bewail mine own loss. No, the true love must be proved in the honour of your memory, and that must be showed with seeking just revenge upon your unjust and unnatural enemies, and far more honourable it will be for your tomb to have the blood of your murderers sprinkled upon it than the tears of your friends. And if your soul look down upon this miserable earth, I doubt not it had much rather your death were accompanied with well-deserved punishment of the causers of it, than with the heaping on it more sorrows with the end of them, to whom you vouchsafed your affection: let them lament that have woven the web of lamentation; let their own deaths make them cry out for your death, that were the authors of it.” Therewith carrying manful sorrow and vindicative resolution in his face, he rose up, so looking on the poor guiltless princess transported with an unjust justice, that his eyes were sufficient heralds for him, to denounce a mortal hatred. She, whom furies of love, firebrands of her conscience, shame of the world, with the miserable loss of her husband, towards whom now the disdain of herself bred more love; with the remembrance of her vision, wherewith she resolved assuredly the gods had appointed that shameful end to be her resting place, had set her mind to no other way but to death, used such like speeches, to Philanax, as she had before to the shepherds; willing him not to look upon her as a woman, but a monster; not as a queen, but as a traitor to his prince; not as Basilius’s wife, but as Basilius’s murderer. She told how the world required at his hands, the just demonstration of his friendship; if he now forgot his king, he should show he had never loved but his fortune: like those vermin that suck of the living blood, and leave the body as soon as it is dead; poor queen needlessly seeking to kindle him, who did most deadly detest her, which he uttered in this bitter answer. “Madam,” said he, “you do well to hate yourself, for you cannot hate a worse creature; and though we feel enough your hellish disposition, yet we need not doubt you are of counsel to yourself of much worse than we know. But now fear not; {540} you shall not long be cumbered with being guided by so evil a soul; therefore prepare yourself, that if it be possible you may deliver up your spirit so much purer, as you more wash your wickedness with repentance.” Then having presently given order for the bringing from Mantinea, a great number of tents; for the receipt of the principal Arcadians: the manner of that country being, that where the king died, there should be orders taken for the country’s government, and in the place any murder was committed, the judgment should be given there, before the body was buried, both concurring in this matter, and already great part of the nobility being arrived, he delivered the queen to a gentleman of great trust; and as for Dametas, taking from him the keys of both the lodges, calling him the moth of his king’s estate, and only spot of his judgment, he caused him, with his wife and daughter, to be fettered up in as many chains and clogs as they could bear, and every third hour to be cruelly whipped, till the determinate judgment should be given of all these matters. That done, having sent already at his coming, to all the quarters of the country to seek Pamela, although with small hope of overtaking them, he himself went well accompanied to the lodge, where the two unfortunate lovers were attending a cruel conclusion of their long, painful, and late most painful affection. Dametas’s clownish eyes, having been the only discoverers of Pyrocles’s stratagem, had no sooner taken a full view of them, which in some sights would rather have bred anything, than an accusing mind, and locked the door upon these two young folks, now made prisoners for love, as before they had been prisoners to love; but that immediately upon his going down, whether with noise Dametas made, or with the creeping in of the light, or rather that as extreme grief had procured his sleep, so extreme care had measured his sleep, giving his senses very early salve to come to themselves, Pyrocles awaked, and being up, the first evil handful he had of the ill case wherein he was, was the seeing himself deprived of his sword, from which he had never separated himself in any occasion, and even that night first by the king’s bed, and then there had laid it, as he thought safe: putting great part of the trust of his well-doing in his own courage so armed. For indeed the confidence in one’s self is the chief nurse of magnanimity, which confidence notwithstanding doth not leave the care of necessary furnitures for it: and therefore of all the Grecians, Homer doth ever make Achilles the best armed. But that, as I say, was the first ill token: but by and by he perceived he was a prisoner before any arrest: for the door which he had left open was made so fast of the outside, that for all the force he could employ unto it, he could not undo Dametas’s doing; then {541} went he to the windows, to see if that way there were any escape for him and his dear lady. But as vain he found all his employment there, not having might to break out but only one bar; wherein notwithstanding he strained his sinews to the uttermost: and that he rather took out to use for other service, than for any possibility he had to escape; for even then it was that Dametas having gathered together the first coming shepherds, did blabber out what he had found in the lady Philoclea’s chamber. Pyrocles markingly hearkened to all that Dametas said, whose voice and mind acquaintance had taught him sufficiently to know. But when he assuredly perceived that his being with the Lady Philoclea was fully discovered: and by the folly or malice, or rather malicious folly of Dametas, her honour therein touched in the highest degree: remembering withal the cruelty of the Arcadian laws, which without exception did condemn all to death who were found, as Dametas reported of them, in act of marriage, without solemnity of marriage, assuring himself, besides the law, the king and the queen would use so much the more hate against their daughter, as they had found themselves sotted by him in the pursuit of their love. Lastly, seeing they were not only in the way of death, but fitly incaged for death, looking with a hearty grief upon the honour of love, the fellowless Philoclea, whose innocent soul now enjoying his own goodness did little know the danger of his ever fair, then sleeping harbour, his excellent wit strengthened with virtue, but guided by love, had soon described to himself a perfect vision of their present condition, wherein having presently cast a resolute reckoning of his own part of the misery, not only the chief but sole burden of his anguish consisted in the unworthy case, which was like to fall upon the best deserving Philoclea. He saw the misfortune, not the mismeaning of his work, was like to bring that creature to end, in whom the world, as he thought, did begin to receive honour: he saw the weak judgment of man would condemn that as death deserving vice in her, which had in troth never broken the bonds of a true living virtue: and how oft his eye turned to his attractive adamant, so often did an unspeakable horror strike his noble heart to consider so unripe years, so faultless a beauty, the mansion of so pure goodness, should have her youth so untimely cut off, her natural perfections so unnaturally consumed, her virtue rewarded with shame: sometimes he would accuse himself of negligence, that had not more curiously looked to all the house-entries, and yet could he not imagine the way Dametas was gotten in: and to call back what might have been, to a man of wisdom and courage, carries but a vain shadow of discourse; sometimes he could not choose but with a dissolution of his inward might lamentably {542} consider with what face he might look upon his, till then, joy Philoclea, when the next light waking should deliver unto her, should perchance be the last of her hurtless life. And that the first time she should bend her excellent eyes upon him, she should see the accursed author of her dreadful end, and even this consideration more than any other, did so set itself in his well-disposed mind, that dispersing his thoughts to all the ways that might be of her safety, finding a very small discourse in so narrow limits of time and place, at length in many difficulties he saw none bear any likelihood for her life, but his death. For then he thought it would fall out, that when they found his body dead, having no accuser but Dametas, as by his speech he found there was not, it might justly appear that either Philoclea in defending her honour, or else he himself in despairing of achieving, had left his carcass proof of his intent, but witness of her clearness. Having a small while stayed upon the greatness of his resolution, and looked to the furthest of it: “Be it so,” said the valiant Pyrocles, “never life for better cause, nor to better end was bestowed; for if death be to follow this doing, which no death of mine could make me leave undone, who is to die so justly as myself? and if I must die, who can be so fit executioners as mine own hands, which as they were accessories to the doing, so in killing me they shall suffer their own punishment?” but then arose there a new impediment; for Dametas having carried away anything which he thought might hurt as tender a man as himself, he could find no fit instrument which might give him a final dispatch: at length making the more haste, least his lady should awake, taking the iron bar, which being sharper somewhat at the one end than the other, he hoped, joined to his willing strength, might break off the feeble thread of mortality. “Truly,” said he, “fortune thou hast well preserved mine enemy, that will grant me no fortune but to be unfortunate, nor let me have an easy passage now I am to trouble thee no more. But,” said he, “O bar blessed in that thou hast done service to the chamber of the paragon of life, since thou couldst not help me to make a perfecter escape, yet serve my turn I pray thee, that I may escape from myself,” therewithal yet once looking to fetch the last repass of his eyes, and now again transported with the pitiful case he left her in, kneeling down he thus prayed.

“O great maker and great ruler of this world,” said he, “to Thee do I sacrifice this blood of mine, and suffer, Lord, the errors of my youth to pass away therein, and let not the soul by Thee made, and ever bending unto Thee, be now rejected of Thee, neither be offended that I do abandon this body, to the government of which Thou hadst placed me, without Thy leave; since how can I know {543} but that Thy unsearchable mind is I should so do, since Thou hast taken from me all means longer to abide in it? and since the difference stands but in a short time of dying, Thou that hast taken from me all means longer to abide in it? and since the difference stands but in a short time of dying, Thou that hast framed my soul inclined to do good, how can I in this small space of mine benefit so much all the human kind, as in preserving Thy perfectest workmanship, their chiefest honour? O justice itself, howsoever thou determinest of me, let this excellent innocency not be oppressed? let my life pay her loss, O Lord give me some sign that I may die with this comfort.” (And paused a little as if he had hoped for some token) “and whensoever to the eternal darkness of the earth she doth follow me, let our spirits possess one place, and let them be more happy in that uniting.” With that word striking the bar upon his heart-side, with all the force he had, and falling withal upon it to give the thorougher passage, the bar in troth was too blunt to do the effect, although it pierced his skin, and bruised his ribs very sore, so that his breath was almost past him. But the noise of his fall drove away sleep from the quiet senses of the dear Philoclea, whose sweet soul had an early salutation of a deadly spectacle unto her, with so much more astonishment, as the falling asleep but a little before she had retired herself from the utmost point of woefulness, and saw now again before her eyes the most cruel enterprise that human nature can undertake, without discerning any cause thereof. But the lively print of her affection had soon taught her not to stay long upon deliberation in so urgent a necessity; therefore getting with speed her weak, though well accorded limbs, out of her sweetened bed, as when jewels are hastily pulled out of some rich coffer, she spared not the nakedness of her tender feet, but I think borne as fast with desire as fear carried Daphne, she came running to Pyrocles, and finding his spirits something troubled with the fall, she put by the bar that lay close to him, and straining him in her most beloved embracements: “My comfort, my joy, my life,” said she, “what haste have you to kill your Philoclea with the most cruel torment that ever lady suffered? Do you not yet persuade yourself that any hurt of yours is a death unto me; and that your death should be my hell. Alas! if any sudden mislike of me, for other cause I see none, have caused you to loathe yourself; if any fault or defect of mine hath bred this terrible rage in you, rather let me suffer the bitterness of it, for so shall the deserver be punished, mankind preserved from such a ruin, and I for my part shall have that comfort, that I die by the noblest hand that ever drew sword.” Pyrocles, grieved with his fortune, that he had not in one instant cut off all such deliberation, thinking his life only reserved to be bound to be the {544} unhappy newsteller: “Alas,” said he, “my only star, why do you this wrong to God, yourself, and me, to speak of faults in you? No, no, most faultless, most perfect lady, it is your excellency that makes me hasten my desired end; it is the right I owe to the general nature, that, though against private nature, makes me seek the preservation of all that she hath done in this age, let me, let me die. There is no way to save life, most worthy to be conserved, than that my death be your clearing.” Then did he with far more pain and backward loathness, than the so near killing himself was, but yet driven with necessity to make her yield to that he thought was her safety, make her a short but pithy discourse, what he had heard by Dametas’s speeches, confirming the rest with a plain demonstration of their imprisonment. And then sought he a new means of stopping his breath; but that by Philoclea’s labour, above her force, he was stayed to hear her. In whom a man might perceive what a small difference in the working there is, betwixt a simple voidness of evil and a judicial habit of virtue. For she, not with an unshaken magnanimity, wherewith Pyrocles weighed and despised death, but with an innocent guiltiness, not knowing why she should fear to deliver her unstained soul to God, helped with the true loving of Pyrocles, which made her think no life without him, did almost bring her mind to as quiet attending all accidents, as the unmastered virtue of Pyrocles. Yet having with a pretty paleness, which did leave milken lines upon her rosy cheeks, paid a little duty to human fear, taking the prince by his hand, and kissing the wound he had given himself: “O the only life of my life, and if it fall out so, the comfort of my death,” said she, “far, far from you be the doing of me such wrong as to think I will receive my life as a purchase of your death, but well may you make my death so much more miserable, as it shall anything be delayed after my only felicity. Do you think I can account of the moment of death, like the unspeakable afflictions my soul should suffer, so oft as I call Pyrocles to my mind, which should be as oft as I breathed? Should these eyes guide my steps, that had seen your murderer? Should these hands feed me, that had not hindered such a mischief? Should this heart remain within me, at every pant to count the continual clock of my miseries? O no, if die we must, let us thank death, he hath not divided so true a union. And truly, my Pyrocles, I have heard my father and other wise men say that the killing of one’s self is but a false colour of true courage, proceeding rather of a fear of a further evil, either of torment or shame. For if it were not respecting the harm, that would likewise make him not respect what might be done unto him: and hope, being of all other the most contrary thing to fear; this being an utter banishment of hope, it seems to {545} receive his ground in fear. Whatsoever, would they say, comes out of despair, cannot bear the title of valour, which should be lifted up to such a height, that holding all things under itself, it should be able to maintain his greatness even in the midst of miseries. Lastly, they would say, God had appointed us captains of these our bodily forts, which without treason to that majesty, were never to be delivered over till they were re-demanded.”

Pyrocles, who had that for a law unto him, not to leave Philoclea in anything unsatisfied, although he still remained in his former purpose, and knew that time would grow short for it, yet hearing no noise, the shepherds being as then run to Basilius, with settled and humble countenance, as a man that should have spoken of a thing that did not concern himself, bearing even in his eyes sufficient shows, that it was nothing but Philoclea’s danger which did anything burden his heart, far stronger than fortune, having with vehement embracings of her got yet some fruit of his delayed end, he thus answered the wise innocency of Philoclea. “Lady, most worthy not only of life, but to be the very life of all things; the more notable demonstrations you make of love so far beyond my desert, with which it pleaseth you to overcome fortune, in making me happy: the more am I, even in course of humanity, to leave that love’s force which I neither can nor will leave, bound to seek requital’s witness, that I am not ungrateful to do which, the infiniteness of your goodness being such as I cannot reach unto it, yet doing all I can, and paying my life, which is all I have, though it be far, without measure, short of your desert, yet shall I not die in debt to mine own duty. And truly, the more excellent arguments you made, to keep me from this passage, imagined far more terrible than it is, the more plainly it makes me to see what reason I have, to prevent the loss not only of Arcadia, but all the face of the earth should receive, if such a tree, which even in his first spring, doth not only bear most beautiful blossoms, but most rare fruit, should be so untimely cut off. Therefore, O most truly beloved lady, to whom I desire for both our goods that these may be my last words, give me your consent even out of that wisdom which must needs see, that, besides your unmatched betterness, which perchance you will not see, it is fitter one die than both. And since you have sufficiently showed you love me, let me claim by that love you will be content rather to let me die contentedly than wretchedly, rather with a clear and joyful conscience than with desperate condemnation in myself, that I, accursed villain, should be the means of banishing from the sight of men the true example of virtue. And because there is nothing left me to be imagined, which I so much desire, as that the memory of Pyrocles may ever have an allowed place in your wise judgment, I am {546} content to draw so much breath longer, as by answering the sweet objections you alleged, may bequeath, as I think, a right conceit unto you, that this my doing is out of judgment, and not sprung of passion. Your father, you say, was wont to say, that this like action doth more proceed of fear of further evil or shame than of a true courage: truly first, they put a very guessing case, speaking of them who can never after come to tell with what mind they did it. And as for my part, I call the immortal truth to witness that no fear of torment can appal me; who know it is but diverse manners of apparelling death; and have long learned to set bodily pain but in the second form of my being. And as for shame, how can I be ashamed of that for which my well meaning conscience will answer for me to God, and your unresistable beauty to the world? But to take that argument in his own force, and grant it done for avoiding of further pain or dishonour: (for as for the name of fear, it is but an odious title of a passion, given to that which true judgment performeth) grant, I say, it is to shun a worse case, and truly I do not see but that true fortitude, looking into all human things with a persisting resolution, carried away neither with wonder of pleasing things, nor astonishment of the unpleasant, doth not yet deprive itself of the discerning the difference of evil, but rather is the only virtue, which with an assured tranquility shuns the greater by valiantly entering into the less. Thus for his country’s safety he will spend his life, for the saving of a limb he will not niggardly spare his goods; for the saving of all his body he will not spare the cutting off a limb, where indeed the weak-hearted man will rather die than see the face of a surgeon, who might with as good reason say, that the constant man abides the painful surgery for fear of a further evil: but he is content to wait for death itself, but neither is true; for neither had the one any fear, but a well-chosen judgment: nor the other hath any contentment, but only fear, and not having a heart actively to perform a matter of pain, is forced passively to abide a greater damage. For to do, requires a whole heart; to suffer falleth easiliest in the broken minds. And if in bodily torment thus, much more in shame, wherein since valour is a virtue, and virtue is ever limited, we must not run so infinitely as to think the valiant man is willingly to suffer anything, since the very suffering of some things is a certain proof of want of courage. And if anything unwillingly, among the chiefest may shame go; for if honour be to be held dear, his contrary is to be abhorred, and that not for fear, but of a true election. For which is the less inconvenient, either the loss of some years more or less (when once we know our lives be not immortal) or the submitting ourselves to each unworthy misery which the foolish world may {547} lay upon us? as for their reason, that fear is contrary to hope, neither do I defend fear, nor much yield to the authority of hope, to either of which great inclining shows but a feeble reason which must be guided by his servants; and who builds not upon hope, shall fear no earthquake of despair. Their last alleging of the heavenly powers, as it bears the greatest name, so it is the only thing that at all breeds any combat in my mind, and yet I do not see but that if God had made us masters of anything, it is of our own lives out of which, without doing wrong to anybody, we are to issue at our own pleasure. And the same argument would as much prevail to say we should for no necessity lay away from us any of our joints, since they being made of Him, without His warrant we should not depart from them; or if that may be, for a greater cause we may pass to a greater degree. And if we be lieutenants of God in this little castle, do you not think we must take warning of Him to give over our charge when He leaves us unprovided of good means to tarry in it?” “No certainly do I not,” answered the sorrowful Philoclea, “since it is not for us to appoint that mighty majesty what time He will help us; the uttermost instant is scope enough for Him to revoke everything to one’s own desire. And therefore to prejudicate His determination is but a doubt of goodness in Him Who is nothing but goodness. But when indeed He doth either by sickness, or outward force lay death upon us, then are we to take knowledge that such is His pleasure, and to know that all is well that He doth. That we should be masters of ourselves, we can show at all no title nor claim; since neither we made ourselves, nor bought ourselves, we can stand upon no other right but His gift, which He must limit as it pleaseth Him. Neither is there any proportion betwixt the loss of any other limb, and that, since the one bends to the preserving of all, the other to the destruction of all; the one takes not away the mind from the actions for which it is placed in the world, the other cuts off all possibility of his working. And truly my most dear Pyrocles, I must needs protest unto you, that I cannot think your defence even in rules of virtue sufficient. Sufficient and excellent it were, if the question were of two outward things, wherein a man might by nature’s freedom determine, whether he would prefer shame to pain; present smaller torment, to greater following, or no. But to this, besides the comparison of the matter’s valour, there is added of the one part a direct evil doing, which maketh the balance of that side too much unequal; since a virtuous man without any respect, whether the grief be less or more, is never to do that which he cannot assure himself is allowable before the everliving rightfulness; but rather is to think honours or shames which stand in other men’s true or false judgments, pains or not pains, which {548} yet never approach our souls, to be nothing in regard of an unspotted conscience. And these reasons do I remember, I have heard good men bring in, that since it hath not his ground in an assured virtue, it proceeds rather of some other disguised passion.”

Pyrocles was not so much persuaded as delighted, by her well-conceived and sweetly pronounced speeches: but when she had closed her pitiful discourse, and as it were sealed up her delightful lips, with the moistness of her tears, which followed still one another like a precious rope of pearl, now thinking it high time: “Be it as you say,” said he, “most virtuous beauty, in all the rest, but never can God himself persuade me that Pyrocles’s life is not well lost, for to preserve the most admirable Philoclea. Let that be, if it be possible, written on my tomb, and I will not envy Codrus’s honour.” With that he would again have used the bar, meaning if that failed, to leave his brains upon the wall, when Philoclea now brought to that she most feared, kneeled down unto him, and embracing so his legs, that without hurting her (which for nothing he would have done) he could not rid himself from her, she did with all the conjuring words, which the authority of love may lay, beseech him he would not now so cruelly abandon her, he would not leave her comfortless in that misery to which he had brought her. That then indeed she would even in her soul accuse him to have most foully betrayed her; that then she would have cause to curse the time that ever the name of Pyrocles came to her ears, which otherwise no death could make her do. “Will you leave me,” said she, “not only dishonoured, as supposed unchaste with you, but as a murderer of you? Will you give mine eyes such a picture of hell, before my near approaching death, as to see the murdered body of him I love more than all the lives nature can give?” With that she swore by the highest cause of all devotions, that if he did persevere in that cruel resolution, she would, though untruly, not only confess to her father that with her consent this act had been committed, but if that would not serve (after she had pulled out her own eyes made accursed by such a sight) she would give herself so terrible a death, as she might think the pain of it would countervail the never dying pain of her mind. “Now therefore kill yourself to crown this virtuous action with infamy: kill yourself to make me, whom you say you love, as long as I after live, change my loving admiration of you to a detestable abhorring your name. And so indeed you shall have the end you shoot at: for instead of one death, you shall give me a thousand, and yet in the meantime, deprive me of the help God may send me.” Pyrocles, even over-weighed with her so wisely uttered affection, finding her determination so fixed that his end should but deprive them both of a present contentment, and not {549} avoid a coming evil (as a man that ran not into it by a sudden qualm of passion, but by a true use of reason, preferring her life to his own) now that wisdom did manifest unto him that way would not prevail, he retired himself with as much tranquility from it as before he had gone unto it. Like a man that had set the keeping or leaving of the body as a thing without himself, and so had thereof a freed and untroubled consideration. Therefore throwing away the bar from him, and taking her up from the place, where he thought the consummating of all beauties, very worthily lay, suffering all his senses to devour up their chiefest food, which he assured himself they should shortly after for ever be deprived of: “Well,” said he, “most dear lady, whose contentment I prefer before mine own, and judgment esteem more than mine own, I yield unto your pleasure. The gods send you have not won your own loss. For my part they are my witnesses that I think I do more at your commandment in delaying my death than another would in bestowing his life. But now,” said he, “as thus far I have yielded unto you, so grant me in recompense thus much again, that I may find your love in granting, as you have found your authority in obtaining. My humble suit is, you will say I came in by force into your chamber, for so am I resolved now to affirm, and that will be the best for us both, but in no case name my name that, whatsoever come of me, my house be not dishonoured.”

Philoclea fearing lest refusal would turn him back again to his violent refuge, gave him a certain countenance that might show she did yield to his request, the latter part whereof indeed she meant for his sake to perform. Neither could they spend more words together: for Philanax with twenty of the noblest personages of Arcadia after him, were come into the lodge, Philanax making the rest to stay below, for the reverence he bare to womanhood, as stilly as he could came up to the door, and opening it, drew the eyes of these two doleful lovers upon him. Philoclea closing again for modesty’s sake, within her bed the riches of her beauties, but Pyrocles took hold of his bar, minding at least to die, before the excellent Philoclea should receive any outrage. But Philanax rested a while upon himself, stricken with admiration at the goodly shape of Pyrocles, whom before he had never seen, and withal remembering, besides others, the notable act he had done, when with his courage and eloquence, he had saved Basilius, perchance the whole state from utter ruin, he felt a kind of relenting mind towards him. But when that same thought came waited on with the remembrance of his master’s death, which he by all probabilities thought he had been of council unto with the queen, compassion turned to hateful passion, and left in Philanax a strange medley, {550} betwixt pity and revenge, betwixt liking and abhorring. “O lord,” said he to himself, “what wonders doth nature in our time to set wickedness so beautifully garnished? and that which is strangest, out of one spring to make wonderful effects both of virtue and vice to issue?” Pyrocles seeing him in such a muse, neither knowing the man, nor the cause of coming, but assuring himself it was for no good, yet thought best to begin with him in this sort. “Gentleman,” said he, “what is the cause of your coming to my lady Philoclea’s chamber? is it to defend her from such violence as I might go about to offer unto her? if it be so, truly your coming is vain, for her own virtue hath been a sufficient resistance; there needs no strength to be added to so inviolate chastity, the excellency of her mind makes her body impregnable. Which for my own part I had soon yielded to confess, with going out of this place, where I found but little comfort being so disdainfully received, had I not been, I know not by whom presently upon my coming hither, so locked into this chamber that I could never escape hence; where I was fettered in the most guilty shame that ever man was, seeing what a paradise of unspotted goodness, my filthy thoughts sought to defile. If for that therefore you come, already I assure you your errand is performed; but if it be to bring me to any punishment whatsoever, for having undertaken so inexcusable presumption; truly I bear such an accuser about me in mine own conscience, that I willingly submit myself unto it. Only thus much let me demand of you, that you will be a witness unto the king what you hear me say, and oppose yourself, that neither his sudden fury, nor any other occasion may offer any hurt to this lady; in whom you see nature hath accomplished so much that I am fain to lay mine own faultiness as a foil of her purest excellency. I can say no more, but look upon her beauty, remember her blood, consider her years, and judge rightly of her virtues, and I doubt not a gentleman’s mind will then be a sufficient instructor unto you, in this, I may term it miserable chance, happened unto her by my unbridled audacity.”

Philanax was content to hear him out, not for any favour he owed him, but to see whether he would reveal anything of the original cause and purpose of the king’s death. But finding it so far from that, that he named Basilius unto him, as supposing him alive, thinking it rather cunning than ignorance: “Young man,” said he, “whom I have cause to hate before I have mean to know, you use but a point of skill by confessing the manifest smaller fault, to be believed hereafter in the denial of the greater. But for that matter, all passeth to one end, and hereafter we shall have leisure by torments to seek the truth, if the love of the truth itself will not bring you unto it. As for my Lady Philoclea, if it so fall {551} out as you say, it shall be the more fit for her years, and comely for the great house that she is come of, that an ill-governed beauty hath not cancelled the rules of virtue. But howsoever it be, it is not for you to teach an Arcadian what reverend duty we owe unto any of that progeny. But,” said he, “come you with me without resistance, for the one cannot avail, and the other may procure pity.” “Pity!” said Pyrocles, with a bitter smiling, disdaining with so currish an answer, “no, no, Arcadian, I can quickly have pity of myself, and would think my life most miserable, which should be a gift of thine. Only I demand this innocent lady’s security, which until thou hast confirmed unto me by an oath, assure thyself the first that lays hands upon her shall leave his life for a testimony of his sacrilege.” Philanax, with an inward scorn, thinking it most manifest they were both, he at least, of council with the king’s death: “Well,” said he, “you speak much to me of the king: I do here swear unto you, by the love I have ever borne him, she shall have no worse howsoever it fall out than her own parents.” “And upon that word of yours I yield,” said the poor Pyrocles, deceived by him that meant not to deceive him. Then did Philanax deliver him into the hands of a nobleman in the company, everyone desirous to have him in his charge, so much did his goodly presence, wherein true valour shined, breed a delightful admiration in all the beholders. Philanax himself stayed with Philoclea, to see whether of her he might learn some disclosing of his former conclusion. But she, sweet lady, whom first a kindly shamefulness had separated from Pyrocles, having been left in a more open view than her modesty would well bear, then the attending her father’s coming, and studying how to behave herself towards him for both their safeties, had called her spirits all within her; now that upon a sudden Pyrocles was delivered out of the chamber from her, at the first she was so surprised with the extreme stroke of the woeful sight, that, like those that in their dreams are taken with some ugly vision, they would fain cry for help but have no force, so remained she a while quite deprived not only of speech but almost of any other lively action. But when indeed Pyrocles was quite drawn from her eyes, and that her vital strength began to return unto her, now not knowing what they did to Pyrocles, but, according to the nature of love, fearing the worst, wringing her hands, and letting abundance of tears be the first part of her eloquence, bending her amber crowned head over her bedside to the hard-hearted Philanax. “O Philanax, Philanax,” said she, “I know how much authority you have with my father: there is no man whose wisdom he so much esteems, nor whose face he so much reposes upon. Remember how oft you have promised your service unto me, {552} how oft you have given me occasion to believe that there was no lady in whose favour you more desired to remain: and if the remembrance be not unpleasant to your mind, or the rehearsal unfitting for my fortune, remember there was a time when I could deserve it. Now my chance is turned, let not your truth turn. I present myself unto you, the most humble and miserable suppliant living, neither shall my desire be great: I seek for no more life than I shall be found worthy of. If my blood may wash away the dishonour of Arcadia, spare it not, although through me it hath indeed never been dishonoured. My only suit is, you will be a mean for me, that while I am suffered to enjoy this life, I may not be separated from him, to whom the gods have joined me, and that you determine nothing of him more cruelly than you do of me. If you rightly judge of what hath passed, wherein the gods, that should have been of our marriage, are witnesses of our innocencies, then procure, we may live together. But if my father will not so conceive of us, as the fault, if any were, was united, so let the punishment be united also.” There was no man that ever loved either his prince, or anything pertaining to him, with a truer zeal than Philanax did. This made him, even to the depth of his heart, receive a most vehement grief, to see his master made as it were more miserable after death. And for himself, calling to mind in what sort his life had been preserved by Philoclea, what time taken by Amphialus, he was like to suffer a cruel death, there was nothing could have kept him from falling to all tender pity but the perfect persuasion he had that all this was joined to the pack of his master’s death, which the misconceived speech of marriage made him the more believe. Therefore first muttering to himself such like words: “The violence the gentleman spoke of, is now turned to marriage: he alleged Mars, but she speaks of Venus: O unfortunate master! this hath been that fair devil Gynecia; sent away one of her daughters, prostituted the other, impoisoned thee, to overthrow the diadem of Arcadia.” But at length thus unto herself he said: “If your father, Madam, were now to speak unto, truly there should nobody be found a more ready advocate for you than myself. For I would suffer this fault, though very great, to be blotted out of my mind, by your former led life, your benefit towards myself, and being daughter to such a father. But since among yourselves you have taken him away, in whom was the only power to have mercy, you must be clothed in your own working, and look for none other than that which dead pitiless laws may allot unto you. For my part, I loved you for your virtue, but now where is that? I loved you in respect of a private benefit, what is that in comparison of the public loss? I loved you for your father, unhappy folks you have robbed the world of him.” These {553} words of her father were so little understood by the only well-understanding Philoclea, that she desired him to tell her, what he meant to speak in such dark sort unto her of her lord and father, whose displeasure was more dreadful unto her than her punishment: that she was free in her own conscience, she had never deserved evil of him, no not in this last fact: wherein, if it pleased him to proceed with patience, he should find her choice had not been unfortunate. He that saw her words written in the plain table of her fair face, thought it impossible there should therein be contained deceit: and therefore so much the more abashed: “Why,” said he, “Madam, would you have me think, you are not of conspiracy with the Princess Pamela’s flight, and your father’s death?” With that word the sweet lady gave a pitiful cry, having straight in her face and breast abundance of witnesses that her heart was far from any such abominable consent. “Ah of all sides utterly ruined Philoclea,” said she, “now indeed I may well suffer all conceit of hope to die in me. Dear father, where was I that might not do you my last service before, soon after miserably following you?” Philanax, perceived the demonstration so lively and true in her that he easily acquitted her in his heart of that fact, and the more was moved to join with her in most hearty lamentation. But remembering him, that the burden of the state, and punishment of his master’s murderers, lay all upon him: “Well,” said he, “Madam, I can do nothing, without all the states of Arcadia: what they will determine of you, I know not: for my part your speeches would much prevail with me, but that I find not how to excuse your giving over your body to him that for the last proof of his treason lent his garments to disguise your miserable mother, in the most vile fact she hath committed. Hard sure will it be to separate your causes, with whom you have so nearly joined yourself.” “Neither do I desire it,” said the sweetly weeping Philoclea: “Whatsoever you determine of him, do that likewise to me, for I know from the fountain of virtue nothing but virtue could ever proceed, only as you find him faultless, let him find you favourable, and build not my dishonour upon surmises.” Philanax, feeling his heart more and more mollifying unto her, renewed the image of his dead master in his fancy, and using that for the spurs of his revengeful choler, went suddenly without any more speech from the desolate lady, to whom now fortune seemed to threaten unripe death, and undeserved shame among her least evils. But Philanax leaving good guard upon the lodge, went himself to see the order of his other prisoners, whom even then as he issued, he found increased by this unhoped means.

The noble Pamela having delivered over the burden of her fearful cares, to the natural ease of a well-refreshing sleep, reposed {554} both mind and body upon the trusted support of her princely shepherd, when with the braying cries of a rascal company she was robbed of her quiet, so that at one instant she opened her eyes, and the enraged Musidorus rose from her, enraged betwixt the doubt, he had what these men would go about, and the spite he conceived against their ill-pleasing presence. But the clowns having with their hideous noise brought them both to their feet, had soon knowledge what guests they had found, for indeed these were the scummy remnants of those rebels, whose naughty minds could not trust so much to the goodness of their prince, as to lay their hangworthy necks upon the constancy of his promised pardon. Therefore when the rest, who as sheep had but followed their fellows, so sheepishly had submitted themselves, these only committed their safety to the thickest part of these desert woods, who as they were in the constitution of their minds little better than beasts, so were they apt to degenerate to a beastly kind of life, having now framed their gluttonish stomachs to have for food the wild benefits of nature, the uttermost end they had being but to draw out as much as they could the line of a tedious life. In this sort vagabonding in those untrodden places, they were guided by the everlasting justice, using themselves to be punishers of their faults, and making their own actions the beginning of their chastisements, unhappily both for him and themselves, to light on Musidorus. Whom as soon as they saw turned towards them, they full well remembered it was he, that, accompanied with Basilius, had come to the succour of Zelmane, and had left among some of them bloody tokens of his valour. As for Pamela, they had many times seen her. Thus first stirred up with a rustical revenge against him, and then desire of spoil to help their miserable wants, but chiefly thinking it was the way to confirm their own pardon, to bring the princess back unto her father, whom they were sure he would never have sent so far so slightly accompanied without any other denouncing of war, set all together upon the worthy Musidorus. Who being beforehand as much inflamed against them, gave them so brave a welcome, that the smart of some made the rest stand further off, crying and prating against him, but like bad curs, rather barking than closing: he, in the meantime, placing his trembling lady to one of the pine trees, and so setting himself before her, as might show the cause of his courage grew in himself, but the effect was only employed in her defence; the villains that now had a second proof, how ill-wards they had for such a sword, turned all the course of their violence into throwing darts and stones, indeed the only way to overmaster the valour of Musidorus. Who finding them some already touched, some fall so near his chiefest life Pamela, that in the end some one or other {555} might hap to do an unsuccourable mischief, setting all his hope in despair, ran out from his lady among them. Who straight like so many swine when a hardy mastiff sets upon them, dispersed themselves. But the first he overtook as he ran away, carrying his head as far before him, as those manner of runnings are wont to do, with one blow struck it so clean off, that it falling betwixt the hands, and the body falling upon it, it made a show as though the fellow had had great haste to gather up his head again. Another the speed he made to run for the best game, bare him full butt against a tree, so that tumbling back with a bruised face, and a dreadful expectation, Musidorus was straight upon him, and parting with his sword one of his legs from him, left him to make a roaring lamentation that his mortar-treading was marred for ever. A third finding his feet too slow, as well as his hands too weak, suddenly turned back, beginning to open his lips for mercy. But before he had well entered a rudely compiled oration, Musidorus’s blade was come between his jaws into his throat, and so the poor man rested there for ever with a very evil mouth full of an answer. Musidorus in this furious chase would have followed some other of these hateful wretches, but that he heard his lady cry for help, whom three of this villainous crew had, whilst Musidorus followed their fellows, compassing about some trees, suddenly come upon and surprised, threatening to kill her if she cried, and meaning to convey her out of sight, whilst the prince was making his bloodthirsty chase. But she that was resolved no worse thing could fall unto her than the being deprived of him, on whom she had established all her comfort, with a pitiful cry fetched his eyes unto her: who then thinking so many weapons thrust into his eyes, as with his eyes he saw bent against her, made all hearty speed to her succour. But one of them wiser than his companions, set his dagger to her alabaster throat, swearing if he threw not away his sword, he would kill her presently. There was never poor scholar, that having instead of his book some playing toy about him, did more suddenly cast it from him, at the child-feared presence of a cruel schoolmaster, than the valiant Musidorus discharged himself of his only defence, when he saw it stood upon the instant point of his lady’s life. And holding up his noble hands to so unworthy audience, “O Arcadians, it is I that have done you the wrong, she is your princess,” said he, “she never had will to hurt you, and you see she hath no power. Use your choler upon me that have better deserved it, do not yourselves the wrong to do her any hurt, which in no time or place will ever be forgiven you.”

They that yet trusted not to his courtesy, bid him stand further off from his sword, which he obediently did. So far was love above all other thoughts in him. Then did they call together the {556} rest of their fellows, who though they were few, yet according to their number, possessed many places. And then began these savage senators to make a consultation what they should do: some wishing to spoil them of their jewels and let them go on their journey, for that if they carried them back, they were sure they should have least part of their prey, others preferring their old homes to anything, desired to bring them to Basilius as pledges of their surety. And there wanted not which cried, the safest way was to kill them both; to such an unworthy thraldom were these great and excellent personages brought. But the most part resisted to the killing of the princes, foreseeing their lives would never be safe after such a fact committed: and began to wish rather the spoil than death of Musidorus: when the villain that had his leg cut off came crawling towards them, and being helped to them by one of the company, began with a groaning voice, and a disfigured face, to demand the revenge of his blood, which since he had spent with them in their defence, it were no reason he should be suffered by them to die discontented. The only contentment he required was, that by their help with his own hands he might put his murderer to some cruel death: he would fain have cried more against Musidorus, but that the much loss of blood helped on with this vehemency, choked up the spirits of his life, leaving him to make betwixt his body and soul an ill-favoured partition. But they seeing their fellow in that sort die before their faces, did swell in new mortal rages: all resolved to kill him, but now only considering what manner of terrible death they should invent for him. Thus was a while the agreement of his slaying broken by disagreement of the manner of it; and extremity of cruelty. At length they were resolved every one to have a piece of him, and to become all as well hangmen as judges: when Pamela tearing her hair, and falling down among them, sometimes with all the sort of humble prayers, mixed with promises of great good turns, which they knew her state was able to perform, sometimes threatening them, that if they killed him and not her, she would not only revenge it upon them, but upon all their wives and children: bidding them consider that though they might think she was come away in her father’s displeasure, yet they might be sure he would ever show himself a father; that the gods would never, if she lived, put her in so base estate but that she should have ability to plague such as they were: returning afresh to prayers and promises, and mixing the same again with threatenings, brought them who were now grown colder in their fellow’s cause, who was past aggravating the matter with his cries, to determine with themselves there was no way, but either to kill them both, or save them both, as for the killing, already they having answered themselves {557} that that was a way to make them citizens of the woods for ever, they did in fine conclude they would return them back again to the king, which they did not doubt would be cause of a great reward, besides their safety from their fore-deserved punishment.

Thus having either by fortune or the force of these two lovers’ inward working virtue, settled their cruel hearts to this gentler course, they took the two horses, and having set upon them their princely prisoners, they returned towards the lodge. The villains having decked all their heads with laurel branches, as thinking they had done a notable act, singing and shouting, ran by them, in hope to have brought them the same day again to the king. But the time was so far spent that they were forced to take up that night’s lodging in the midst of the woods. Where while the clowns continued their watch about them, now that the night, according to his dark nature, did add a kind of desolation to the pensive hearts of these two afflicted lovers, Musidorus taking the tender hand of Pamela, and bedewing it with his tears, in this sort gave an issue to the swelling of his heart’s grief. “Most excellent lady,” said he, “in what case think you am I with myself, how unmerciful judgments do I lay upon my soul, now that I know not what god hath so reversed my well-meaning enterprise, that, instead of doing you that honour which I hoped, and not without reason hoped, Thessalia should have yielded unto you, am now like to become a wretched instrument of your discomfort? alas! how contrary an end have all the inclinations of my mind taken: my faith falls out a treason unto you, and the true honour I bear you is the field wherein your dishonour is like to be sown! but I invoke that universal and only wisdom, which examining the depth of hearts, hath not his judgment fixed upon the event, to bear testimony with me that my desire, though in extremest vehemency, yet did not so overcharge my remembrance, but that as far as man’s will might be extended I sought to prevent all things that might fall to your hurt. But now that all the evil fortunes of evil fortune have crossed my best framed intent, I am most miserable in that, that I cannot only not give you help, but, which is worst of all, am barred from giving you counsel. For how should I open my mouth to counsel you in that, wherein by my counsel you are most undeservedly fallen?” The fair and wise Pamela, although full of cares of the unhappy turning of this matter, yet seeing the grief of Musidorus only stirred for her, did so tread down all other motions with the true force of virtue that she thus answered him, having first kissed him, which before she had never done, love commanding her, which doubted how long they should enjoy one another, or of a lively spark of nobleness, to descend in most favour to one when he is lowest {558} in affliction. “My dear and ever dear Musidorus,” said she, “a greater wrong do you to yourself, that will torment you thus with grief for the fault of fortune. Since a man is bound no further to himself than to do wisely: chance is only to trouble them that stand upon chance. But greater is the wrong, at least, if anything that comes from you may bear the name of wrong, you do unto me, to think me either so childish as not to perceive your faithful faultlessness, or perceiving it, so basely disposed as to let my heart be overthrown, standing upon itself in so unspotted a pureness. Hold for certain, most worthy Musidorus, it is yourself I love, which can no more be diminished by these showers of evil hap than flowers are marred with the timely rains of April. For how can I want comfort that have the true living comfort of thy unblemished virtue? And how can I want honour, as long as Musidorus, in whom indeed honour is, doth honour me? Nothing bred from myself can discomfort me; and fools’ opinions I will not reckon as dishonour.” Musidorus looking up to the stars, “O mind of mine!” said he, “the living power of all things, which dost with all these eyes behold our ever-varying actions, accept into thy favourable ears this prayer of mine: if I may any longer hold out this dwelling on the earth, which is called a life, grant me ability to deserve at this lady’s hands the grace she hath showed unto me: grant me wisdom to know her wisdom, and goodness so to increase my love of her goodness, that all mine own chosen desires, be to myself but second to her determination. Whatsoever I be let it be to her service: let me herein be satisfied, that for such infinite favours of virtue I have some way wrought her satisfaction. But if my last time approacheth, and that I am no longer to be amongst mortal creatures, make yet my death serve her to some purpose, that hereafter she may not have cause to repent herself that she bestowed so excellent a mind upon Musidorus.”

Pamela could not choose but accord the conceit of their fortune to these passionate prayers, in so much that their constant eyes yielded some tears, which wiping from her face with Musidorus’s hand, speaking softly unto him, as if she had feared more anybody should be witness of her weakness, than of anything else she had said, “You see,” said she, “my prince and only lord, what you work in me by your too much grieving for me. I pray you think I have no joy but in you, and if you fill that with sorrow, what do you leave for me? What is prepared for us we know not, but that with sorrow we cannot prevent it, we know. Now let us turn from these things, and think you how you will have me behave myself towards you in this matter.” Musidorus finding the authority of her speech confirmed with direct necessity, the {559} first care came to his mind was of his dear friend and cousin Pyrocles; with whom long before he had concluded what names they should bear, if upon any occasion they were forced to give themselves out for great men, and yet not make themselves fully known. Now fearing, lest if the princess should name him for Musidorus, the fame of their two being together would discover Pyrocles; holding her hand betwixt his hands a good while together: “I did not think, most excellent princess,” said he, “to have made any further request unto you, for having been already unto you so unfortunate a suitor, I know not what modesty can bear any further demand. But the state of one young man, whom, next to you, far above myself, I love more than all the world, one worthy of all well-being for the notable constitution of his mind, and most unworthy to receive hurt by me, whom he doth in all faith and constancy love, the pity of him only goes beyond all resolution to the contrary.” Then did he, to the princess’s great admiration, tell her the whole story as far as he knew of it, and that when they made the grievous disjunction of their long combination, they had concluded Musidorus should entitle himself Palladius, prince of Iberia, and Pyrocles should be Daiphantus of Lycia.

“Now,” said Musidorus, “he keeping a woman’s habit, is to use no other name than Zelmane; but I that find it best of the one side for your honour, you went away with a prince, and not with a shepherd; of the other side, accounting my death less evil than the betraying of that sweet friend of mine, will take this mean betwixt both, and using the name of Palladius, if the respect of a prince will stop your father’s fury, that will serve as well as Musidorus, until Pyrocles’s fortune being some way established, I may freely give good proof that the noble country of Thessalia is mine; and if that will not mitigate your father’s opinion to me-wards, nature, I hope, working in your excellency, will make him deal well with you: for my part the image of death is nothing fearful unto me, and this good I shall have reaped by it, that I shall leave my most esteemed friend in no danger to be disclosed by me. And besides, since I must confess I am not without a remorse of her case, my virtuous mother shall not know her son’s violent death hid under the fame will go of Palladius. But as long as her years, now of good number, be counted among the living, she may joy herself with some possibility of my return.” Pamela promising him upon no occasion ever to name him, fell into extremity of weeping, as if her eyes had been content to spend all their seeing moistness, now that there was a speech of the loss of that which they held as their chiefest light. So that Musidorus was forced to repair her good counsels with sweet consolations, {560} which continued betwixt them till it was about midnight, that sleep having stolen into their heavy senses, and now absolutely commanding in their vital powers, left them delicately wound one in another’s arms, quietly to wait for the coming of the morning; which as soon as she appeared to play her part, laden, as you have heard, with so many well occasioned lamentations, their lobbish guard, who all night had kept themselves awake, with prating how valiant deeds they had done when they ran away; and how fair a death their fellow had died, who at his last gasp sued to be a hangman, awaked them, and set them upon their horses, to whom the very shining force of excellent virtue, though in a very harrish subject, had wrought a kind of reverence in them: Musidorus as he rode among them, of whom they had no other hold but of Pamela, thinking it want of a well-squared judgment to leave any means unassayed of saving their lives, to this purpose spoke to his unseemly guardians, using a plain kind of phrase to make his speech the more credible.

“My masters,” said he, “there is no man that is wise but hath, in whatsoever he doth, some purpose whereto he directs his doings, which so long he follows till he see that either that purpose is not worth the pains, or that another doing carries with it a better purpose. That you are wise in what you take in hand, I have to my cost learned; that makes me desire you tell me what is your end in carrying the princess and me back to her father.” “Pardon,” said one; “reward,” cried another. “Well,” said he, “take both, although I know you are so wise to remember that hardly they both will go together, being of so contrary a making; for the ground of pardon is an evil, neither any man pardons but remembers an evil done: the cause of reward is the opinion of some good act, and whoso rewardeth, that holds the chief place of his fancy. Now one man of one company, to have the same consideration of good and evil, but that the conceit of pardoning, if it be pardoned, will take away the mind of rewarding, is very hard, if not impossible. For either even in justice will he punish the fault, as well as reward the desert, or else in mercy balance the one by the other: so that the not chastising shall be a sufficient satisfying. Thus then you may see that in your own purpose rests great uncertainty. But I will grant that by this your deed you shall obtain your double purpose. Yet consider, I pray you, whether by another means that may not better be obtained, and then I doubt not your wisdom will teach you to take hold of the better. I am sure you know, anybody were better have no need of a pardon than enjoy a pardon; for as it carries with it the surety of a preserved life, so bears it a continual note of a deserved death. This therefore, besides the danger you may run into, my Lady {561} Pamela being the undoubted inheritrix of this state, if she shall hereafter seek to revenge the wrong done her shall be continually cast in your teeth, as men dead by the law: the honester sort will disdain your company, and your children shall be the more basely reputed of, and you yourselves in every slight fault hereafter, as men once condemned, aptest to be overthrown. Now if you will, I doubt not but you will, for you are wise, turn your course, and guard my Lady Pamela thitherward, whither she was going: first, you need not doubt to adventure your fortune where she goes, and there shall you be assured in a country as good and rich as this is, of the same manners and language to be so far from the conceit of a pardon, as we both shall be forced to acknowledge we have received by your means whatsoever we hold dear in this life. And so for reward, judge you whether it be not more likely, you shall there receive it where you have done no evil, but singular and undeserved goodness; or here, where this service of yours shall be diminished by your duty, and blemished by your former fault. Yes I protest and swear unto you, by the fair eyes of that lady, there shall no gentleman in all that country be preferred: you shall have riches, ease, pleasure, and that which is best to such worthy minds, you shall not be forced to cry mercy for a good fact. You only, of all the Arcadians shall have the praise, in continuing in your late valiant attempt, and not be basely brought under a halter for seeking the liberty of Arcadia.”

These words in their minds, who did nothing for any love of goodness, but only as their senses presented greater shows of profit, began to make them waver, and some to clap their hands and scratch their heads, and swear it was the best way. Others that would seem wiser than the rest, to capitulate what tenements they should have, what subsidies they should pay; others to talk of their wives, in doubt whether it were best to send for them, or to take new where they went: most, like fools, not readily thinking what was next to be done, but imagining what cheer they would make when they came there, one or two of the last discoursers beginning to turn their faces towards the woods which they had left. But being now come within the plain, near to the lodges, unhappily they espied a troop of horsemen. But then their false hearts had quickly, for the present fear, forsaken their last hopes: and therefore keeping on the way toward the lodge, with songs and cries of joy, the horsemen, who were some of them Philanax had sent out to the search of Pamela, came galloping unto them, marvelling who they were that in such a general mourning durst sing joyful tunes, and in so public a ruin wear the laurel token of victory. And that which seemed strangest, they might see two among them unarmed like prisoners, but riding like captains. {562} But when they came nearer, they perceived the one was a lady, and the Lady Pamela. Then glad they had by hap found that which they so little hoped to meet withal, taking these clowns, who first resisted them, for the desire they had to be the deliverers of the two excellent prisoners, learning that they were of those rebels which had made the dangerous uproar, as well under colour to punish that, as this their last withstanding them, but indeed their principal cause being, because they themselves would have the only praise of their own quest, they suffered not one of them to live. Marry three of the stubbornest of them they left their bodies hanging upon the trees, because their doing might carry the likelier form of judgment. Such an unlooked-for end did the life of justice work for the naughty-minded wretches, by subjects to be executed, that would have executed princes: and to suffer that without law, which by law they had deserved. And thus these young folks twice prisoners, before any due arrest, delivered of their jailors, but not of their jail, had rather change than respite of misery; these soldiers that took them with very few words of entertainment, hasting to carry them to their lord Philanax, to whom they came, even as he, going out of the Lady Philoclea’s chamber, had overtaken Pyrocles, whom before he had delivered to the custody of a nobleman of that country. When Pyrocles, led towards his prison, saw his friend Musidorus, with the noble Lady Pamela in that unexpected sort returned, his grief, if any grief were in a mind which had placed everything according to his natural worth, was very much augmented; for besides some small hope he had, if Musidorus had once been clear of Arcadia, by his dealing and authority to have brought his only gladsome desires to a good issue: the hard estate of his friend did no less, nay rather more vex him than his own. For so indeed it is ever found, where valour and friendship are perfectly coupled in one heart; the reason being that the resolute man having once digested in his judgment the worst extremity of his own case, and having either quite expelled or at least repelled all passion which ordinarily follows an overthrown fortune, not knowing his friend’s mind so well as his own, nor with what patience he brooks his case, which as it were the material cause of making a man happy or unhappy, doubts whether his friend accounts not himself more miserable, and so indeed be more lamentable. But as soon as Musidorus was brought by the soldiers near unto Philanax, Pyrocles not knowing whether ever after he should be suffered to see his friend, and determining there could be no advantage by dissembling a not-knowing of him, leaped suddenly from their hands that held him, and passing, with a strength strengthened with a true affection, through them that encompassed Musidorus, he embraced {563} him as fast as he could in his arms. And kissing his cheeks, “O my Palladius,” said he, “let not our virtue now abandon us; let us prove our minds are no slaves to fortune, but in adversity can triumph over adversity.” “Dear Daiphantus,” answered Musidorus, seeing by his apparel his being a man was revealed, “I thank you for this best care of my best part: but fear not, I have kept too long company with you to want now a thorough determination of these things; I well know, there is nothing evil but within us, the rest is either natural or accidental.” Philanax, finding them of so near acquaintance, began presently to examine them apart: but such resolution he met with in them, that by no such means he could learn further than it pleased them to deliver. So that he thought best to put them both in one place, with espial of their words and behaviour, that way to sift out the more of these surpassed mischiefs. And for that purpose gave them both unto the nobleman, who before had the custody of Pyrocles, by name Sympathus, leaving a trusty servant of his own to give diligent watch to what might pass betwixt them. No man that hath ever passed through the school of affection, needs doubt what a tormenting grief it was to the noble Pamela, to have the company of him taken from her, to whose virtuous company she had bound her life. But weighing with herself, it was fit for her honour, till her doings were clearly manifested, that they should remain separate, kept down the rising tokens of grief; showing passion in nothing but her eyes, which accompanied Musidorus even unto the tent, whither he and Pyrocles were led. Then, with a countenance more princely than she was wont, according to the wont of highest hearts, like the palm tree striving most upwards, when he is most burdened, she commanded Philanax to bring her to her father and mother, that she might render them an account of her doings. Philanax showing a sullen kind of reverence unto her, as a man that honoured her as his master’s heir, but much misliked her for her, in his conceit, dishonourable proceedings, told her what was past, rather to answer her, than that he thought she was ignorant of it. But her good spirit did presently suffer a true compassionate affliction of those hard adventures, which, with crossing her arms, looking a great while upon the ground, with those eyes which let fall many tears, she well declared. But in the end, remembering how necessary it was for her, not to lose herself in such an extremity, she strengthened her well-created heart, and stoutly demanded Philanax, what authority then they had to lay hands on her person, who being the undoubted heir, was then the lawful princess of that kingdom? Philanax answered, her grace knew the ancient laws of Arcadia bare, she was to have no sway of government till she came to one and twenty years of {564} age, or were married. “And married I am,” replied the wise princess, “therefore I demand your due allegiance.” “The gods forbid,” said Philanax, “Arcadia should be a dowry of such marriages.” Besides, he told her all the states of her country were evil satisfied touching her father’s death, which likewise according to the statutes of Arcadia, was even that day to be judged of, before the body were removed to receive his princely funeral. After that passed, she should have such obedience, as by the laws were due unto her, desiring God she would show herself better in public government than she had done in private. She would have spoken to the gentlemen and people gathered about her, but Philanax fearing lest thereby some commotion might arise, or at least a hinderance of executing his master’s murderers, which he longed after more than anything, hasted her up to the lodge, where her sister was, and there was a chosen company of soldiers to guard the place, left her with Philoclea, Pamela protesting they laid violent hands on her, and that they entered into rebellious attempts against her. But high time it was for Philanax so to do, for already was all the whole multitude fallen into confused and dangerous divisions.

There was a notable example, how great dissipations monarchical government is subject unto. For now their prince and guide had left them, they had not experience to rule, and had not whom to obey. Public matters had ever been privately governed, so that they had no lively taste what was good for themselves. But everything was either vehemently desireful, or extremely terrible. Neighbours’ invasions, civil dissention, cruelty of the coming prince, and whatsoever in common sense carries a dreadful show, was in all men’s heads, but in few how to prevent: hearkening on every rumour, suspecting everything, condemning them whom before they had honoured, making strange and impossible tales of the king’s death, while they thought themselves in danger, wishing nothing but safety; as soon as persuasion of safety took them, desiring further benefits, as amendment of fore-passed faults, which faults notwithstanding none could tell either the grounds or effects of, all agreeing in the universal names of liking or misliking, but of what in especial points, infinitely disagreeing. Altogether like a falling steeple, the parts whereof, as windows, stones, and pinnacles were well, but the whole mass ruinous. And this was the general cause of all, wherein notwithstanding was an extreme medley of diversified thoughts, the great men looking to make themselves strong by factions, the gentlemen some bending to them, some standing upon themselves, some desirous to overthrow those few which they thought were over them; the soldiers desirous of trouble, as the nurse of spoil, and not much unlike to {565} them though in another way, were all the needy sort, the rich fearful, the wise careful. This composition of conceits brought forth a dangerous tumult, which yet would have been more dangerous, but that it had so many parts that nobody well knew against whom chiefly to oppose themselves. For some there were that cried to have the state altered, and governed no more by a prince; marry, in the alteration, many would have the Lacedaemonian government of a few chosen senators, others the Athenian, where the people’s voice held the chief authority. But these were rather the discoursing sort of men, than the active, being a matter more in imagination than practice. But they that went nearest to the present case, as in a country that knew no government without a prince, were they that strove whom they should make. Whereof a great number there were that would have the Princess Pamela presently to enjoy it: some disdaining that she had as it were abandoned her own country, inclining more to Philoclea; and there wanted not of them, which wished Gynecia were delivered, and made regent till Pamela were worthily married. But great multitudes there were, which having been acquainted with the just government of Philanax, meant to establish him as lieutenant of the state; and these were the most popular sort, who judged by the commodities they felt. But the principal men in honour and might, who had long before envied his greatness with Basilius, did much more spurn against any such preferment of him. For yet before their envy had some kind of breathing out his rancour, by laying his greatness as a fault to the prince’s judgment, who showed in Dametas he might easily be deceived in men’s value: but now if the prince’s choice, by so many mouths should be confirmed, what could they object to so rightly esteemed an excellency, they therefore were disposed sooner to yield to any thing than to his raising; and were content, for to cross Philanax, to stop those actions, which otherwise they could not but think good. Philanax himself as much hindered by those that did immoderately honour him, which brought both more envy and suspicion upon him, as by them that did manifestly resist him: but, standing only upon a constant desire of justice, and a clear conscience went forward stoutly in the action of his master’s revenge, which he thought himself particularly bound to. For the rest, as the ordering of the government, he accounted himself but as one wherein notwithstanding he would employ all his loyal endeavour.

But among the noblemen, he that most openly set himself against him was named Timautus, a man of middle age, but of extreme ambition, as one that had placed his uttermost good in greatness, thinking small difference by what means he came by it. {566} Of commendable wit, if he had not made it a servant to unbridled desires. Cunning to creep into men’s favours, which he prized only as they were serviceable unto him. He had been brought up in some soldiery, which he knew how to set out with more than deserved ostentation. Servile, though envious, to his betters: and no less tyrannically minded to them he had advantage of. Counted revengeful, but indeed measuring both revenge and reward, as the party might either help or hurt him. Rather shameless than bold, and yet more bold in practice than in personal adventures. In some, a man that could be as evil as he listed, and listed as much as any advancement might thereby be gotten. As for virtue he counted it but a school-name. He even at the first assembling together, finding the great stroke Philanax carried among the people, thought it his readiest way of ambition to join with him: which though his pride did hardly brook, yet the other vice carrying with it a more apparent object prevailed over the weaker, so that with those liberal protestations of friendship, which men that care not for their word are wont to bestow, he offered unto him the choice in marriage of either the sisters, so he would likewise help him to the other, and make such a partition of the Arcadian estate. Wishing him that since he loved his master, because he was his master, which showed the love began in himself, he should rather now occasion was presented seek his own good substantially than affect the smoke of a glory by showing an untimely fidelity to him that could not reward it: and have all the fruit he could get, in men’s opinions, which would be as divers as many; few agreeing to yield him due praise of his true heart. But Philanax, who had limited his thoughts in that he esteemed good, to which he was neither carried by the vain tickling of uncertain fame, nor from which he would be transported by enjoying anything, whereto the ignorant world gives the excellent name of goods, with great mislike of his offer, he made him so peremptory an answer, not without threatening, if he found him foster any such fancy, that Timautus went with an inward spite from him, whom before he had never loved: and measuring all men’s marches by his own pace, rather thought it some further fetch of Philanax, as that he would have all to himself alone, than was any way taken with the lovely beauty of his virtue, whose image he had so quite defaced in his own soul that he had left himself no eyes to behold it, but stayed waiting fit opportunity to execute his desires both for himself and against Philanax, which by the bringing back of Pamela, the people being divided into many motions, which both with murmuring noises, and putting themselves in several troops, they well showed, he thought apt time was laid before him, the waters being, as the proverb saith, {567} troubled, and so the better for his fishing. Therefore going among the chiefest lords, whom he knew principally to repine at Philanax, and making a kind of convocation of them, he inveighed against his proceeding, drawing everything to the most malicious interpretation, that malice itself could instruct him to do. He said, it was season for them to look to such a weed, that else would over-grow them all. It was not now time to consult of the dead, but of the living: since such a sly wolf was entered among them, that could make justice the cloak of tyranny, and love of his late master the destruction of his now being children. “Do you not see,” said he, “how far his corruption hath stretched, that he hath such a number of rascals’ voices to declare him lieutenant, ready to make him prince, but that he instructs them, matters are not yet ripe for it? as for us, because we are too rich to be bought, he thinks us the fitter to be killed. Hath Arcadia bred no man but Philanax? is she become a stepmother to all the rest, and hath given all her blessings to Philanax? or if there be men amongst us, let us show we disdain to be servants to a servant. Let us make him know we are far worthier not to be slaves than he to be a master. Think you he hath made such haste in these matters to give them over to another man’s hand? think you he durst become the jailor of his princess, but either meaning to be her master, or her murderer? and all this for the dear goodwill, forsooth, he bears to the king’s memory, whose authority as he abused in his life, so he would now persevere to abuse his name after his death. O notable affection, for the love of the father to kill the wife and disinherit the children! O single-minded modesty, to aspire to no less than to the princely diadem, no, no, he hath veered all this while, but to come the sooner to his affected end. But let us remember what we be, in quality his equals, in number far before him: let us deliver the queen and our natural princesses, and leave them no longer under his authority, whose proceedings would rather show that he himself had been the murderer of the king, than a fit guardian of his posterity.”

These words pierced much into the minds already inclined that way, insomuch that most part of the nobility confirmed Timautus’s speech, and were ready to execute it: when Philanax came among them, and with a constant, but reverent behaviour, desired them they would not exercise private grudges in so common a necessity. He acknowledged himself a man, and a faulty man: to the clearing or satisfying of which, he would at all times submit himself; since his end was to bring all things to an upright judgment, it should evil fit him to fly the judgment. “But,” said he, “my lords, let not Timautus’s railing speech, who whatsoever he finds evil in his own soul can with ease lay it upon another, make me lose {568} your good favour. Consider that all well-doing stands so in the middle betwixt his two contrary evils that it is a ready matter to cast a slanderous shade upon the most approved virtues. Who hath an evil tongue, can call severity cruelty, and faithful diligence, diligent ambition. But my end is not to excuse myself, nor to accuse him: for both those hereafter will be time enough. There is neither of us, whose purging or punishing may so much import to Arcadia. Now I request you, for your own honour’s sake, and require you by the duty you owe to this estate, that you do presently, according to the laws, take in hand the chastisement of our master’s murderers, and laying order for the government by whomsoever it be done, so it be done, and justly done, I am satisfied. My labour hath been to frame things so that you might determine; now it is in you to determine. For my part, I call the heavens to witness, the care of my heart stands to repay that, wherein both I and most of you were tied to that prince, with whom all my love of worldly action is dead.”

As Philanax was speaking his last words there came one running to him with open mouth and fearful eyes, telling him that there was a great number of the people which were bent to take the young men out of Sympathus’s hands, and as it should seem by their acclamations, were like enough to proclaim them princes. “Nay,” said Philanax, speaking aloud, and looking with a just anger upon the noblemen, “it is no season to hear Timautus’s idle slanders while strangers become our lords, and Basilius’s murderers sit in his throne. But whosoever is a true Arcadian let him follow me.” With that he went toward the place he heard of, followed by those that had ever loved him, and some of the noblemen. Some other remaining with Timautus, who in the meantime was conspiring by strong hands to deliver Gynecia, of whom the weakest guard was had. But Philanax, where he went found them all in an uproar, which thus was fallen out. The greatest multitude of people that were come to the death of Basilius, were the Mantineans, as being the nearest city to the lodges. Among these the chief man both in authority and love was Kalander, he that not long before had been host to the two princes; whom though he knew not so much as by name, yet besides the obligation he stood bound to them in for preserving the lives of his son and nephew, their noble behaviour had bred such love in his heart towards them that both with tears he parted from them when they left him, under promise to return, and did keep their jewels and apparel as the relics of two demi-gods. Among others he had entered the prison and seen them, which forthwith so invested his soul, both with sorrow and desire to help them, whom he tendered as his children, that calling his neighbours the Mantineans unto {569} him, he told them all the praises of these two young men, swearing he thought the gods had provided for them better than they themselves could have imagined. He willed them to consider that when all was done Basilius’s children must enjoy the state, who since they had chosen, and chosen so that all the world could not mend their choice, why should they resist God’s doing, and their princess’s pleasure? this was the only way to purchase quietness without blood, where otherwise they should at one instant crown Pamela with a crown of gold, and a dishonoured title? which whether ever she would forget, he thought it fit for them to weigh: “Such,” said he, “heroical greatness shines in their eyes, such an extraordinary majesty in all their actions, as surely either fortune by parentage, or nature in creation, hath made them princes. And yet a state already we have, we need but a man, who since he is presented unto you by the heavenly providence, embraced by our undoubted princess, worthy for their youth of compassion, for their beauty of admiration, for their excellent virtue to be monarchs of the world; shall we not be content with our own bliss? shall we put out our eyes because another man cannot see? or rather like some men, when too much good happens unto them, they think themselves in a dream and have not spirits to taste their own goods? No, no, my friends, believe me, I am so impartial, that I know not their names, but so overcome with their virtue that I shall then think the destinies have ordained a perpetual flourishing to Arcadia, when they shall allot such a governor unto it.”

This spoken by a grave man in years, great in authority, near allied to the prince, and known honest, prevailed so with all the Mantineans, that with one voice they ran to deliver the two princes. But Philanax came in time to withstand them, both sides standing in arms, and rather wanting a beginning than minds to enter into a bloody conflict. Which Philanax foreseeing, thought best to remove the prisoners secretly, and if need were, rather without form of justice to kill them, than against justice, as he thought, to have them usurp the state. But there again arose a new trouble. For Sympathus, the nobleman that kept them, was so stricken in compassion with their excellent presence, that as he would not falsify his promise to Philanax to give them liberty so yet would he not yield them to himself, fearing he would do them violence. Thus tumult upon tumult arising, the sun, I think, weary to see their discords had already gone down to his western lodging. But yet to know what the poor shepherds did, who were the first discriers of these matters, will not to some ears perchance be a tedious digression.

THE FOURTH ECLOGUES

The shepherds finding no place for them in these garboils, to which their quiet hearts, whose highest ambition was in keeping themselves up in goodness, had at all no aptness, retired themselves from among the clamorous multitude: and as sorrow desires company, went up together to the western side of an hill, whose prospect extended it so far that they might well discern many of Arcadia’s beauties. And there looking upon the sun’s as then declining race, the poor men sat pensive of their present miseries, as if they found a weariness of their woeful words: till at last good old Geron, who as he had longest tasted the benefits of Basilius’s government, so seemed to have a special feeling of the present loss, wiping his eyes and long white beard, bedewed with great drops of tears, began in this sort to complain: “Alas! poor sheep,” said he, “which hitherto have enjoyed your fruitful pasture in such quietness, as your wool among other things hath made this country famous, your best days are now past: now you must become the victual of an army, and perchance an army of foreign enemies, you are now not only to fear home-wolves, but alien lions: now, I say, now that our right Basilius is deceased. Alas! sweet pastures, shall soldiers that know not how to use you, possess you? shall they that cannot speak the Arcadian language be lords over your shepherds? for alas with good cause may we look for any evil, since Basilius our only strength is taken from us.”

To that all the other shepherds present uttered pitiful voices, especially the very born Arcadians. For as for the other, though humanity moved them to pity human cases, especially in a prince under whom they had found a refuge of their miseries, and justice equally administered, yet could they not so naturally feel the lively touch of sorrow. Nevertheless, of that number one Agelastus notably noted among them as well for his skill in poetry as for an austerely maintained sorrowfulness, wherewith he seemed to despise the works of nature, framing an universal complaint in that universal mischief, uttered it in this Sestine.

It seemed that this complaint of Agelastus had awaked the spirits of the Arcadians, astonished before with the exceedingness of sorrow. For he had scarcely ended when divers of them offered to follow his example in bewailing the general loss of that country which had been as well a nurse to strangers as a mother to Arcadians. Among the rest one accounted good in that kind, and made the better by the true feeling of sorrow, roared out a song of lamentation, which, as well as might be, was gathered up in this form:

Many were ready to have followed this course, but the day was so wasted, that only this rhyming Sestine delivered by one of great account among them, could obtain favour to be heard.

The night began to cast her dark canopy over them, and they, even weary with their woes, bended homewards, hoping by sleep, forgetting themselves, to ease their present dolours, when they were met with a troop of twenty horse, the chief of which asking them for the king, and understanding the hard news, thereupon stayed among them expecting the return of a messenger, whom with speed he dispatched to Philanax.

ARCADIA
BOOK V

The dangerous division of men’s minds, the ruinous renting of all estates, had now brought Arcadia to feel the pangs of uttermost peril, such convulsions never coming, but that the life of that government draws near his necessary period, when to the honest and wise Philanax, equally distracted between desire of his master’s revenge and care of the estate’s establishment, there came, unlooked for, a Macedonian gentleman, who in short, but pithy manner, delivered unto him, that the renowned Euarchus, King of Macedon, purposing to have visited his old friend and confederate the King Basilius, was now come within half a mile of the lodges, where having understood by certain shepherds the sudden death of their prince, had sent unto him, of whose authority and faith he had good knowledge, desiring him to advertise him in what security he might rest there for that night, where willingly he would, if safely he might, help to celebrate the funeral of his ancient companion and ally; adding he need not doubt, since he had brought but twenty in his company, he would be so unwise as to enter into any forcible attempt with so small force. Philanax having entertained the gentleman, as well as in the midst of so many tumults he could, pausing a while with himself, considering how it should not only be unjust and against the law of nations, not well to receive a prince whom goodwill had brought among them, but, in respect of the greatness of his might, very dangerous to give him any cause of due offence; remembering withal the excellent trials of his equity, which made him more famous than his victories, he thought he might be the fittest instrument to redress the ruins they were in, since his goodness put him without suspicion, and his greatness beyond envy. Yet weighing with himself how hard many heads were to be bridled, and that in this monstrous confusion such mischief might be attempted, of which {578} late repentance should after be but a simple remedy, he judged best first to know how the people’s minds would sway to this determination. Therefore desiring the gentleman to return to the King his master, and to beseech him, though with his pains, to stay for an hour or two, where he was, till he had set things in better order to receive him, he himself went first to the noblemen, then to Kalander, and the principal Mantineans, who were most opposite unto him, desiring them, that as the night had most blessedly staid them from entering into civil blood, so they would be content in the night to assemble the people together to hear some news which he was to deliver unto them. There is nothing more desirous of novelties than a man that fears his present fortune. Therefore they, whom mutual diffidence made doubtful of their utter destruction, were quickly persuaded to hear of any new matter, which might alter at least, if not help the nature of their fear. Namely, the chiefest men, who as they had most to lose, so were most jealous of their own case, and were already grown as weary to be followers of Timautus’s ambition, as before they were enviers of Philanax’s worthiness. As for Kalander and Sympathus as in the one a virtuous friendship had made him seek to advance, in the other a natural commiseration had made him willing to protect the excellent, though unfortunate prisoners, so were they not against this convocation. For having nothing but just desires in them, they did not mistrust the justifying of them. Only Timautus laboured to have withdrawn them from this assembly, saying it was time to stop their ears from the ambitious charms of Philanax. Let them first deliver Gynecia, and her daughters, which were fit persons to hear, and then they might begin to speak. That this was but Philanax’s cunning, to link broil upon broil, because he might avoid the answering of his trespasses, which as he had long intended, so had he prepared coloured speeches to disguise them. But as his words expressed rather a violence of rancour than any just ground of accusation, so pierced they no further than to some partial ear, the multitude yielding good attention to what Philanax would propose unto them. Who, like a man whose best building was a well-framed conscience, neither with plausible words, nor fawning countenance, but even with the grave behaviour of a wise father, whom nothing but love makes to chide, thus said unto them.

“I have,” said he, “a great matter to deliver unto you, and thereout am I to make a greater demand of you: but truly such hath this late proceeding been of yours that I know not what is to be demanded of you. Methinks I may have reason to require of you, as men are wont among pirates, that the life of him that never hurt you, may be safe. Methinks I am not without {579} appearance of cause, as if you were Cyclopes or Cannibals, to desire that our prince’s body, which hath thirty years maintained us in a flourishing peace, be not torn in pieces, or devoured among you, but may be suffered to yield itself, which never was defiled with any of your bloods, to the natural rest of the earth. Methinks, not as to Arcadians renowned for your faith to prince, and love of country, but as to sworn enemies of this sweet soil. I am to desire you, that at least, if you will have strangers to your princes, yet you will not deliver the seigniory of this goodly kingdom to your noble king’s murderers. Lastly, I have reason, as if I had to speak to madmen, to desire you to be good to yourselves: for before God, what either barbarous violence or unnatural folly, hath not this day had his seat in your minds, and left his footsteps in your actions? but in troth I love you too well to stand long displaying your faults: I would you yourselves did forget them, so you did not fall again into them. For my part, I had much rather be an orator of your praises. But now, if you will suffer attentive judgment, and not forejudging passion, to be the weigher of my words, I will deliver unto you what a blessed mean the gods have sent unto you, if you list to embrace it. I think there is none among you so young, either in years, or understanding, but hath heard the true fame of that just prince Euarchus, King of Macedon. A prince with whom our late master did ever hold most perfect alliance. He, even he, is this day come, having but twenty horse with him, within two miles of this place, hoping to have found the virtuous Basilius alive, but now willing to do honour to his death. Surely, surely the heavenly powers have in so full a time bestowed him on us to unite our divisions. For my part therefore I wish, that since among ourselves we cannot agree in so manifold partialities, we do put the ordering of all these things into his hands, as well touching the obsequies of the king, the punishment of his death, as the marriage and crowning of our princesses, he is both by experience and wisdom taught how to direct: his greatness such as no man can disdain to obey him: his equity such as no man need to fear him. Lastly, as he hath all these qualities to help, so hath he, though he would, no force to hurt. If therefore you so think good, since our laws bear that our prince’s murder be chastised before his murdered body be buried, we may invite him to sit to-morrow in the judgment seat; which done, you may after proceed to the burial.”

When Philanax first named Euarchus’ landing, there was a muttering murmur among the people, as though, in that evil ordered weakness of theirs he had come to conquer their country. But when they understood he had so small a retinue, whispering one with another, and looking who should begin to confirm {580} Philanax’s proposition, at length Sympathus was the first that allowed it, then the rest of the noblemen; neither did Kalander strive, hoping so excellent a prince could not but deal graciously with two such young men, whose authority joined to Philanax, all the popular sort followed. Timautus still blinded with his own ambitious haste, not remembering factions are no longer to be trusted, than the factious may be persuaded it is for their own good, would needs strive against the stream, exclaiming against Philanax, that now he showed who it was that would betray his country to strangers. But well he found, that who is too busy in the foundation of an house, may pull the building about his ears. For the people already tired with their own divisions, of which his clampring had been a principal nurse, and beginning now to espy a haven of rest, hated anything that should hinder them from it: asking one another whether this were not he whose evil tongue no man could escape? whether it were not Timautus that made the first mutinous oration, to strengthen the troubles? whether Timautus, without their consent, had not gone about to deliver Gynecia? And thus inflaming one another against him, they threw him out of the assembly, and after pursued him with stones and staves, so that with loss of one of his eyes, sore wounded and beaten, he was fain to fly to Philanax’s feet, for succour of his life; giving a true lesson, that vice itself is forced to seek the sanctuary of virtue. For Philanax, who hated his evil, but not his person, and knew that a just punishment might by the manner be unjustly done; remembering withal that although herein the people’s rage might have hit rightly, yet if it were nourished in this, no man knew to what extremities it might extend itself, with earnest dealing, and employing the uttermost of his authority he did protect the trembling Timautus. And then having taken a general oath, that they should in the nonage of the princess, or till these things were settled, yield full obedience to Euarchus, so far as were not prejudicial to the laws, customs and liberties of Arcadia: and having taken a particular bond of Sympathus, under whom he had a servant of his own, that the prisoners should be kept close, without conference with any man: he himself honourably accompanied with a great number of torches, went to the King Euarchus, whose coming in this sort into Arcadia had thus fallen out.

The woeful Prince Plangus receiving of Basilius no other succours, but only certain to conduct him to Euarchus, made all possible speed towards Byzantium, where he understood the king, having concluded all his wars with the winning of that town, had now for some good space made his abode. But being far gone on his way, he received certain intelligence, that Euarchus was {581} not only some days before returned into Macedon, but since was gone with some haste to visit that coast of his country that lay towards Italy; the occasion given by the Latines, who having already gotten into their hands, partly by conquest and partly by confederacy, the greatest part of Italy, and long gaped to devour Greece also, observing the present opportunity of Euarchus’s absence, and Basilius’s solitariness, which two princes they knew to be in effect the whole strength of Greece, were even ready to lay an unjust gripe upon it, which after they might beautify with the noble name of conquest. Which purpose though they made not known by any solemn denouncing of war, but contrariwise gave many tokens of continuing still their former amity: yet the staying of his subjects’ ships, trafficking as merchants into those parts, together with the daily preparation of shipping, and other warlike provisions in ports, most convenient for the transporting of soldiers, occasioned Euarchus, not unacquainted with such practices, first to suspect, then to discern, lastly to seek to prevent the intended mischief. Yet thinking war never to be accepted until it be offered by the hand of necessity, he determined so long openly to hold them his friends, as open hospitality betrayed them not his enemies, nor ceasing in the meantime by letters and messages to move the states of Greece, by uniting their strength, to make timely provision against this peril; by many reasons making them see that, though in respect of place some of them might seem further removed from the first violence of the storm, yet being embarked in the same ship, the final wreck must needs be common to them all. And knowing the mighty force of example, with the weak effect of fair discourses, not waited on with agreeable actions, what he persuaded them, himself performed, leaving in his own realm nothing either undone or unprovided which might be thought necessary for withstanding an invasion. His first care was to put his people in a readiness for war, and by his experienced soldiers to train the unskilful to martial exercises. For the better effecting whereof, as also for meeting with other inconveniences in such doubtful times incident to the most settled states, making of the divers regions of his whole kingdom so many divisions as he thought convenient, he appointed the charge of them to the greatest, and of greatest trust he had about him: arming them with sufficient authority to levy forces within their several governments, both for the resisting the invading enemy, and punishing the disordered subject.

Having thus prepared the body, and assured the heart of his country against any mischief that might attaint it, he then took into his careful consideration the external parts, giving order both for the repairing and increasing his navy, and for the fortifying of {582} such places, especially on the sea coast, as either commodity of landing, weakness of the country, or any other respect of advantage was likeliest to draw the enemy unto. But being none of them who think all things done, for which they have once given direction, he followed everywhere his commandment with his presence, which witnessed of every man’s slackness or diligence, chastising the one, and encouraging the other, suffered not the fruit of any profitable counsel for want of timely taking to be lost. And thus making one place succeed another in the progress of wisdom and virtue, he was now come to Aulon a principal port of his realm, when the poor Plangus extremely wearied with his long journey, desire of succouring Erona no more relieving, than fear of not succouring her in time, aggravating his travel, by a lamentable narration of his children’s death, called home his cares from encountering foreign enemies, to suppress the insurrection of inward passions. The matter so heinous, the manner so villainous, the loss of such persons, in so unripe years, in a time so dangerous to the whole state of Greece, how vehemently it moved to grief and compassion others, only not blind to the light of virtue, nor deaf to the voice of their country, might perchance by a more cunning workman in lively colours be delivered. But the face of Euarchus’s sorrow, to the one in nature, to both in affection a father, and judging the world so much the more unworthily deprived of those excellencies, as himself was better judge of so excellent worthiness, can no otherwise be shadowed out by the skilfullest pencil than by covering it over with the veil of silence. And indeed that way himself took, with so patient a quietness receiving this pitiful relation, that all words of weakness suppressed, magnanimity seemed to triumph over misery. Only receiving of Plangus perfect instruction of all things concerning Plexirtus and Artaxia, with promise not only to aid him in delivering Erona, but also with vehement protestation never to return into Macedon, till he had pursued the murderers to death, he dispatched with speed a ship for Byzantium, commanding the governor to provide all necessaries for the war against his own coming, which he purposed should be very shortly. In this ship Plangus would needs go, impatient of stay, for that in many days before he had understood nothing of his lady’s estate. Soon after whose departure, news was brought to Euarchus, that all the ships detained in Italy were returned. For the Latines finding by Euarchus’s proceedings their intent to be frustrate, as before by his sudden return they doubted it was discovered, deeming it no wisdom to show the will, not having the ability to hurt, had not only in free and friendly manner dismissed them, but for that time wholly omitted their enterprise attending the opportunity of fitter occasion. By means whereof Euarchus, {583} rid from the cumber of that war, likely otherwise to have stayed him longer, with so great a fleet as haste would suffer him to assemble, forthwith embarked for Byzantium. And now followed with fresh winds he had in a short time run a long course, when on a night encountered with an extreme tempest, his ships were so scattered that scarcely any two were left together. As for the king’s own ship, deprived of all company, sore bruised, and weather beaten, able no longer to brook the sea’s churlish entertainment, a little before day it recovered the shore. The first light made them see it was the unhappy coast of Laconia: for no other country could have shown the like evidence of unnatural war. Which having long endured between the nobility and the Helots, and once compounded by Pyrocles, under the name of Daiphantus, immediately upon his departure had broken out more violently than ever before. For the king taking opportunity of their captain’s absence, refused to perform the conditions of peace as extorted from him by rebellious violence. Whereupon they were again deeply entered into war, with so notable an hatred towards the very name of a king, that Euarchus, though a stranger unto them, thought it not safe there to leave his person, where neither his own force could be a defence, nor the sacred name of majesty, a protection. Therefore calling to him an Arcadian, one that coming with Plangus had remained with Euarchus, desirous to see the wars, he demanded of him for the next place of surety where he might make his stay until he might hear somewhat of his fleet, or cause his ship to be repaired. The gentleman glad to have this occasion of doing service to Euarchus, and honour to Basilius, to whom he knew he should bring a most welcome guest, told him, that if it pleased him to commit himself to Arcadia, a part whereof lay open to their view, he would undertake ere the next night were far spent to guide him safely to his master Basilius. The present necessity much prevailed with Euarchus, yet more a certain virtuous desire to try whether by his authority he might withdraw Basilius from burying himself alive, and to employ the rest of his old years in doing good, the only happy action of man’s life. For besides the universal case of Greece, deprived by this means of a principal pillar, he weighed and pitied the pitiful state of the Arcadian people, who were in worse case than if death had taken away their prince. For so yet their necessity would have placed someone to the helm; now, a prince being, and not doing like a prince, keeping and not exercising the place, they were in so much more evil case, as they could not provide for their evil.

These rightly wise and virtuous considerations especially moved Euarchus to take his journey towards the deserts, where arriving within night, and understanding to his great grief the news of the {584} prince’s death, he waited for his safe conduct from Philanax; in the meantime taking his rest under a tree, with no more affected pomps than as a man that knew, howsoever he was exalted, the beginning and end of his body was earth. But Philanax as soon as he was in sight of him, alighting from his horse, presented himself unto him in all those humble behaviours, which not only the great reverence of the party, but the conceit of one’s own misery, is wont to frame: Euarchus rose up unto him, with so gracious a countenance, as the goodness of his mind had long exercised him unto; careful so much more to descend in all courtesies, as he saw him bear a low representation of his afflicted state. But to Philanax, as soon as by near looking on him, he might perfectly behold him, the gravity of his countenance and years, not much unlike to his late deceased, but ever beloved master, brought his form so lively into his memory, and revived so all the thoughts of his wonted joys within him, that instead of speaking to Euarchus, he stood a while like a man gone a far journey from himself, calling as it were with his mind an account of his losses, imagining that this pain needed not, if nature had not been violently stopped of her own course; and casting more loving than wise conceits, what a world would this have been if this sudden accident had not interrupted it. And so far strayed he into his raving melancholy that his eyes, nimbler than his tongue, let fall a flood of tears, his voice being stopped with extremity of sobbing, so much had his friendship carried him to Basilius that he thought no age was timely for his death. But at length taking the occasion of his own weeping, he thus did speak to Euarchus: “Let not my tears, most worthily renowned prince, make my presence unpleasant, or my speech unmarked of you. For the justice of the cause takes away the blame of any weakness in me; and the affinity that the same beareth to your greatness, seems even lawfully to claim pity in you: a prince of a prince’s fall, a lover of justice, of a most unjust violence. And give me leave, excellent Euarchus, to say, I am but the representer of all the late flourishing Arcadia, which now with mine eyes doth weep, with my tongue doth complain, with my knees doth lay itself at your feet, which never have been unready to carry you to the virtuous protecting of innocents. Imagine, vouchsafe to imagine, most wise and good king, that here is before your eyes the pitiful spectacle of a most dolorously ending tragedy; wherein I do but play the part of all the new miserable province, which being spoiled of their guide, doth lie like a ship without a pilot, tumbling up and down in the uncertain waves, till it either run itself upon the rocks of self-division, or be overthrown by the stormy wind of foreign force. Arcadia finding herself in these desolate terms, doth speak, and I speak for her, to thee not vainly {585} puissant prince, that since now she is not only robbed of the natural support of her lord, but so suddenly robbed that she hath not breathing time to stand for her safety: so unfortunately, that it doth appall their minds, though they had leisure; and so mischievously, that it doth exceed both the suddenness and unfortunateness of it; thou wilt lend thine arm unto her, and, as a man, take compassion of mankind; as a virtuous man, chastise most abominable vice; and as a prince protect a people, which all have with one voice called for thy goodness, thinking that as thou art only able, so thou art fully able, to redress their imminent ruins. They do therefore with as much confidence as necessity, fly unto you for succour, they lay themselves open unto you: to you, I mean yourself such as you have ever been: that is to say, one that hath always had his determinations bounded with equity. They only reserve the right to Basilius’s blood; the manner to the ancient prescribing of their laws. For the rest without exception they yield over unto you, as to the elected protector of this kingdom, which name and office they beseech you, till you have laid a sufficient foundation of tranquility, to take upon you; the particularity both of their statutes and demands you shall presently after understand. Now only I am to say unto you, that this country falls to be a fair field, to prove whether the goodly tree of your virtue will live in all soils. Here I say will be seen, whether either fear can make you short, or the lickerishness of dominion make you beyond justice. And I can for conclusion say no more but this, you must think upon my words, and on your answer depends not only the quiet, but the lives of so many thousands, which for their ancient confederacy, in this their extreme necessity, desire neither the expense of your treasure, nor hazard of your subjects, but only the benefit of your wisdom, whose both glory and increase stands in the exercising of it.”

The sum of this request was utterly unlooked for of Euarchus, which made him the more diligent in marking his speech, and after his speech take the greater pause for a perfect resolution. For as of the one side, he thought nature required nothing more of him than that he should be a help to them of like creation, and had his heart no wit commanded with fear, thinking his life well passed, having satisfied the tyranny of time, with the course of many years, the expectation of the world with more than expected honour: lastly, the tribute due to his own mind, with the daily offering of most virtuous actions: so of the other he weighed the just reproach that followed those who easily enter into other folk’s business, with the opinion might be conceived, love of seigniory rather than of justice, had made him embark himself thus into a matter nothing pertaining to him, especially in a time when earnest {586} occasion of his own business so greatly required his presence. But in the end, wisdom being an essential and not an opinionate thing, made him rather to bend to what was in itself good than what by evil minds might be judged not good. And therein did see that though the people did not belong unto him, yet doing good, which is not enclosed within any terms of people, did belong unto him, and if necessity forced him for some time to abide in Arcadia, the necessity of Arcadia might justly demand some fruit of abiding. To this secret assurance of his own worthiness, which although it be never so well clothed in modesty, yet always lives in the worthiest minds, did much push him forward, saying unto himself, the treasure of those inward gifts he had were bestowed by the heavens upon him to be beneficial and not idle. On which determination resting, and yet willing before he waded any further, to examine well the depth of the other’s proffer; he thus with that well-poised gesture, unpassionate nature bestoweth upon mankind, made answer to Philanax’s most urgent petition.

“Although long experience hath made me know all men, and so princes which be but men, to be subject to infinite casualties, the very constitution of our lives remaining in continual change: yet the affairs of this country, or at least my meeting so jumply with them, makes me abashed with the strangeness of it. With much pain am I come hither to see my long approved friend, and now I find if I will see him, I must see him dead: after, for mine own security, I seek to be warranted mine own life; and there suddenly am I appointed to be a judge of other men’s lives: though a friend to him, yet am I a stranger to the country, and now of a stranger you would suddenly make a director. I might object, to your desire, my weakness, which age perhaps hath wrought in mind and body: and justly I may pretend the necessity of mine own affairs, to which as I am by all true rules most nearly tied, so can they not long bear the delay of my absence. But though I would and could dispense with these difficulties, what assurance can I have of the people’s will? which having so many circles of imaginations can hardly be enclosed in one point. Who knows a people, that knows not sudden opinion makes them hope, which hope if it be not answered, they fall into hate, choosing and refusing, erecting, and overthrowing, according as the presentness of any fancy carries them. Even this their hasty drawing to me, makes me think they will be as hastily withdrawn from me; for it is but one ground of inconstancy, soon to take or soon to leave. It may be they have heard of Euarchus more than cause: their own eyes will be perhaps more curious judges, out of hearsay they may have builded many conceits, which I cannot, perchance will not, perform, then will undeserved {587} repentance be a greater shame and injury unto me than their undeserved proffer is honour. And to conclude, I must be fully informed how the patient is minded, before I can promise to undertake the cure.”

Philanax was not of the modern minds, who made suitors magistrates; but did ever think the unwilling worthy man, was fitter than the undeserving desirer. Therefore the more Euarchus drew back, the more he found in him, that the cunningest pilot doth most dread the rocks, the more earnestly he pursued his public request unto him. He desired him not to make any weak excuses of his weakness, since so many examples had well proved his mind was strong to overpass the greatest troubles, and his body strong enough to obey his mind: and that so long as they were joined together, he knew Euarchus would think it no wearisome exercise, to make them vessels of virtuous actions. The duty to his country he acknowledged, which as he had so settled as it was not to fear any sudden alteration, so since it did want him, as well it might endure a fruitful as an idle absence. As for the doubt he conceived of the people’s constancy in this their election, he said it was such a doubt as all human actions are subject unto; yet as much as in politic matters, which receive not geometrical certainties, a man may assure himself there was evident likelihood to be conceived of the continuance, both in their unanimity, and his worthiness; whereof the one was apt to be held, and the other to hold, joined to the present necessity the firmest band of mortal minds. In some he alleged so many reasons to Euarchus’s mind, already inclined to enter into any virtuous action, that he yielded to take upon himself the judgment of the present cause; so as he might find indeed, that such was the people’s desire out of judgment, and not faction.

Therefore mounting on their horses, they hasted to the lodges, where they found, though late in the night, the people wakefully watching for the issue of Philanax’s embassage. No man thinking the matter would be well done, without he had his voice in it, and each deeming his own eyes the best guardians of his throat in that unaccustomed tumult. But when they saw Philanax return, having on his right hand the King Euarchus, on whom they had now placed the greatest burden of their fears, with joyful shouts, and applauding acclamations, they made him and the world quickly know, that one man’s sufficiency is more available than ten thousand of the multitude. So evil balanced be the extremities of popular minds: and so much natural imperiousness there rests in a well-formed spirit. For, as if Euarchus had been born of the princely blood of Arcadia, or that long and well-acquainted proof had ingrafted him in their country, so flocked {588} they about this stranger, most of them already from dejected fears, rising to ambitious considerations, who should catch the first hold of his favour. And then from those crying welcomes to babbling one with the other, some praising Philanax for his exceeding pain, others liking Euarchus’s aspect, and as they judged his age by his face, so judging his wisdom by his age, Euarchus passed through them like a man that did neither disdain a people, nor yet was anything tickled with their flatteries. But always holding his own, a man might read a constant determination in his eyes. And in that soft dismounting among them, he forthwith demanded the convocation to be made, which accordingly was done, with as much order and silence, as it might appear; Neptune had not more force to appease the rebellious wind, than the admiration of an extraordinary virtue hath, to temper a disordered multitude; he being raised up upon a place more high than the rest, where he might be best understood, in this sort speak unto them.

“I understand,” said he, “faithful Arcadians, by my Lord Philanax, that you have with one consent chosen me to be the judge of the late evils happened; orderer of the present disorders; and finally protector of this country till therein it be seen what the customs of Arcadia require.” He could say no further, being stopped with a general cry, that so it was, giving him all the honourable titles and happy wishes they could imagine. He beckoned unto them for silence, and then thus again proceeded, “Well,” said he, “how good choice you have made, the attending must be in you, the proof in me. But because it many times falls out, we are much deceived in others, we being the first to deceive ourselves, I am to require you, not to have an over-shooting expectation of me, the most cruel adversary of all honourable doings. Nor promise yourselves wonders out of a sudden liking: but remember I am a man, that is to say, a creature whose reason is often darkened with error. Secondly, that you will lay your hearts void of foretaken opinions: else whatsoever I do or say, will be measured by a wrong rule, like them that have the yellow jaundice, every thing seeming yellow unto them. Thirdly, whatsoever debates have risen among you, may be utterly extinguished; knowing that even among the best men are diversities of opinions, which are no more in true reason to breed hatred, than one that loves black, should be angry with him that is clothed in white; for thoughts and conceits are the very apparel of the mind: lastly, that you do not easily judge of your judge, but since you will have me to command, think it is your part to obey. And in reward of this, I will promise and protest unto you, that to the uttermost of my skill, both in the general laws of nature, especially of Greece, and particularly of Arcadia, wherein I must {589} confess I am not unacquainted, I will not only see the past evils duly punished, and your weal hereafter established, but for your defence in it, if need shall require, I will employ the force and treasures of mine own country. In the meantime, this shall be the first order I will take, that no man, under pain of grievous punishment, name me by any other name but protector of Arcadia. For I will not leave any possible colour, to any of my natural successors, to make claim to this which by free election you have bestowed upon me. And so I vow unto you, to depose myself of it as soon as the judgment is passed, the king buried, and his lawful successor appointed. For the first whereof, I mean the trying which be guilty of the king’s death, and these other heinous trespasses, because your customs require such haste, I will no longer delay it, than till to-morrow as soon as the sun shall give us fit opportunity. You may therefore retire yourselves to your rest, that you may be readier to be present, at these so great important matters.”

With many allowing tokens was Euarchus’s speech heard, who now by Philanax, that took the principal care of doing all due services unto him, was offered a lodging made ready for him, the rest of the people as well as a small commodity of that place would suffer, yielding their weary heads to sleep, when lo, the night thoroughly spent in these mixed matters, was for that time banished the face of the earth, and Euarchus, seeing the day begin to disclose his comfortable beauties, desiring nothing more than to join speed with justice, willed Philanax presently to make the judgment-place be put in order: and as soon as the people, who yet were not fully dispersed, might be brought together, to bring forth the prisoners and the king’s body. Which the manner was, should in such cases be held in sight, though covered with black velvet, until they that were accused to be the murderers were acquitted or condemned; whether the reason of the law were to show the more grateful love to their prince, or by that spectacle, the more to remember the judge of his duty. Philanax, who now thought in himself, he approached to the just revenge he so much desired, went with all care and diligence to perform his charge.

But first it shall be well to know how the poor and princely prisoners passed this tedious night. There was never tyrant exercised his rage with more grievous torments upon any he most hated, than afflicted Gynecia did crucify her own soul, after the guiltiness of her heart was surcharged with the suddenness of her husband’s death: for although that effect came not from her mind, yet her mind being evil, and the effect evil, she thought the justice of God had for the beginning of her pains coupled them together. This incessantly boiled in her breast, but {590} most of all, when Philanax having closely imprisoned her, she was left more freely to suffer the firebrands of her own thoughts, especially when it grew dark, and had nothing left her but a little lamp whose small light to a perplexed mind, might rather yield fearful shadows than any assured sight. Then began the heaps of her miseries, to weigh down the platform of her judgment, then began despair to lay his ugly claws upon her, she began then to fear the heavenly powers, she was wont to reverence, not like a child, but like an enemy, neither kept she herself from blasphemously repining against her creation, “O God,” would she cry out, “why did You make me to destruction? if You love goodness, why did You not give me a good mind? or if I cannot have it without Your gift, why do You plague me? Is it in me to resist the mightiness of Your power?” Then would she imagine she saw strange sights, and that she heard the cries of hellish ghosts, then would she shriek out for succour, but no man coming unto her, she would fain have killed herself, but knew not how. At sometimes again, the very heaviness of her imaginations would close up her senses to a little sleep: but then did her dreams become her tormentors. One time it would seem unto her, Philanax was hauling her by the hair of the head, and having put out her eyes was ready to throw her in a burning furnace. Another time she would think she saw her husband making the complaint of his death to Pluto, and the magistrates of that infernal region, contending in great debate to what eternal punishment they should allot her. But long her dreaming would not hold, but that it would fall upon Zelmane, to whom she would think she was crying for mercy, and that she did pass away by her in silence, without any show of pitying her mischief. Then waking out of a broken sleep, and yet wishing she might ever have slept; new forms, but of the same miseries, would seize her mind: she feared death, and yet desired death; she had passed the uttermost of shame, and yet shame was one of her cruellest assaulters; she hated Pyrocles as the original of her mortal overthrow; and yet the love she had conceived to him, had still a high authority of her passions, “O Zelmane,” would she say, not knowing how near he himself was to as great a danger, “now shalt thou glut thy eyes, with the dishonoured death of thy enemy. Enemy! alas! enemy, since so thou hast well showed thou wilt have me account thee: couldst thou not as well have given me a determinate denial, as to disguise thy first disguising, with a double dissembling? perchance if I had been utterly hopeless, the virtue was once in me might have called together his forces, and not have been led captive to this monstrous thraldom of punished wickedness.” Then would her own knowing of good inflame anew the rage of despair: which becoming an {591} unresisted lord in her breast, she had no other comfort but in death, which yet she had in horror, when she thought of. But the wearisome detesting of herself made her long for the day’s approach, at which time she determined to continue her former course, in acknowledging anything that might hasten her end: wherein although she did not hope for the end of her torments, feeling already the beginning of hell-agonies; yet according to the nature of pain, the present being most intolerable, she desired to change that, and put to adventure the ensuing. And thus rested the restless Gynecia.

No less sorrowful, though less rageful, where the minds of the Princess Pamela, and the Lady Philoclea, whose only advantages were that they had not consented to so much evil, and so were at greater peace with themselves: and that they were not left alone, but might mutually bear part of each other’s woes. For when Philanax not regarding Pamela’s princely protestations, had by force left her under guard with her sister, and that the two sisters were matched, as well in the disgraces of fortune, as they had been in the best beauties of nature: those things that till then bashfulness and mistrust had made them hold reserved one from the other, now fear, the underminer of all determinations, and necessity the victorious rebel of all laws, forced them interchangeably to lay open. Their passions then so swelling in them as they would have made auditors of stones, rather than have swallowed up in silence the choking adventures were fallen unto them; truly the hardest hearts, which have at any time thought woman’s tears to be a matter of slight compassion, imagining that fair weather will quickly after follow, would now have been mollified; and been compelled to confess that the fairer a diamond is, the more pity it is it should receive a blemish. Although, no doubt, their faces did rather beautify sorrow, than sorrow could darken that which even in darkness did shine. But after they had so long, as their other afflictions would suffer them, with doleful ceremonies bemoaned their father’s death: they sat down together apparelled as their misadventures had found them; Pamela in her journeying weeds now converted to another use: Philoclea only in her night-gown, which she thought should be the raiment of her funerals. But when the excellent creatures had after much panting, with their inward travel, gotten so much breathing power as to make a pitiful discourse one to the other, what had befallen them, and that by the plain comparing the case they were in, they thoroughly found that their griefs were not more like in regard of themselves, than like in respect of the subject, the two princes, as Pamela had learned of Musidorus, being so minded that they would ever make both their fortunes one, it did more unite, and so {592} strengthen their lamentation: seeing the one could not be miserable, but that it must necessarily make the other miserable also. That therefore was the first matter their sweet mouths delivered, the declaring the passionate beginning, troublesome proceeding, and dangerous ending, their never-ending loves had passed. And when at any time they entered into praises of the young princes, too long it would have exercised their tongues, but that their memory forthwith warned them, the more praiseworthy they were, the more at that time they were worthy of lamentation. Then again to crying and wringing of hands; and then anew, as unquiet grief sought each corner, to new discourses, from discourses to wishes, from wishes to prayers. Especially the tender Philoclea, who as she was in years younger, and had never lifted up her mind to any opinion of sovereignty, so was she the apter to yield to her misfortune; having no stronger debates in her mind, than a man may say a most witty childhood is wont to nourish, as to imagine with herself, why Philanax and the other noblemen should deal so cruelly by her that had never deserved evil of any of them. And how they could find in their hearts, to imprison such a personage as she did figure Pyrocles, whom she thought all the world was bound to love, as well as she did. But Pamela, although endued with a virtuous mildness, yet the knowledge of herself, and what was due unto her, made her heart full of a stronger disdain against her adversity.

So that she joined the vexation of her friend with the spite to see herself, as she thought, rebelliously detained, and mixed desirous thoughts to help, with revengeful thoughts if she could not help. And as in pangs of death, the stronger heart feels the greater torment, because it doth the more resist his oppressor: so her mind, the nobler it was set, and had already embraced the higher thoughts, so much more it did repine; and the more it repined, the more helpless wounds it gave unto itself. But when great part of the night was passed over the doleful music of these sweet ladies’ complaints, and that leisure though with some strife had brought Pamela to know that an eagle when she is in a cage must not think to do like an eagle, remembering with themselves that it was likely the next day the lords would proceed against those they had imprisoned. They employed the rest of the night in writing unto them, with such earnestness as the matter required, but in such styles as the state of their thoughts was apt to fashion.

In the meantime, Pyrocles and Musidorus were recommended to so strong a guard that they might well see it was meant they should pay no less price than their lives for the getting out of that place, which they like men indeed, fortifying courage with {593} the true rampire of patience, did so endure that they did rather appear governors of necessity, than servants to fortune. The whole sum of their thoughts resting upon the safety of their ladies, and their care one for the other: wherein, if at all, their hearts did seem to receive some softness. For sometimes Musidorus would feel such a motion to his friend, and his unworthy case, that he would fall into such kind of speeches. “My Pyrocles,” would he say, “how unhappy may I think Thessalia, that hath been as it were the middle way to this evil estate of yours? For if you had not been there brought up, the sea should not have had this power thus to sever you from your dear father. I have therefore, if complaints do at any time become a man’s heart, most cause to complain, since my country, which received the honour of Pyrocles’s education, should be a step to his overthrow, if human chances can be counted an overthrow to him that stands upon virtue.” “Oh excellent Musidorus,” answered Pyrocles, “how do you teach me rather to fall out with myself, and my fortune, since by you I have received all good, you only by me this affliction? To you and your virtuous mother, I in my tenderest years, and father’s greatest troubles, was sent for succour. There did I learn the sweet mysteries of philosophy; there had I your lively example to confirm that which I learned; there, lastly, had I your friendship, which no unhappiness can ever make you say, but that hath made me happy. Now see how my destiny, the gods know, not my will, hath rewarded you: my father sends for you out of your land, whence but for me you had not come: what after followed, you know. It was my love, not yours, which first stayed you here; and therefore if the heavens ever held a just proportion, it were I, and not you, that should feel the smart.” “O blame not the heavens, sweet Pyrocles,” said Musidorus, “as their course never alters, so is there nothing done by the unreachable ruler of them, but hath an everlasting reason for it. And to say the truth of these things, we should deal ungratefully with nature, if we should be forgetful receivers of her gift, and diligent auditors of the chances we like not. We have lived, and have lived to be good to ourselves and others: our souls, which are put into the stirring earth of our bodies, have achieved the causes of their thither coming: they have known and honoured with knowledge the cause of their creation, and to many men, for in this time, place and fortune, it is lawful for us to speak gloriously, it hath been behoveful that we should live. Since then eternity is not to be had in this conjunction, what is to be lost by the separation, but time? which since it hath his end, when that is once come, all that is past is nothing: and by the protracting nothing gotten, but labour and care. Do {594} not me, therefore, that wrong, who something in years, but much in all other deserts, am fitter to die than you, as to say you have brought me to any evil: since the love of you doth over-balance all bodily mischiefs, and those mischiefs be but mischiefs to the baser minds, too much delighted with the kennel of this life. Neither will I any more yield to my passion of lamenting you, which howsoever it might agree to my exceeding friendship, surely it would nothing to your exceeding virtue.” “Add this to your noble speech my dear cousin,” said Pyrocles, “that if we complain of this our fortune, or seem to ourselves faulty, in having one hurt the other, we show a repentance of the love we bear to these matchless creatures, or at least a doubt, it should be over dearly bought, which for my part, and so dear I answer for you, I call all the gods to witness, I am so far from, that no shame, no torment, no death, would make me forego the least part of the inward honour, essential pleasure, and living life, I have enjoyed in the presence of the faultless Philoclea.” “Take the pre-eminence in all things but in true loving,” answered Musidorus, “for the confession of that no death shall get of me.” “Of that,” answered Pyrocles, soberly smiling, “I perceive we shall have a debate in the other world, if at least there remain anything of remembrance in that place.” “I do not think the contrary,” said Musidorus, “although you know it is greatly held that with the death of body and senses, which are not only the beginning, but dwelling and nourishing of passions, thoughts and imaginations, they failing, memory likewise fails, which riseth only out of them, and then is there left nothing but the intellectual part or intelligence, which void of all moral virtues which stand in the mean of perturbations, doth only live in the contemplative virtue, and power of the omnipotent good, the soul of souls, and universal life of this great work, and therefore is utterly void from the possibility of drawing to itself these sensible considerations.” “Certainly,” answered Pyrocles, “I easily yield that we should not know one another, and much less these past things, with a sensible or passionate knowledge. For the cause being taken away, the effects follow. Neither do I think we shall have such a memory as now we have, which is but a relic of the senses, or rather a print the senses have left of things past in our thoughts, but it shall be a vital power of that very intelligence: which as vile as it was here, it held the chief seat of our life, and was as it were the last resort to which of all our knowledges the highest appeal came, and so by that means was never ignorant of our actions, though many times rebelliously resisted, always with this prison darkened; so much more being free of that prison, and returning to the life of all things, where all infinite knowledge is, {595} it cannot but be a right intelligence which is both his name and being, of things both present and past, though void of imagining to itself anything; but even grown like to his creator hath all things, with a spiritual knowledge before it. The difference of which is as hard for us to conceive as it was for us when we were in our mother’s wombs to comprehend, if anybody would have told us, what kind of light we now in this life see, what kind of knowledge we now have: yet now we do not only feel our present being, but we conceive what we were before we were born, though remembrance make us not do it, but knowledge, and though we are utterly without any remorse of any misery we might then suffer. Even such, and much more odds, shall there be at that second delivery of ours, when void of sensible memory, or memorative passion, we shall not see the colours, but lives of all things that have been or can be, and shall, as I hope, know our friendship, though exempt from the earthly cares of friendship, having both united it, and ourselves in that high and heavenly love of the unquenchable light.” As he had ended his speech, Musidorus looking with a heavenly joy upon him, sang this song unto him he had made before love turned his muse to another subject.

Thus did they, like quiet swans, sing their own obsequies, and virtuously enable their minds against all extremities which they did think would fall upon them, especially resolving that the first care they would have, should be by taking the fault upon themselves, to clear the two ladies, of whose case, as of nothing else that happened, they had not any knowledge. Although their friendly host, the honest gentleman Kalander, seeking all means how to help them, had endeavoured to speak with them, and to make {596} them know who should be their judge. But the curious servant of Philanax forbade him the entry upon pain of death. For so it was agreed upon, that no man should have any conference with them, for fear of new tumults. Insomuch that Kalander was constrained to retire himself, having yet obtained thus much, that he would deliver unto the two princes their apparel and jewels, which being left with him at Mantinea, wisely considering that their disguised weeds, which were all as then they had, would make them more odious in the sight of the judges, he had that night sent for, and now brought unto them. They accepted their own with great thankfulness, knowing from whence it came, and attired themselves in it against the next day, which being indeed rich and princely, they accordingly determined to maintain the names of Palladius and Daiphantus, as before it is mentioned. Then gave they themselves to consider, in what sort they might defend their causes; for they thought it no less vain to wish death, than cowardly to fear it, till something before morning, a small slumber taking them, they were by and by after called up to come to the answer, of no less than their lives imported. But in this sort was the judgment ordered. As soon as the morning had took a full possession of the element, Euarchus called unto him Philanax, and willed him to draw out into the midst of the green, before the chief lodge, the throne of judgment seat, in which Basilius was wont to sit, and according to their customs, was ever carried with the prince. For Euarchus did wisely consider the people to be naturally taken with exterior shows, far more than with inward consideration of the material points. And therefore in this new entry into so entangled a matter, he would leave nothing which might be either an armour or an ornament unto him, and in these pompous ceremonies he well knew a secret of government much to consist. That was performed by the diligent Philanax, and therein Euarchus did set himself all clothed in black, with the principal men who could in that suddenness provide themselves of such mourning raiments; the whole people commanded to keep an orderly silence of each side, which was duly observed of them, partly for the desire they had to see a good conclusion of these matters, and partly stricken with admiration, as well at the grave and princely presence of Euarchus, as at the greatness of the cause which was then to come in question. As for Philanax, Euarchus would have done him the honour to sit by him, but he excused himself, desiring to be the accuser of the prisoners in his master’s behalf; and therefore since he made himself a party, it was not convenient for him to sit in the judicial place.

Then was it a while deliberated, whether the two young ladies should be brought forth in open presence: but that was stopped {597} by Philanax, whose love and faith did descend from his master to his children, and only desired the smart should light upon the others, whom he thought guilty of his death and dishonour, alleging for this, that neither wisdom would they should be brought in presence of the people, which might hereupon grow to new uproars, nor justice required they should be drawn to any shame till somebody accused them. And as for Pamela, he protested the laws of Arcadia would not allow any judgment of her, although she herself were to determine nothing till age or marriage enabled her. Then the king’s body being laid upon a table, just before Euarchus, and all covered over with black, the prisoners, namely, the queen and two young princes, were sent for to appear in the protector’s name: which name was the cause they came not to knowledge, how near a kinsman was to judge of them, but thought him to be some nobleman, chosen by the country in this extremity. So extraordinary a course had the order of the heavens produced at this time, that both nephew and son were not only prisoners, but unknown to their uncle and father, who of many years had not seen them. And Pyrocles was to plead for his life before that throne, in which throne lately before he had saved the king’s life.

But first was Gynecia led forth in the same weeds that the day and night before she had worn, saving that instead of Zelmane’s garment in which she was found, she had cast on a long cloak which reached to the ground, of russet coarse cloth, with a poor felt hat which almost covered all her face, most part of her goodly hair, on which her hands had laid many a spiteful hold, so lying upon her shoulders, as a man might well see had no artificial carelessness. Her eyes down on the ground, of purpose not to look on Pyrocles’s face, which she did not so much shun, for the unkindness she conceived of her own overthrow as for the fear those motions in this short time of her life should be revived, which she had with the passage of infinite sorrows mortified. Great was the compassion the people felt to see their princess’s state and beauty so deformed by fortune and her own desert, whom they had ever found a lady most worthy of all honour.

But by and by the sight of the other two prisoners drew most of the eyes to that spectacle. Pyrocles came out led by Sympathus, clothed, after the Greek manner, in a long coat of white velvet reaching to the small of his leg, with great buttons of diamonds all along upon it; his neck without any collar, not so much as hidden with a ruff, did pass the whiteness of his garments, which was not much in fashion unlike to the crimson raiment our Knights of the Order[1] first put on. On his feet he had nothing {598} but slippers, which, after the ancient manner, were tied up with certain laces, which were fastened under his knee, having wrapped about, with many pretty knots, his naked legs. His fair auburn hair, which he wore in great length, and gave at that time a delightful show, with being stirred up and down with the breath of a gentle wind, had nothing upon it, but a white ribbon, in those days used for a diadem. Which rolled once or twice about the uppermost part of his forehead, fell down upon his back, closed up at each end with the richest pearls were to be seen in the world. After him followed another nobleman, guiding the noble Musidorus, who had upon him a long cloak, after the fashion of that which we call the apostle’s mantle, made of purple satin; not that purple which we now have, and is but a counterfeit of the Getalian purple, which yet was far the meaner in price and estimation, but of the right Tyrian purple, which was nearest to a colour betwixt our murrey and scarlet. On his head, which was black and curled, he wore a Persian tiara, all set down with rows of so rich rubies, that they were enough to speak for him that they had to judge of no mean personage.

In this sort, with erected countenances, did these unfortunate princes suffer themselves to be led, showing aright, by the comparison of them and Gynecia, how to divers persons compassion is diversly to be stirred. For as to Gynecia, a lady known of great estate, and greatly esteemed, the more miserable representation was made of her sudden ruin, the more men’s hearts were forced to bewail such an evident witness of weak humanity: so to these men, not regarded because unknown, but rather, besides the detestation of their fact, hated as strangers, the more they should have fallen down in an abject semblance, the more, instead of compassion, they should have got contempt: but therefore were to use, as I may term it, the more violence of magnanimity, and so to conquer the expectation of the lookers with an extraordinary virtue. And such effect indeed it wrought in the whole assembly, their eyes yet standing as it were in balance to whether of them they should most direct their sight. Musidorus was in stature so much higher than Pyrocles as commonly is gotten by one year’s growth. His face, now beginning to have some tokens of a beard, was composed to a kind of manlike beauty. His colour was of a well-pleasing brownness, and the features of it such as they carried both delight and majesty: his countenance severe, and promising a mind much given to thinking. Pyrocles of a pure complexion, and of such a cheerful favour as might seem either a woman’s face in a boy, or an excellent boy’s face in a woman. His look gentle and bashful, which bred the more admiration, having showed such notable {599} proofs of courage. Lastly, though both had both, if there were any odds, Musidorus was the more goodly, and Pyrocles the more lovely. But as soon as Musidorus saw himself so far forth led among the people, that he knew to a great number of them his voice should be heard, misdoubting their intention to the Princess Pamela, of whom he was more careful than of his own life, even as he went, though his leader sought to interrupt him, he thus with a loud voice spoke unto them.

“And is it possible, O Arcadians,” said he, “that you can forget the natural duty you owe to your Princess Pamela? Hath this soil been so little beholden to her noble ancestors? Hath so long a time rooted no surer love in your hearts to that line? Where is that faith to your prince’s blood which hath not only preserved you from all dangers heretofore, but hath spread your fame to all the nations of the world? Where is that justice the Arcadians were wont to flourish in, whose nature is to render to everyone his own? Will you now keep the right from your prince, who is the only giver of judgment, the key of justice, and life of your laws? Do you hope in a few years to set up another race, which nothing but length of time can establish? Will you reward Basilius’s children with ungratefulness, the very poison of manhood? Will you betray your long settled reputation with the foul name of traitors? Is this your mourning for your king’s death, to increase his loss with his daughter’s misery? Imagine your prince doth look out of the heavens unto you, what do you think he could wish more at your hands than that you do well by his children? and what more honour I pray you can you do to his obsequies than to satisfy his soul with a loving memory, as you do his body with an unfelt solemnity? What have you done with the Princess Pamela? Pamela, the just inheritrix of this country, Pamela, whom this earth may be happy that it shall be hereafter said, she was born in Arcadia; Pamela, in herself your ornament, in her education your foster child, and every way your only princess, what account can you render to yourselves of her? truly I do not think that you all know what is become of her: so soon may a diamond be lost: so soon may the fairest light in the world be put out. But look, look unto it, O Arcadians, be not so wilfully robbed of your greatest treasure, make not yourselves ministers to private ambitions, who do but use yourselves to put on your own yokes. Whatsoever you determine of us, who I must confess are but strangers, yet let not Basilius’s daughters be strangers unto you. Lastly, howsoever you bar her from her public sovereignty, which if you do, little may we hope of equity where rebellion reigns, yet deny not that child’s right unto her, that she may come and do the last duties to her father’s body. Deny not that happiness, if in such a case there be {600} any happiness, to your late king, that his body may have his last touch of his dearest child.”

With such like broken manner of questions and speeches, was Musidorus desirous, as much as in passing by them he could, to move the people to tender Pamela’s fortune. But at length, by that they came to the judgment-place, both Sympathus and his guider had greatly satisfied him, with the assurance they gave him, this assembly of people had neither meaning nor power to do any hurt to the princess, whom they all acknowledged as their sovereign lady. But that the custom of Arcadia was such, till she had more years, the state of the country to be guided by a protector, under whom, he and his fellow were to receive their judgment. That eased Musidorus’s heart of his most vehement care, when he found his beloved lady to be out of danger. But Pyrocles as soon as the queen of the one side, he and Musidorus of the other, were stayed before the face of their judge, having only for their bar the table whereon the king’s body lay, being nothing less vexed with the doubt of Philoclea, than Musidorus was for Pamela, in this sort with a lowly behaviour, and only then like a suppliant, he spoke to the protector:

“Pardon me, most honoured judge,” saith he, “that uncommanded I begin my speech unto you, since both to you and me, those words of mine shall be most necessary. To you having the sacred exercise of justice in your hand, nothing appertains more properly than truth nakedly and freely set down. To me, being environed round about with many dangerous calamities, what can be more convenient, than, at least, to be at peace with myself, in having discharged my conscience in a most behoveful verity. Understand therefore, and truly understand, that the lady Philoclea, to whose unstained virtue it hath been my unspeakable misery, that my name should become a blot, if she be accused, is most unjustly accused of any dishonourable fact, which by my means she may be thought to have yielded unto. Whatsoever hath been done, hath been my only attempt, which notwithstanding was never intended against her chastity. But whatsoever hath been informed, was my fault. And I attest the heavens, to blaspheme which I am not now in fit tune, that so much as my coming into her chamber, was wholly unwitting unto her. This your wisdom may withal consider, if I would lie, I would lie for mine own behoof, I am not so old as to be weary of myself; but the very sting of my inward knowledge, joined with the consideration I must needs have what an infinite loss it should be to all those who love goodness in good folks if so pure a child of virtue should wrongfully be destroyed, compels me to use my tongue against myself, and receive the burden of what evil was {601} upon mine own doing. Look therefore with pitiful eyes upon so fair beams, and that misfortune which by me hath fallen upon her, help to repair it with your public judgment, since whosoever deals cruelly with such a creature, shows himself a hater of mankind, and an envier of the world’s bliss. And this petition I make, even in the name of justice, that before you proceed further against us, I may know how you conceive of her noble, though unfortunate action, and what judgment you will make of it.”

He had not spoken his last word, when all the whole people, both of great and low estate, confirmed with an united murmur Pyrocles’s demand, longing, for the love generally was borne Philoclea, to know what they might hope of her. Euarchus though neither regarding a prisoner’s passionate prayer, nor bearing over-plausible ears to a many-headed motion, yet well enough content, to win their liking with things in themselves indifferent, he was content: first, to seek as much as might be of Philoclea’s behaviour in this matter: which being cleared by Pyrocles, and but weakly gainsaid by Philanax, who had framed both his own and Dametas’s evidence most for her favour, and in truth could have gone no further than conjecture, yet finding by his wisdom that she was not altogether faultless, he pronounced she should all her life long be kept prisoner among certain women of religion, like the Vestal nuns, so to repay the touched honour of her house, with well observing a strict profession of chastity. Although this were a great prejudicating of Pyrocles’s case, yet was he exceedingly joyous of it, being assured of his lady’s life; and in the depth of his mind not sorry, that what end soever he had, none should obtain the after enjoying that jewel whereon he had set his life’s happiness. After it was by public sentence delivered, what should be done with the sweet Philoclea, the laws of Arcadia bearing that what was appointed by the magistrates in the nonage of the prince could not afterwards be repealed. Euarchus still using to himself no other name but protector of Arcadia, commanded those that had to say against the Queen Gynecia to proceed, because both her estate required she should be first heard, and also for that she was taken to be the principal in the greater matter they were to judge of. Philanax incontinently stepped forth, and showing in his greedy eyes that he did thirst for her blood, began a well thought on discourse of her, in his judgment, execrable wickedness. But Gynecia, standing up before the judge, casting abroad her arms, with her eyes hidden under the breadth of her unseemly hat, laying open in all her gestures the despairful affliction, to which all the might of her reason was converted, with such like words stopped Philanax, as he was entering into his invective oration:

“Stay, stay, Philanax,” said she, “do not defile thy honest mouth with those dishonourable speeches thou art about to utter against a woman, now most wretched, lately thy mistress. Let either the remembrance how great she was move thy heart to some reverence, or the seeing how low she is, stir in thee some pity. It may be truth doth make thee deal untruly, and love of justice frames injustice in thee, do not therefore, neither shalt thou need, tread upon my desolate ruins. Thou shalt have what thou seekest; and yet shalt not be oppressor of her, who cannot choose but love thee for thy singular faith to thy master. I do not speak this to procure mercy, or to prolong my life, no, no, I say unto you I will not live, but I am only loth, my death should be engrieved with any wrong thou shouldst do unto me. I have been too painful a judge over myself to desire pardon in others’ judgment. I have been too cruel an executioner of my own soul to desire that execution of justice should be staid for me. Alas, they that know how sorrow can rend the spirits, they that know what fiery hells are contained in a self-condemning mind, need not fear that fear can keep such an one from desiring to be separated from that which nothing but death can separate. I therefore say to thee, O just judge, that I, and only I, was the worker of Basilius’s death. They were these hands that gave unto him the poisonous potion that hath brought death to him, and loss to Arcadia; it was I, and none but I, that hastened his aged years to an unnatural end, and that have made all his people orphans of their royal father. I am the subject that have killed my prince, I am the wife that have murdered my husband, I am a degenerate woman, an undoer of this country, a shame of my children. What wouldst thou have said more, O Philanax! and all this I grant, there resteth then nothing else to say but that I desire you, you will appoint quickly some to rid me of my life, rather than these hands, which else are destined unto it, and that indeed it may be done with such speed as I may not long die in this life, which I have in so great horror.” With that she crossed her arms, and sat down upon the ground, attending the judge’s answer. But a great while it was, before anybody could be heard speak, the whole people concurring in a lamentable cry, so much had Gynecia’s words and behaviour stirred their hearts to a doleful compassion, neither in troth could most of them in their judgments tell whether they should be more sorry for her fault, or her misery; for the loss of her estate, or loss of her virtue. But most were most moved with that which was under their eyes, the sense most subject to pity. But at length the reverent awe they stood in of Euarchus brought them to a silent waiting his determination, who, having well considered the abomination of the fact, attending more the manifest proof of so horrible a trespass, {603} confessed by herself, and proved by others, than anything relenting to those tragical phrases of hers, apter to stir a vulgar pity than his mind, which hated evil in what colours soever he found it, having considered a while with the principal men of the country, and demanded their allowance, he definitively gave this sentence: “That whereas, both in private and public respects, this woman had most heinously offended, in private, because marriage being the most holy conjunction that falls to mankind, out of which all families, and so consequently all societies do proceed, which not only by community of goods, but community of children, is to knit the minds in a most perfect union, which whoso breaks, dissolves all humanity, no man living free from the danger of so near a neighbour, she had not only broken it, but broken it with death, and the most pretended death that might be: in public respect, the princes’ persons, being in all monarchal governments the very knot of the people’s welfare, and light of all her doings, to which they are not only in conscience, but in necessity bound to be loyal, she had traitorously empoisoned him, neither regarding her country’s profit, her own duty, nor the rigour of the laws. That therefore, as well for the due satisfaction to eternal justice, and accomplishment of the Arcadian statutes, as for the everlasting example to all wives and subjects, she should presently be conveyed to close prison, and there kept with such food as might serve to sustain her life, until the day of her husband’s burial, at which time she should be buried quick, in the same tomb with him: that so his murder might be a murder to herself, and she forced to keep company with the body from which she had made so detestable a severance; and lastly, death might redress their disjoined conjunction of marriage.” His judgment was received of the whole assembly, as not with disliking, so with great astonishment, the greatness of the matter and person as it were overpressing the might of their conceits. But when they did set it to the beam, with the monstrousness of her ugly misdeed, they could not but yield in their hearts, there was no over-balancing. As for Gynecia, who had already settled her thoughts, not only to look but long for this event, having, in this time of her vexation, found a sweetness in the rest she hoped by death, with a countenance witnessing she had before-hand so passed through all the degrees of sorrow, that she had no new look to figure forth any more, rose up, and offered forth her fair hands to be bound or led as they would, being indeed troubled with no part of this judgment, but that her death was as she thought long delayed. They that were appointed for it, conveyed her to the place she was in before, where the guard was relieved, and the number increased to keep her more sure for the time of her execution: none of them all that led her, though most {604} of them were such whose hearts had been long hardened with the often exercising such offices, being able to bar tears from their eyes, and other manifest tokens of compassionate sorrow. So goodly a virtue is a resolute constancy, that even in evil deservers, it seems that party might have been notably well deserving. Thus the excellent lady Gynecia, having passed five and thirty years of her age, even to the admiration of a beautiful mind and body, and having not in her own knowledge ever spotted her soul with any wilful vice, but her immoderate love of Zelmane, was brought first by that ill-answered passion, and then by the despairing conceit she took of the judgment of God in her husband’s death and her own fortune, purposely to overthrow herself, and confirm by a wrong confession, that abominable shame, which with her wisdom, joined to the truth, perhaps she might have repelled.

Then did Euarchus ask Philanax, whether it were he that would charge the two young prisoners, or that some other should do it, and he sit, according to his estate, as an assistant in the judgment. Philanax told him as before he had done, that he thought no man could say manifest the naughtiness of those two young men with so much either truth or zeal as himself, and therefore he desired he might do this last service to his faithfully beloved master, as to prosecute the traitorous causers of his death and dishonour, which being done, for his part he meant to give up all dealing in public affairs, since that man was gone who had made him love them. Philanax thus being ready to speak, the two princes were commanded to tell their names, who answered, according to their agreements, that they were Daiphantus of Lycia, and Palladius Prince of Iberia. Which when they had said, they demanded to know by what authority they could judge of them, since they were not only foreigners, and so not born under their laws, but absolute princes, and therefore not to be touched by laws. But answer was presently made them that Arcadian laws were to have their force upon any found in Arcadia: since strangers have scope to know the customs of a country, before they put themselves in it: and when they once are entered, they must know that what by many was made must not for one be broken. And so much less for a stranger, as he is to look for no privilege in that place, to which in time of need his service is not to be expected. As for their being princes, whether they were so or no, the belief stood in their own words, which they had so diversly falsified, as they did not deserve belief. But whatsoever they were, Arcadia was to acknowledge them but as private men, since they were neither by magistracy nor alliance to the princely blood, to claim anything in that region. Therefore if they had offended, which now by the plaintiff and their defence was to be judged, against the laws of nations, by {605} the laws of nations they were to be chastised: if against the peculiar ordinances of the province, those peculiar ordinances were to lay hold of them.

The princes stood a while upon that, demanding leisure to give perfect knowledge of their greatness; but when they were answered, that in a case of the prince’s death, the law of that country had ever been that immediate trial should be had, they were forced to yield, resolved that in those names they would as much as they could cover the shame of their royal parentage, and keep as long as might be, if evil were determined against them, the evil news from their careful kinsfolks, wherein the chief man they considered was Euarchus: whom the strange and secret working of justice had brought to be the judge over them. In such a shadow, or rather pit of darkness, the wormish mankind lives, that neither they know how to foresee, nor what to fear, and are but like tennis balls, tossed by the racket of the higher powers. Thus both sides ready, it was determined, because their cases were separated, first Philanax should be heard against Pyrocles, whom they termed Daiphantus, and that heard, the other’s cause should follow, and so receive together such judgment as they should be found to have deserved.

But Philanax that was even short-breathed at the first, with the extreme vehemency he had to speak against them, stroking once or twice his forehead, and wiping his eyes, which either wept, or he would at that time have them seem to weep, looking first upon Pyrocles, as if he had proclaimed all hatefulness against him, humbly turning to Euarchus, who with quiet gravity showed great attention, he thus began his oration: “That which all men, who take upon them to accuse another, are wont to desire, most worthy protector, to have many proofs of faults in them they seek to have condemned, that is to me in this present action my greatest cumber and annoyance. For the number is so great, and the quality so monstrous of the enormities this wretched young man hath committed, that neither I in myself can tell where to begin, my thoughts being confused with the horrible multitude of them, neither do I think your virtuous ears will be able to endure the report, but will rather imagine you hear some tragedy invented of the extremity of wickedness, than a just recital of a wickedness indeed committed: for such is the disposition of the most sincere judgments, that as they can believe mean faults, and such as man’s nature may slide into, so when they pass to a certain degree, nay, when they pass all degrees of unspeakable naughtiness, then find they in themselves a hardness to give credit that human creatures can so from all humanity be transformed. But in myself the strength of my faith to my dead master will help the weakness of my memory; in {606} you, your excellent love of justice will force you to vouchsafe attention: and as for the matter, it is so manifest, so pitiful evidences lie before your eyes of it, that I shall need to be but a brief recounter, and no rhetorical enlarger of this most harmful mischief. I will therefore, in as few words as so huge a trespass can be obtained, deliver unto you the sum of this miserable fact: leaving out a great number of particular tokens of his naughtiness, and only touching the essential points of this doleful case. This man, whom to begin withal I know not how to name, since being come into this country, unaccompanied like a lost pilgrim, from a man grew a woman, from a woman a ravisher of women, thence a prisoner, and now a prince: but this Zelmane, this Daiphantus, this what you will, for any shape or title he can take upon him, that hath no restraint of shame, having understood the solitary life my late master lived, and considering how open he had laid himself to any traitorous attempt, for the first mask of his falsehood, disguised himself like a woman, which being the more simple and hurtless sex, might easier hide his subtle harmfulness. And presenting himself to my master, the most courteous prince that lived, was received of him with so great graciousness that might have bound not only any grateful mind, but might have mollified any enemy’s rancour. But this venomous serpent, admitted thus into his bosom, as contagion will easily find a fit body for it, so had he quickly fallen into so near acquaintance with this naughty woman, whom even now you have most justly condemned, that this was her right hand, she saw with no eyes but his, nor seemed to have any life but in him, so glad she was to find one more cunning than herself in covering wickedness with a modest veil. What is to be thought passed betwixt two such virtuous creatures, whereof the one hath confessed murder, and the other rape, I leave to your wise consideration. For my heart hastens to the miserable point of Basilius’s murder, for the executing of which with more facility, this young nymph of Diana’s bringing up, feigned certain rites she had to perform, so furious an impiety had carried him from all remembrance of goodness that he did not only not fear the gods, as the beholders and punishers of so ungodly a villainy, but did blasphemously use their sacred holy name as a minister unto it. And forsooth a cave hereby was chosen for the temple of his devotions, a cave of such darkness, as did prognosticate he meant to please the infernal powers; for there this accursed caitiff, upon the altar of falsehood, sacrificed the life of the virtuous Basilius. By what means he trained him thither, alas I know not, for if I might have known it, either my life had accompanied my master, or this fellow’s death had preserved him. But this may suffice that in {607} the mouth of this cave, where this traitor had his lodging and chapel, when already master shepherd, his companion, had conveyed away the undoubted inheritrix of this country, was Gynecia found by the dead corpse of her husband, newly empoisoned, apparelled in the garments of the young lady, and ready no question to have fled to some place, according to their consort, but that she was by certain honest shepherds arrested: while in the meantime, because there should be left no revenger of this bloody mischief, this noble Amazon was violently gotten into the chamber of the Lady Philoclea, where by the mingling, as much as in him lay, of her shame with his misdeed, he might enforce her to be accessory to her father’s death, and under the countenance of her and her sister, against whom they knew we would not rebel, seize as it were with one grip into their treacherous hands, the regiment of this mighty province. But the Almighty Eye prevented him of the end of his mischief, by using a villain Dametas’s hand to inclose him in there, where with as much fortification as in a house could be made, he thought himself in most security. Thus see you most just judge, a short and simple story of the infamous misery fallen upon this country; indeed infamous, since by an effeminate man we should suffer a greater overthrow than our mightiest enemies have been ever able to lay upon us. And that all this, which I have said is most manifest, as well of the murdering of Basilius, as the ravishing of Philoclea, for those two parts I establish of my accusation, who is of so incredulous a mind, or rather who will so stop his eyes from seeing a thing clearer than the light, as not to hold for assured so palpable a matter? For to begin with his most cruel misdeed, is it to be imagined that Gynecia, a woman though wicked, yet witty, would have attempted and achieved an enterprise, no less hazardous than horrible, without having some counsellor in the beginning, and some comforter in the performing? had she, who showed her thoughts were so over-ruled with some strange desire, as in despite of God, nature, and womanhood, to execute that in deeds, which in words we cannot hear without trembling? Had she, I say, no practice to lead her unto it? or had she a practice without conspiracy? or could she conspire without somebody to conspire with? and if one were, who so likely as this, to whom she communicated I am sure her mind, the world thinks her body? neither let her words, taking the whole fault upon herself, be herein anything available. For to those persons who have vomited out of their souls all remnants of goodness, there rests a certain pride in evil, and having else no shadow of glory left them, they glory to be constant in iniquity, and that, God knows, must be held out to the last gasp, without {608} revealing their accomplices; as thinking great courage is declared in being neither afraid of the heavens, nor ashamed of the world. But let Gynecia’s action die with herself, what can all the earth answer for his coming hither? Why alone, if he be a prince? How so richly jewelled if he be not a prince? Why then a woman if now a man? Why now Daiphantus, if then Zelmane? Was all this play for nothing, or if it had an end, what end but the end of my dear master? Shall we doubt so many secret conferences with Gynecia, such feigned favour to the over-soon beguiled Basilius, a cave made a lodging, and the same lodging made a temple of his religion, lastly, such changes and traverses, as a quiet poet could scarce fill a poem withal, were directed to any less scope than to this monstrous murderer? O snaky ambition, which can wind thyself in so many figures, to slide thither thou desirest to come! O corrupted reason of mankind, that can yield to deform thyself with so filthy desires? and O hopeless be those minds whom so unnatural desires do not with their own ugliness sufficiently terrify! But yet even of favour let us grant him thus much more, as to fancy that in these foretold things, fortune might be a great actor, perchance to an evil end, yet to a less evil end all these entangled devices were intended. But I beseech your ladyship, my Lady Daiphantus, tell me what excuse can you find for the changing your lodging with the queen that very instant she was to finish her execrable practice? how can you cloak the lending of your cloak unto her. Was all that by chance too? Had the stars sent such an influence unto you, as you should be just weary of your lodging and garments when our prince was destined to the slaughter? What say you to this, O shameful and shameless creature? fit indeed to be the dishonour of both sexes. But alas! I spend too many words in so manifest and so miserable a matter. They must be four wild horses, which according to our laws are the executioners of men which murder our prince, which must decide this question with you. Yet see so far had my zeal to my beloved prince transported me that I had almost forgotten my second part, and his second abomination, I mean his violence offered to the Lady Philoclea: wherewith as if it had well become his womanhood, he came braving to the judgment-seat: indeed our laws appoint not so cruel a death, although death too, for this fact as for the other. But whosoever well weighs it shall find it sprung out of the same fountain of mischievous naughtiness, the killing of the father, dishonouring the mother, and ravishing the child. Alas, could not so many benefits received of my prince, the justice of nature, the sign of hospitality be a bridle to thy lust, if not to thy cruelty? or if thou hadst, as surely thou hast, a heart recompensing goodness with hatred, could not his death, which is {609} the last of revenges, satisfy thy malice, but thou must heap upon it the shame of his daughter? Were thy eyes so stony, thy breast so tigerish, that the sweet and beautiful shows of Philoclea’s virtue did not astonish thee? O woeful Arcadia, to whom the name of this mankind courtesan shall ever be remembered as a procurer of thy greatest loss! But too far I find my passion, yet honest passion hath guided me; the cause is every way too, too much unanswerable. It resteth in you, O excellent protector, to pronounce judgment, which if there be hope that such a young man may prove profitable to the world, who in the first exercise of his own determination, far passed the arrantest strumpet in luxuriousness, the cunningest forger in falsehood, a player in disguising, a tiger in cruelty, a dragon in ungratefulness, let him be preserved like a jewel to do greater mischief. If his youth be not more defiled with treachery than the eldest man’s age, let, I say, his youth be some cause of compassion. If he have not every way sought the overthrow of human society, if he have done anything like a prince, let his naming himself a prince breed a reverence of his base wickedness. If he have not broken all the laws of hospitality, and broken them in the most detestable degree that can be, let his being a guest be a sacred protection of his more than savage doings: or if his whorish beauty, have not been as the high way of his wickedness, let the picture drawn upon so poisonous a wood, be reserved to show how greatly colours can please us. But if it is as it is, what should I say more, a very spirit of hellish naughtiness; if his act be to be punished, and his defiled person not to be pitied, then restore unto us our prince by duly punishing his murderers, for then we shall think him and his name to live when we shall see his killers to die. Restore to the excellent Philoclea her honour, by taking out of the world her dishonour, and think that at this day, in this matter, are the eyes of the world upon you, whether anything can sway your mind from a true administration of justice. Alas! though I have much more to say, I can say no more, for my tears and sighs interrupt my speech, and force me to give myself over to my private sorrow.”

Thus when Philanax had uttered the uttermost of his malice, he made sorrow the cause of his conclusion. But while Philanax was in the course of his speech, and did with such bitter reproaches defame the princely Pyrocles, it was well to be seen, his heart was unused to bear such injuries, and his thoughts such as could arm themselves better against anything than shame. For sometimes blushing, his blood with divers motions coming and going, sometimes closing his eyes, and laying his hand over them, sometimes giving such a look to Philanax, as might show he assured himself he durst not so have spoken if they had been {610} in an indifferent place: with some impatiency he bare the length of his oration; which being ended, with as much modest humbleness to the judge, as despiteful scorn to the accuser, with words to this purpose he defended his honour.

“My accuser’s tale may well bear witness with me, most rightful judge, in how hard a case, and environed with how many troubles, I may esteem myself. For if he who shows his tongue is not unacquainted with railing, was in an agony in the beginning of his speech with the multitude of the matters he had to lay unto me, wherein notwithstanding the most evil could fall unto him was that he should not do so much evil as he would, how cumbered do you think may I acknowledge myself, who, in things no less importing than my life, must be mine own advocate, without leisure to answer, or foreknowledge what should be objected? in things, I say, promoted with so cunning confusion, as having mingled truths with falsehoods, surmises with certainties, causes of no moment with matters capital, scolding with complaining, I can absolutely neither grant nor deny, neither can I tell whether I come hither to be judged, or before judgment to be punished, being compelled to hear such unworthy words, far more grievous than any death unto me. But since the form of this government allows such tongue-liberty unto him, I will pick as well as I can out of his invective speech those few points which may seem of some purpose in the touching of me, hoping that by your easy hearing of me, you will show that though you hate evil, yet you wish men may prove themselves not evil; so in that he hath said, you will not weigh so much what he hath said as what he hath proved, remembering that truth is simple and naked, and that if he had guided himself under that banner, he needed not out of the way have sought so vile and false disgracing of me, enough to make the untruest accusation believed. I will therefore, using truth as my best eloquence, repeat unto you as much as I know in this matter, and then, by the only clearness of the discourse, your wisdom I know will find the difference between cavilling supposition, and direct declaration. This Prince Palladius and I being inflamed with love, a passion far more easily reprehended than refrained, to the two peerless daughters of Basilius, and understanding how he had secluded himself from the world, that, like princes, there was no access unto him, we disguised ourselves, in such forms as might soonest bring us to the revealing our affections. The Prince Palladius had such event of his doings that, with Pamela’s consent, he was to convey her out of the thraldom she lived in, to receive the subjection of a greater people than her own, until her father’s consent might be obtained. My fortune was more hard, for I bare no more love to the chaste {611} Philoclea, than Basilius, deceived in my sex, showed to me, insomuch that by his importunacy, I could have no time to obtain the like favour of the pure Philoclea, till this policy I found, taking under colour of some devotions, my lodging, to draw Basilius thither, with hope to enjoy me; which likewise I revealed to the queen, that she might keep my place, and so make her husband see his error. While I in the meantime, being delivered of them both, and having locked so the doors as I hoped, if the immaculate Philoclea would condescend to go with me, there should be none to hinder our going, I was made prisoner there, I know not by what means, when being repelled by her divine virtue, I would fainest have escaped. Here you have the thread to guide you in the labyrinth, this man of his tongue, had made so monstrous. Here you see the true discourse, which he mountebank-fashion doth make so wide a mouth over. Here may you conceive the reason why the queen had my garment, because in her going to the cave, in the moon-shine night, she might be taken for me, which he useth as the knot of all his wise assertions: so that as this double-minded fellow’s accusation was double, double likewise my answer must perforce be, to the murder of Basilius, and violence offered to the inviolate Philoclea. For the first, O heavenly gods, who would have thought any mouth could have been found so mercenary as to have opened so slight proofs of so horrible matters! His first argument is a question, who would imagine that Gynecia would accomplish such an act, without some accessories? and if any, who but I? truly I am so far from imagining anything, that till I saw these mourning tokens, and heard Gynecia’s confession, I never imagined the king was dead. And for my part so vehemently, and more like the manner of passionate than guilty folk, I see the queen persecute herself, that I think condemnation may go too hastily over her, considering the unlikelihood, if not impossibility, her wisdom and virtue so long nourished, should in one moment throw down itself to the uttermost end of wickedness. But whatsoever she hath done, which, as I say, I never believed, yet how unjustly should that aggravate my fault? she found abroad, I within doors, for as for the wearing my garment I have told you the cause, she seeking, as you say, to escape, I locking myself in a house: without perchance the conspiracy of one poor stranger, might greatly enable her attempt, or the fortification of the lodge, as the trim man alleged, might make me hope to resist all Arcadia. And see how treacherously he seeks to draw from me my chiefest clearing, by preventing the credit of her words, wherewith she had wholly taken the fault upon herself. An honest and impartial examiner: her words may condemn her, but may not absolve me. Thus, {612} void of all probable allegation, the craven crows upon my affliction, not leaving out any evil that ever he hath felt in his own soul, to charge my youth withal. But who can look for a sweet breath out of such a stomach? or for honey from so filthy a spider? What should I say more? if in so inhuman a matter, which he himself confesseth, sincerest judgments are lothest to believe, and in the severest laws proofs clearer than the sun are required, his reasons are only the scum of a base malice, my answers most manifest, shining in their own truth, there remain any doubt of it, because it stands betwixt his affirming and my denial, I offer, nay I desire, and humbly desire I may be granted the trial by combat, wherein let him be armed, and me in my shirt, I doubt not justice will be my shield, and his heart will show itself as faint as it is false.

“Now come I to the second part of my offence towards the young lady, which, howsoever you term it, so far forth as I have told you, I confess, and for her sake heartily lament. But if herein I offered force to her, love offered more force to me. Let her beauty be compared to my years, and such effects will be found no miracles. But since it is thus as it is, and that justice teacheth us not to love punishment, but to fly to it for necessity: the salve of her honour, I mean as the world will take it, for else in truth it is most untouched, must be my marriage and not my death, since the one stops all mouths, the other becomes a doubtful fable. This matter requires no more words, and your experience, I hope, in these cases shall need no more; for myself methinks I have showed already too much love of my life to bestow so many. But certainly it hath been love of truth, which could not bear so unworthy falsehood, and love of justice that would brook no wrong to myself nor other, and makes me now, even in that respect to desire you to be moved rather with pity at a just cause of tears, than with the bloody tears this crocodile spends, who weeps to procure death, and not to lament death. It will be no honour to Basilius’s tomb to have guiltless blood sprinkled upon it, and much more may a judge over-weigh himself in cruelty than in clemency. It is hard, but it is excellent where it is found, a right knowledge when correction is necessary, when grace doth more avail. For mine own respect, if I thought in wisdom I had deserved death, I would not desire life: for I know nature will condemn me to die though you do not; and longer I would not wish to draw this breath, than I may keep myself unspotted of any horrible crime; only I cannot, nor ever will deny the love of Philoclea, whose violence wrought violent effects in me.”

With that he finished his speech, casting up his eyes to the judge, and crossing his hands, which he held in their length before him declaring a resolute patience in whatsoever should be done {613} with him. Philanax, like a watchful adversary, curiously marked all that he said, saving that in the beginning he was interrupted by two letters which were brought him from the Princess Pamela, and the Lady Philoclea, who having all that night considered and bewailed their estate, careful for their mother likewise, of whom they could never think so much evil, but considering with themselves that she assuredly should have so due trial by the laws, as either she should not need their help, or should be past their help; they looked to that which nearliest touched them, and each wrote in this sort for him, in whom their lives’ joy consisted.

Pamela’s letter, which she meant to send to the general assembly of the Arcadian nobility, for so closely they were kept, as they were utterly ignorant of the new taken orders, was thus framed:

Many blots had the tears of these sweet ladies made in their letters, which many times they had altered, many times torn, and written anew, ever thinking something either wanted, or was too much, or would offend, or, which is worst, would breed denial: {615} but at last, the day warned them to dispatch, which they accordingly did, and calling one of their guard, for nobody else was suffered to come near them, with great entreaty, they requested him that he would present them to the principal noblemen and gentlemen together. For they had more confidence in the numbers’ favour, than in any one, upon whom they would not lay the lives they held so precious. But the fellow trusted to Philanax, who had placed him there, delivered them both to him, what time Pyrocles began to speak, which he suddenly opened, and seeing to what they tended, by the first words, was so far from publishing them, whereby he feared in Euarchus’s just mind, either the princesses might be endangered, or the prisoners preserved, of which choice he knew not which to think the worst, that he would not himself read them over, doubting his own heart might be mollified, so bent upon revenge. Therefore utterly suppressing them, he lent a spiteful ear to Pyrocles, and as soon as he had ended, with a very willing heart desired Euarchus he might accept the combat: although it would have framed but evil with him: Pyrocles having never found any match near him besides Musidorus. But Euarchus made answer, since bodily strength is but a servant to the mind, it were very barbarous and preposterous that force should be made judge over reason. Then would he also have replied in words unto him, but Euarchus who knew what they could say was already said, taking their arguments into his mind, commanded him to proceed against the other prisoner, and that then he would sentence them both together.

Philanax nothing the milder for Pyrocles’s purging himself, but rather, according to the nature of arguing, especially when it is bitter, so much more vehement, entered thus into his speech against Musidorus, being so overgone with rage, that he forgot in this oration his precise method of oratory. “Behold, most noble protector, to what a state Arcadia is come, since such manner of men may challenge in combat the faithfullest of the nobility, and having merited the shamefullest of all deaths dare name in marriage the princesses of this country. Certainly my masters, I must say, you were much out of taste if you had not rather enjoy such ladies than be hanged. But the one you have as much deserved, as you have dishonoured the other. But now my speech must be directed to you, good master Dorus, who, with Pallas’s help perdy, are lately grown Palladius. Too much this sacred seat of justice grants unto such a fugitive bondslave, who, instead of these examinations, should be made confess with a whip, that which a halter should punish. Are not you he, Sir, whose sheephook was prepared to be our sceptre; in whom lay the knot of all this tragedy? or else perchance, they that should gain little by it {616} were dealers in the murder, you only that had provided the fruits for yourself, knew nothing of it; knew nothing! Hath thy companion here infected thee with such impudency, as even in the face of the world to deny that which all the world perceiveth? The other pleads ignorance, and you, I doubt not, will allege absence. But he was ignorant when he was hard by, and you had framed your absence, just against the time the act should be committed, so fit a lieutenant he knew he had left of his wickedness, that for himself his safest mean, was to convey away the lady of us all, who once out of the country, he knew we would come with olive branches of intercession unto her, and fall at his feet to beseech him to leave keeping of sheep, and vouchsafe the tyrannizing over us: for to think they are princes, as they say, although in our laws it behoveth them nothing, I see at all no reason. These jewels certainly with their disguising slights, they have pilfered in their vagabonding race. And think you such princes should be so long without some followers after them? Truly if they be princes, it manifestly shows their virtues such, as all their subjects are glad to be rid of them. But be they as they are, for we are to consider the matter and not the men, Basilius’s murder hath been the cause of their coming, Basilius’s murder they have most treacherously brought to pass; yet that I doubt not, you will deny as well as your fellow. But how will you deny the stealing away the princess of this province, which is no less than treason? so notably hath the justice of the gods provided for the punishing of these malefactors, as if it were possible, men would not believe the certain evidences of their principal mischief, yet have they discovered themselves sufficiently for their most just overthrow. I say therefore, to omit my chief matter of the king’s death, this wolfish shepherd, this counterfeit prince, hath traitorously, contrary to his allegiance, having made himself a servant and subject, attempted the depriving this country of our natural princess, and therefore by all right must receive the punishment of traitors. This matter is so assured as he himself will not deny it, being taken and brought back in the fact. This matter is so odious in nature, so shameful to the world, so contrary to all laws, so hurtful to us, so false in him, as if I should stand further in declaring or defacing it, I should either show great doubts in your wisdom, or in your justice. Therefore I will transfer my care upon you, and attend, to my learning and comfort, the eternal example you will leave to all mankind, of disguisers, falsifiers, adulterers, ravishers, murderers and traitors.”

Musidorus, while Philanax was speaking against his cousin and him, had looked round about him, to see whether by any means he might come to have caught him in his arms, and have killed {617} him, so much had his disgracing words filled his breast with rage. But perceiving himself so guarded as he should rather show a passionate act, than perform his revenge, his hand trembling with desire to strike, and all the veins in his face swelling, casting his eyes over the judgment seat: “O gods,” said he, “and have you spared my life to bear these injuries of such a drivel! Is this the justice of this place, to have such men as we are, submitted not only to apparent falsehood, but most shameful reviling? But mark I pray you the ungratefulness of the wretch, how utterly he hath forgotten the benefits both he and all this country hath received of us. For if ever men may remember their own noble deeds, it is then when their just defence, and others’ unjust unkindness doth require it. I omit our services done to Basilius in the late war with Amphialus, importing no less than his daughters’ lives, and his state’s preservation. Were not we the men who killed the wild beasts which otherwise had killed the princesses if we had not succoured them? Consider if it please you where had been Daiphantus’s rape, or my treason, if the sweet beauties of the earth had then been devoured? either think them now dead, or remember they live by us. And yet full often this telltale can acknowledge the loss they should have by their taking away while maliciously he overpasseth who were their preservers: neither let this be spoken of me, as if I meant to balance this evil with that good, for I must confess that saving of such creatures was rewarded in the act itself, but only to manifest the partial jangling of this vile pickthank. But if we be traitors, where was your fidelity, O only tongue-valiant gentleman, when not only the young princess, but the king himself was defended from uttermost peril, partly by me, but principally by this excellent young man’s both wisdom and valour? Were we that made ourselves against hundreds of armed men, openly the shields of his life, like secretly to be his impoisoners? Did we then show his life to be dearer to us than our own, because we might after rob him of his life to die shamefully? Truly, truly, master orator, whosoever hath hired you to be so busy in their matters, who keep honester servants than yourself, he should have bid you in so many railings, bring some excuse for yourself, why in the greatest need of your prince, to whom you pretend a miraculous goodwill, you were not then as forward to do like a man yourself, or at least to accuse them that were slack in that service: but commonly they use their feet for their defence, whose tongue is their weapon. Certainly a very simple subtlety it had been in us to repose our lives in the daughters when we had killed the father. But as this gentleman thinks to win the reputation of a copious talker by leaving nothing unsaid which a filthy mind can imagine, so think I, or else all {618} words are vain, that to wise men’s judgment our clearness in the King’s death is sufficiently notorious. But at length when the merchant hath set out his gilded baggage, lastly, he comes to some stuff of importance, and saith, I conveyed away the princess of this country. And is she indeed your princess? I pray you then whom should I wait on else but her that was my mistress by my professed vow, and princess over me while I lived in this soil? Ask her why she went, ask not me while I served her. Since accounting me as a prince, you have not to do with me: taking me as her servant, then take withal that I must obey her. But you will say I persuaded her to fly away; certainly I will for no death deny it, knowing to what honour I should bring her from the thraldom by such fellow’s counsel as you, she was kept in. Shall persuasion to a prince grow treason to a prince? It might be error in me, but falsehood it could not be, since I made myself partaker of whatsoever I wished her unto. Who will ever counsel his king, if his counsel be judged by the event, and if it be not found wise, shall therefore be thought wicked? But if I be a traitor, I hope you will grant me a correlative, to whom I shall be the traitor. For the princess against whom the treasons are considered, I am sure will avow my faithfulness, without you will say that I am a traitor to her because I left the country? and a traitor to the country because I went with her. Here do I leave out my just excuses of love’s force, which as thy narrow heart hath never had noble room enough in it to receive, so yet those manlike courages, that by experience know how subject the virtuous minds are to love a most virtuous creature, witnessed to be such by the most excellent gifts of nature, will deem it a venial trespass to seek the satisfaction of honourable desires, honourable even in the curiousest points of honour, whereout there can no disgrace nor disparagement come unto her. Therefore, O judge, who I hope dost know what it is to be a judge, that your end is to preserve and not to destroy mankind, that laws are not made like lime twigs or nets, to catch everything that toucheth them, but rather like sea-marks, to avoid the shipwreck of ignorant passengers, since that our doing in the extremest interpretation is but a human error, and that of it you may make a profitable event, we being of such estate as their parents would not have misliked the affinity, you will not I trust at the persuasion of this babbler, burn your house to make it clean, but like a wise father turn even the fault of your children to any good that may come of it: since that is the fruit of wisdom and end of all judgments.”

While this matter was thus handling, a silent and as it were astonished attention, possessed all the people. A kindly compassion moved the noble gentleman Sympathus, but as for Kalander, {619} everything was spoken either by or for his own dear guests, moved an affect in him: sometimes tears, sometimes hopeful looks, sometimes whispering persuasions in their ears that stood by him, to seek the saving the two young princes. But the general multitude waited the judgment of Euarchus, who showed in his face no motions, either at the one’s or other’s speech, letting pass the flowers of rhetoric and only marking whither their reasons tended; having made the question to be asked of Gynecia, who continued to take the whole fault upon herself, and having called Dametas with Miso and Mopsa, who by Philanax’s order had been held in most cruel prison, to make a full declaration how much they knew of these past matters, and then gathering as assured satisfaction to his own mind as in that case he could, not needing to take leisure for that, whereof a long practice had bred a well-grounded habit in him, with a voice and gesture directed to the universal assembly, in this form pronounced sentence.

“This weighty matter, whereof presently we are to determine, doth at the first consideration yield to important doubts. The first whether these men be to be judged; the second how they are to be judged. The first doubt ariseth because they give themselves out for princes absolute, a sacred name, and to which any violence seems to be an impiety. For how can any laws, which are the bonds of all human society, be observed if the law-givers and law-rulers, be not held in an untouched admiration? but hereto, although already they have been sufficiently answered, yet thus much again will I repeat unto you. That whatsoever they be or be not, here they be no princes, since betwixt prince and subject there is as necessary a relation, as between father and son; and as there is no man a father but to his child, so is not a prince a prince but to his own subjects. Therefore is not this place to acknowledge in them any principality, without it should at the same time, by a secret consent, confess subjection. Yet hereto may be objected, that the universal civility, the law of nations, all mankind being as it were co-inhabiters, or world-citizens together, hath ever required public persons should be of all parties especially regarded, since not only in peace but in war, not only princes, but heralds and trumpeters, are with great reason exempted from injuries. This point is true, but yet so true, as they that will receive the benefit of a custom, must not be the first to break it, for then can they not complain, if they be not helped by that which they themselves hurt. If a prince do acts of hostility without denouncing war, if he breaks his oath of amity, or innumerable such other things contrary to the law of arms, he must take heed how he fall into their hands whom he so wrongeth, for then is courtesy the best custom he can claim; much more these men, who have {620} not only left to do like princes, but to be like princes, not only entered into Arcadia, and so into the Arcadian orders, but into domestical services, and so, by making themselves private, deprived themselves of respect due to their public calling. For no proportion it were of justice that a man might make himself no prince when he would do evil, and might anew create himself a prince when he would not suffer evil. Thus therefore by all laws of nature and nations, and especially by their own putting themselves out of the sanctuary of them, these young men cannot in justice avoid the judgment, but, like private men, must have their doings either cleared, excused, or condemned. There resteth then the second point, how to judge well. And that must undoubtedly be done, not by a free discourse of reason and skill of philosophy, but must be tied to the laws of Greece, and municipal statutes of this kingdom. For although out of them these came, and to them must indeed refer their offspring, yet because philosophical discourses stand in the general consideration of things, they leave to every man a scope of his own interpretation: where the laws applying themselves to the necessary use, fold us within assured bounds: which once broken, man’s nature infinitely rangeth. Judged therefore they must be, and by your laws judged. Now the action offereth itself to due balance, betwixt the accuser’s twofold accusation, and their answer accordingly applied. The questions being, the one of a fact simply, the other of the quality of a fact. To the first they use direct denial; to the second, qualification and excuse. They deny the murder of the King; and against mighty presumptions bring forth some probable answers, which they do principally fortify with the Queen’s acknowledging herself only culpable. Certainly as in equality of conjectures, we are not to take hold of the worse, but rather to be glad we may find any hope that mankind is not grown monstrous, being undoubtedly less evil a guilty man should escape, than a guiltless perish, so if in the rest they be spotless, then is this no further to be remembered. But if they have aggravated these suspicions with new evils, then are those suspicions so far to show themselves, as to cause the other points to be thoroughly examined, and with less favour weighed, since this no man can deny they have been accidental, if not principal causes of the king’s death. Now then we are to determine of the other matters, which are laid to them, wherein they do not deny the fact, but deny, or at least diminish the fault: but first I may remember, though it were not first alleged by them, the services they had before done, truly honourable, and worthy of great reward, but not worthy to countervail a following wickedness. Reward is proper to well doing, punishment to evil doing, which must not be {621} confounded, no more than good and evil are to be mingled. Therefore hath it been determined in all wisdoms, that no man because he hath done well before should have his present evil spared, but rather so much the more punished, as having showed he knew how to be good, yet would against his knowledge be naught. The fact is then nakedly without passion or partiality to be viewed: wherein without all question they are equally culpable. For though he that terms himself Daiphantus, were sooner disappointed of his purpose of conveying away the Lady Philoclea, than he that persuaded the Princess Pamela to fly her country, and accompanied her in it: yet seeing in causes of this nature, the will by the rules of justice standeth for the deed, they are both alike to be found guilty, and guilty of heinous ravishment. For though they ravished them not from themselves, yet they ravished them from him that owned them, which was their father. An act punished by all the Grecian laws, by the loss of the head, as a most execrable theft. For if they must die, who steal from us our goods, how much more they who steal from us that for which we gather our goods? And if our laws have it so in private persons, much more forcibly are they to be in princes’ children, where one steals as it were the whole state and well-being of that people, being tied by the secret of a long use, to be governed by none but the next of that blood. Neither let any man marvel, our ancestors have been so severe in these cases, since the example of the Phoenician Europa, but especially of Grecian Helen, hath taught them, what destroying fires have grown of such sparkles. And although Helen was a wife, and this but a child, that booteth not, since the principal cause of marrying wives is that we may have children of our own. But now let us see how these young men, truly for their persons worthy of pity, if they had rightly pitied themselves, do go about to mitigate the vehemency of their errors. Some of their excuses are common to both, some peculiar only to him that was the shepherd. Both remember the force of love, and as it were the mending up of the matter by their marriage. If that unbridled desire, which is entitled love, might purge such a sickness as this, surely we should have many loving excuses of hateful mischief. Nay rather, no mischief should be committed that should not be veiled under the name of love. For as well he that steals might allege the love of money; he that murders, the love of revenge; he that rebels, the love of greatness, as the adulterer the love of a woman. Since they do in all speeches affirm they love that, which an ill-governed passion maketh them to follow: but love may have no such privilege. That sweet and heavenly uniting of the minds, which properly is called love, hath no other knot but virtue, and therefore if it {622} be a right love, it can never slide into any action that is not virtuous. The other, and indeed more effectual reason is, that they may be married unto them, and so honourably redress the dishonour of them whom this matter seemeth most to touch. Surely if the question were, what were convenient for the parties, and not what is just in the never changing justice, there might be much said in it. But herein we must consider that the laws look how to prevent by due examples that such things be not done, and not how to salve such things when they are done. For if the governors of justice shall take such a scope, as to measure the foot of the law by the show of conveniency, and measure that conveniency not by the public society, but by that which is fittest for them which offend: young men, strong men, and rich men, shall ever find private conveniences how to palliate such committed disorders, as to the public shall not only be inconvenient, but pestilent. The marriage perchance might be fit for them, but very unfit were it to the state, to allow a pattern of such procurations of marriage. And thus much do they both allege. Further goes he that went with the princess Pamela, and requireth the benefit of a counsellor, who hath place of free persuasion, and the reasonable excuse of a servant, that did but wait of his mistress. Without all question, as counsellors have great cause to take heed how they advise anything, directly opposite to the form of that present government, especially when they do it singly without public allowance: yet so is the case much more apparent, since neither she was an effectual princess, her father being then alive, and though he had been dead, she not come to the years of authority, nor he her servant in such manner to obey her, but by his own preferment first belonging to Dametas, and then to the king; and therefore if not by Arcadian laws, yet by household orders, bound to have done nothing without his agreement. Thus therefore since the deeds accomplished by these two are both abominable and inexcusable, I do in the behalf of justice, and by the force of Arcadian laws pronounce that Daiphantus should be thrown out of a high tower to receive his death by his fall, Palladius shall be beheaded; the time before the sun set; the place, in Mantinea; the executioner, Dametas, which office he shall execute all the days of his life for his beastly forgetting the careful duty he owed to his charge.”

This said, he turned himself to Philanax, and two of the other noblemen, commanding them to see the judgment presently performed. Philanax more greedy than any hunter of his prey, went straight to lay hold of the excellent prisoners, who, casting a farewell look one upon the other, represented in their faces as much unappalled constancy as the most excellent courage can {623} deliver in outward graces. Yet if at all there were any show of change in them, it was that Pyrocles was somewhat nearer to bashfulness, and Musidorus to anger, both over-ruled by reason and resolution. But as with great number of armed men, Philanax was descending unto them, and that Musidorus was beginning to say something in Pyrocles’s behalf, behold Kalander, that with arms cast abroad, and open mouth, came crying to Euarchus, holding a stranger in his hand that cried much more than he, desiring they might be heard speak before the prisoners were removed, even the noble gentleman Sympathus aided them in it, and taking such as he could command, stopped Philanax, betwixt entreaty and force, from carrying away the princes until it were heard what new matters these men did bring. So again mounting to the tribunal, they hearkened to the stranger’s vehement speech, or rather a passionate exclaiming. It was indeed Kalodulus, the faithful servant of Musidorus, to whom his master, when in despite of his best-grounded determinations he first became a slave to affection, had sent the shepherd Menalcas to be arrested, by the help of whose raiment in the meantime he advanced himself to that estate which he accounted most high, because it might be serviceable to that fancy which he had placed most high in his mind. For Menalcas having faithfully performed his errand, was faithfully imprisoned by Kalodulus. But as Kalodulus performed the first part of his duty in doing the commandment of his prince, so was he with abundance of sincere loyalty extremely perplexed, when he understood of Menalcas the strange disguising of his beloved master. For as the acts he and his cousin Pyrocles had done in Asia, had filled all the ears of the Thessalonians and Macedonians with no less joy than admiration: so was the fear of their loss no less grievous unto them, when by the noise of report they understood of their lonely committing themselves to the sea, the issue of which they had no way learned. But now that by Menalcas he perceived where he was, guessing the like of Pyrocles, comparing the unusedness of this act with the unripeness of their age, seeing in general conjecture they could do it for nothing that might not fall out dangerous, he was somewhile troubled with himself what to do, betwixt doubt of their hurt, and doubt of their displeasure. Often he was minded, as his safest and honestest way, to reveal it to King Euarchus, that both his authority might prevent any damage to them, and under his wings he himself might remain safe. But considering a journey to Byzantium, whereas yet he supposed Euarchus lay, would require more time than he was willing to remain doubtful of his prince’s estate, he resolved at length to write the matter to Euarchus, and himself the while to go into Arcadia: uncertain what to do when he came thither, but determined to do his best service to his dear master, {624} if by any good fortune he might find him. And so it happened, that being even this day come to Mantinea, and as warily and attentively as he could, giving ear to all reports, in hope to hear something of them he sought, he straight received a strange rumour of these things, but so uncertainly, as popular reports carry so rare accidents. But this by all men he was willed, to seek out Kalander a great gentleman of that country, who would soonest satisfy him of all occurrents. Thus instructed he came even about the midst of Euarchus’s judgment to the desert, where seeing great multitudes, and hearing unknown names of Palladius and Daiphantus, and not able to press to the place where Euarchus sat, he enquired for Kalander, and was soon brought unto him, partly because he was generally known unto all men, and partly because he had withdrawn himself from the press, when he perceived by Euarchus’s words whither they tended, being not able to endure his guests’ condemnation. He requireth forthwith of Kalander the cause of the assembly; and whether the same were true of Euarchus’s presence: who with many tears made a doleful recital unto him, both of the Amazon and shepherd, setting forth their natural graces, and lamenting their pitiful undoing. But this description made Kalodulus immediately know the shepherd was his duke, and so judging the other to be Pyrocles, and speedily communicating it to Kalander, who he saw did favour their case, they break the press with astonishing every man with their cries. And being come to Euarchus, Kalodulus fell at his feet, telling him those he had judged, were his own son and nephew, the one the comfort of Macedon, the other the only stay of Thessalia. With many such like words; but as from a man that assured himself in that matter he should need small speech, while Kalander made it known to all men what the prisoners were to whom he cried they should salute their father, and joy in the good hap the gods had sent them, who were no less glad, than all the people amazed at the strange event of these matters. Even Philanax’s own revengeful heart was mollified when he saw from divers parts of the world so near kinsmen should meet in such a necessity. And withal the fame of Pyrocles and Musidorus greatly drew him to a compassionate conceit, and had already unclothed his face of all show of malice.

But Euarchus staid a good while upon himself, like a valiant man that should receive a notable encounter, being vehemently stricken with the fatherly love of so excellent children, and studying with his best reason what his office required: at length with such a kind of gravity, as was near to sorrow, he thus uttered his mind: “I take witness of the immortal gods,” said he, “O Arcadians that what this day I have said, hath been out of my {625} assured persuasion, what justice itself and your just laws require. Though strangers then to me, I had no desire to hurt them, but leaving aside all considerations of the persons, I weighed the matter which you committed into my hands with my most impartial and farthest reach of reason. And thereout have condemned them to lose their lives, contaminated with so many foul breaches of hospitality, civility, and virtue. Now, contrary to all expectations, I find them to be my only son and nephew, such upon whom you see what gifts nature hath bestowed: such who have so to the wonder of the world heretofore behaved themselves as might give just cause to the greatest hopes that in an excellent youth may be conceived. Lastly, in few words, such in whom I placed all my mortal joys, and thought myself now near my grave, to recover a new life. But alas! shall justice halt? or shall she wink in one’s cause, which had lynx’s eyes in another’s; or rather shall all private respects give place to that holy name? Be it so, be it so, let my grey hairs be laid in the dust with sorrow, let the small remnant of my life be an inward and outward desolation, and to the world a gazing flock of wretched misery, but never, never let sacred righteousness fall; it is immortal, and immortally ought to be preserved. If rightly I have judged, then rightly I have judged mine own children, unless the name of a child should have force to change the never changing justice. No, no, Pyrocles, and Musidorus, I prefer you much before my life, but I prefer justice as far before you: While you did like yourselves, my body should willingly have been your shield, but I cannot keep you from the effects of your own doing: nay, I cannot in this case acknowledge you for mine, for never had I shepherd to my nephew, nor ever had woman to my son; your vices have degraded you from being princes, and have disannulled your birthright. Therefore if there be anything left in you of princely virtue, show it in constant suffering that your unprincely dealing hath purchased unto you. For my part I must tell you, you have forced a father to rob himself of his children. Do you therefore, O Philanax, and you my other lords of this country, see the judgment be rightly performed in time, place, and manner, as before appointed.”

With that though he would have refrained them, a man might perceive the tears drop down his long white beard. Which moved not only Kalodulus and Kalander to roaring lamentations, but all the assembly dolefully to record that pitiful spectacle. Philanax himself could not abstain from great shows of pitying sorrow, and manifest withdrawing from performing the King’s commandment. But Musidorus having the hope of his safety, and recovering of the Princess Pamela, which made him most desirous to live so {626} suddenly dashed, but especially moved for his dear Pyrocles, for whom he was ever resolved his last speech should be, and stirred up with rage of unkindness, he thus spoke:

“Enjoy thy bloody conquest, tyrannical Euarchus,” said he, “for neither is convenient the title of a king to a murderer, nor the remembrance of kindred to a destroyer of his kindred. Go home and glory that it hath been in thy power, shamefully to kill Musidorus. Let thy flattering orators dedicate crowns of laurel unto thee, that the first of thy race thou hast overthrown a prince of Thessalia. But for me, I hope the Thessalians are not so degenerate from their ancestors but that they will revenge my injury and their loss upon thee. I hope my death is no more unjust to me than it shall be bitter to thee; howsoever it be, my death shall triumph over thy cruelty; neither as now would I live to make my life beholden unto thee. But if thy cruelty hath not so blinded thine eyes, that thou canst not see thine own hurt, if thy heart be not so devilish, as thou hast no power but to torment thyself, then look upon this young Pyrocles with a manly eye, if not with a pitiful; give not occasion to the whole earth to say: ‘See how the gods have made the tyrant tear his own bowels!’ Examine the eyes and voices of all this people; and what all men see, be not blind in thine own cause. Look, I say look upon him, in whom the most curious searcher is able to find no fault but that he is thy son. Believe it, thy own subjects will detest thee for robbing them of such a prince, in whom they have right as well as thyself.”

Some more words to that purpose he would have spoken, but Pyrocles, who often had called to him, did now fully interrupt him, desiring him not to do him the wrong to give his father ill words before him, willing him to consider it was their own fault and not his injustice; and withal, to remember their resolution of well suffering all accidents, which this impatiency did seem to vary from: and then kneeling down with all humbleness, he took the speech in this order to Euarchus: “If my daily prayers to the almighty gods had so far prevailed as to have granted me the end whereto I have directed my actions, I should rather have been now a comfort to your mind than an example of your justice; rather a preserver of your memory by my life than a monument of your judgment by my death. But since it hath pleased their unsearchable wisdoms to overthrow all the desires I had to serve you and make me become a shame unto you; since the last obedience I can show you is to die, vouchsafe yet, O Father, if my fault have not made me altogether unworthy so to term you, vouchsafe I say to let the few and last words your son shall ever speak, not be tedious unto you. And if the remembrance of my {627} virtuous mother, who once was dear unto you, may bear any sway with you, if the name of Pyrocles have at any time been pleasant, let one request of mine, which shall not be for mine own life, be graciously accepted of you. What you owe to justice is performed in my death: A father to have executed his only son, will leave a sufficient example for a greater crime than this. My blood will satisfy the highest point of equity, my blood will satisfy the hardest hearted in this country. O save the life of this prince; that is the only all I will with my last breath demand of you. With what face will you look upon your sister, when in reward of nourishing me in your greatest need, you take away, and in such sort take away that which is more dear to her than all the world, and is the only comfort wherewith she nourisheth her old age? O give not such an occasion to the noble Thessalians, for ever to curse the match that their prince did make with the Macedonian blood. By my loss there follows no public loss, for you are to hold the seat, and to provide yourself perchance of a worthier successor. But how can you or all the earth recompense that damage that poor Thessalia shall sustain? Who sending out, whom otherwise they would no more have spared than their own eyes, their prince to you, and your requesting to have him, by you he should thus dishonourably be extinguished. Set before you, I beseech you, the face of that miserable people, when no sooner shall the news come that you have met your nephew, but withal they shall hear that you have beheaded him. How many tears they shall spend, how many complaints they shall make, so many just execrations will light upon you. And take heed, O Father, for since my death answers my fault, while I live I will call upon that dear name, lest seeking too precise a course of justice, you be not thought most unjust in weakening your neighbours’ mighty estate by taking away their only pillar. In me, in me this matter began, in me let it receive his ending. Assure yourself no man will doubt your severe observing the laws, when it shall be known Euarchus hath killed Pyrocles. But the time of my ever farewell approaches: if you do think my death sufficient for my fault, and do not desire to make my death more miserable than death, let these dying words of him that was once your son, pierce your ears. Let Musidorus live, and Pyrocles shall live in him, and you shall not want a child.”

“A child,” cried out Musidorus, “to him that kills Pyrocles?” With that he fell again to entreat for Pyrocles, and Pyrocles as fast for Musidorus, each employing his wit how to show himself most worthy to die, to such an admiration of all the beholders, that most of them examining the matter by their own passions, thought Euarchus, as often extraordinary excellencies, not being rightly {628} conceived, do rather offend than please, an obstinate hearted man, and such an one, who being pitiless, his dominion must needs be insupportable. But Euarchus that felt his own misery more than they, and yet loved goodness more than himself, with such a sad assured behaviour as Cato killed himself withal, when he had heard the uttermost of that their speech tended unto, he commanded again they should be carried away, rising up from the seat, which he would much rather have wished should have been his grave, and looking who would take the charge, whereto every one was exceeding backward.

But as this pitiful matter was entering into, those that were next the Duke’s body, might hear from under the velvet, wherewith he was covered, a great voice of groaning. Whereat every man astonished, and their spirits appalled with these former miseries, apt to take any strange conceit, when they might perfectly perceive the body stir, then some began to fear spirits, some to look for a miracle, most to imagine they knew not what. But Philanax and Kalander, whose eyes honest love, though to divers parties, held most attentive, leaped to the table, and putting off the velvet cover, might plainly discern, with as much wonder as gladness, that the Duke lived. For so it was, that the drink he received was neither as Gynecia first imagined, a love-potion, nor, as it was after thought, a deadly poison, but a drink made by notable art, and as it was thought not without natural magic, to procure for thirty hours such a deadly sleep, as should oppress all show of life. The cause of the making of this drink had first been that a princess of Cyprus, grandmother to Gynecia, being notably learned, and yet not able with all her learning to answer the objections of Cupid, did furiously love a young nobleman of her father’s court, who fearing the king’s rage, and not once daring either to attempt or accept so high a place, she made that sleeping drink, and found means by a trusty servant of hers, who of purpose invited him to his chamber, to procure him that suspected no such thing, to receive it. Which done, he, no way able to resist, was secretly carried by him into a pleasant chamber, in the midst of a garden she had of purpose provided for this enterprise, where that space of time, pleasing herself with seeing and cherishing of him, when the time came of the drink’s end of working, and he more astonished than if he had fallen from the clouds, she bade him choose either then to marry her, and to promise to fly away with her in a bark she had made ready, or else she would presently cry out, and show in what place he was, with oath he was come thither to ravish her. The nobleman in these straights, her beauty prevailed, he married her, and escaped the realm with her. And after many strange adventures, were reconciled to the king her {629} father, after whose death they reigned. But she gratefully remembering the service that drink had done her, preserved in a bottle, made by singular art long to keep it without perishing, great quantity of it, with the foretold inscription, which wrongly interpreted by her daughter-in-law, the Queen of Cyprus, was given by her to Gynecia at the time of her marriage; and the drink finding an old body of Basilius, had kept him some hours longer in the trance than it would have done a younger. But a while it was before the good Basilius could come again to himself: in which time Euarchus more glad than of the whole world’s monarchy to be rid of his miserable magistracy, which even in justice he was now to surrender to the lawful prince of that country, came from the throne unto him, and there with much ado made him understand how these intricate matters had fallen out. Many garboils passed through his fancy before he could be persuaded Zelmane was other than a woman. At length remembering the oracle, which now indeed was accomplished, not as before he had imagined, considering all had fallen out by the highest providence, and withal weighing in all these matters his own fault had been the greatest; the first thing he did was with all honourable pomp to send for Gynecia, who, poor lady, thought she was leading forth to her lively burial, and, when she came, to recount before all the people, the excellent virtue was in her, which she had not only maintained all her life most unspotted, but now was content so miserably to die, to follow her husband. He told them how she had warned him to take heed of that drink: and so with all the exaltings of her that might be, publicly desired her pardon for those errors he had committed. And so kissing her, left her to receive the most honourable fame of any princess throughout the world, all men thinking, saving only Pyrocles and Philoclea, who never betrayed her, that she was the perfect mirror of all wifely love. Which though in that point undeserved, she did in the remnant of her life duly purchase, with observing all duty and faith to the example and glory of Greece: so uncertain are mortal judgments, the same person most infamous, and most famous, and neither justly. Then with princely entertainment to Euarchus, and many kind words to Pyrocles, whom still he dearly loved, though in a more virtuous kind, the marriage was concluded, to the inestimable joy of Euarchus, towards whom now Musidorus acknowledged his fault, betwixt the peerless princes and princesses. Philanax for his singular faith ever held dear of Basilius while he lived, and no less of Musidorus, who was to inherit that kingdom, and therein confirmed to him and his the second place in that province, with great increase of his living to maintain it. With like proportion he used to Kalodulus in Thessalia: highly {630} honouring Kalander while he lived, and after his death continuing in the same measure to love and advance his son Clitophon. But as for Sympathus, Pyrocles, to whom his father in his own time gave the whole kingdom of Thrace, held him always about him, giving him in pure gift the great city of Abdera. But the solemnities of these marriages, with the Arcadian pastorals, full of many comical adventures happening to those rural lovers; the strange stories of Artaxia and Plexirtus, Erona and Plangus, Helen and Amphialus, with the wonderful chances that befell them; the shepherdish loves of Menalcas with Kalodulus’s daughter; the poor hopes of the poor Philisides in the pursuit of his affections; the strange continuance of Claius and Strephon’s desire; lastly, the son of Pyrocles, named Pyrophilus, and Melidora, the fair daughter of Pamela by Musidorus, who even at their birth entered into admirable fortunes; may awake some other spirit to exercise his pen in that wherewith mine is already dulled.

A SIXTH BOOK TO THE COUNTESS OF
PEMBROKE’S ARCADIA

To strive to lessen the greatness of the attempt, were to take away the glory of the action. To add to Sir Philip Sidney, I know is rashness; a fault pardonable in me, if custom might as well excuse the offence, as youth may prescribe in offending in this kind. That he should undergo that burthen, whose mother-tongue differs as much from this language, as Irish from English, augments the danger of the enterprise, and gives your expectation, perhaps, an assurance what the event must be. Yet, let no man judge wrongfully of my endeavours: I have added a limb to Apelles’s picture; but my mind never entertained such vain hopes, to think it of perfection sufficient to delude the eyes of the most vulgar, with the likeness in the workmanship. No, no, I do not follow Pythagoras’s opinion of transmigration: I am well assured divine Sidney’s soul is not infused into me, whose judgment was only able to finish what his invention was only worthy to undertake. For this, courteous reader, let it suffice I place Sir Philip Sidney’s desert (even in mine own esteem) as far beyond my endeavours, as the most fault-finding censor can imagine this essay of mine to come short of his Arcadia. Vale.

ARCADIA
BOOK VI

What changes in fortune the princes of Macedon and Thessaly have passed, together with what event the uncertain actions of so blind a goddess have been crowned, they may remember, whose ears have been fed with the eloquent story, written by the never-enough renowned Sir Philip Sidney.

Basilius, therefore, having beheld with the eye of success, the accomplishment of his misinterpreted oracle, hastened (together with Euarchus) to his court of Mantinea; where the infinite assembly, and the public sacrifices of his subjects, did well witness what joy did possess their hearts, whose eyes were restored to the sight of long eclipsed sovereignty. Fame, also, proud to be the messenger of such royal news, had soon (with speedy flight) passed the limits of Arcadia, so that in few days the court was filled with foreign princes, whom either the tie of a long observed league of amity, or a nearness in blood to Basilius, at such a time, brought thither to congratulate with him, or were such, whose honour-thirsty minds hunted after occasions to make known their acts in chivalry.

And now was the marriage-day come, when Pamela, attired in the stately ornament of beauteous majesty, led by the constant forwardness of a virtuous mind, waited on by the many thoughts of his fore-past crosses in her love, which now made up a perfect harmony in the pleasing discord of endeared affection, was brought to church; whom, soon after, her sister Philoclea (being in the same degree of happiness, clad in the bashful innocency of an unspotted soul, guided by the shame-faced desire of her Pyrocles’s satisfaction, attended on by many graces of a mild cheerfulness) followed; both equally admired, both equally looked on.

The temple (whereto in triumph beauty and majesty were led prisoners by the famous sisters) was a fit dwelling-place for the Arcadian deities, fenced from the sun and winds’ too free access, by many ranks of even-grown, even-set trees, near which, in divided branches, ran two clear streams, whose sweet murmur (as they tumbled over their bed of pebble stones) did much adorn the religious solitariness of that place. And, that nothing should be wanting that might set forth the careful judgment of the builder, it was seated in such a near distance from the palace, as might not presently bury the gloriousness of the show, nor cloy the beholders with the tediousness of the sight. In the way, on both hands, were many altars, on which the crowned entrails of the much-promising sacrifices were laid. At the door the two sisters were received by as many virgins, attired in a white lawn livery, with garlands on their heads of lilies and roses intermixed, holding in their left hands a pair of pigeons, the grateful offering to the queen of love. Soon after, the accustomed rites in the Arcadian nuptials being ended, the King and Euarchus, with the rest of the princes, returned unto a stately palace, sumptuously furnished, where both art and nature seemed to be at variance, whether should bestow most ornaments to enrich so rare a work: seated where the earth did rise a little (as proud to be the supporter of so curious a building) by means whereof, the sight had freedom to overlook a large territory, where the green level of the Arcadian plains, beautified by the intercourse of many forests, represented the delightful mixture of a civil wilderness. The building of marble, where, whether the art in carving into many forms the in vain resisting hardness of the stone, the cunning in knitting these disjointed members, or the invention in contriving their several rooms, did excel, was hard to be judged of.

The inside also might well be the inner part of so glorious an outside; for, besides the well-matched largeness of the rooms, and lightsome pleasantness of the windows, it was all hung with the choice rareness of far-fetched arras, in which the ingenious workman, with the curious pencil of his little needle, had limned the dumb records of revived antiquity. Here did he present the memorable siege of Thebes, where the ruins of her walls seemed yet to hang, and make the beholders fear the downfall of the lively stones. There you might see how cunningly he had expressed the constrained flight of the Trojan prince, and the cruel sacrifice of enraged Dido’s love. Nor was the story of Scylla forgotten, who there stood before Minos, with the present of her father’s fatal hair; while you might perceive, by his bent brows and disdainful countenance, the just reward of her unnatural attempt. With these and others, wherein cost and invention strove {635} for the mastery, were the hangings adorned; yet these many stories did so stealingly succeed each other that the most curious observer’s eye (though his admiration might dwell on each piece) could find no cause of stay until he had overlooked them all. But neither these, nor what art or nature could have added, did set forth so much the palace, as the graceful presence of the Arcadian sisters; whose beauties, till now, of long time had borne a part with their troubled minds, in a sweet pilgrimage to a happy event; and therefore at this present, so far disburdened of those thoughts, as it was to be settled in the most desired enjoying of unspeakable bliss, the imagination would needs persuade, if it were possible, were bettered.

Dinner being set and ended, while the knights (who, to honour that day with tilting, and to show what they dared and could effect in the service, as they thought, of unresistable beauties) were putting on their armour, there entered the hall a page, who, with submissive humbleness, told the King, he was sent from his master, the naked knight, who desired there to be received as a challenger, to eternize, as the justness of his cause required, the famous memory of his deceased mistress Helen, the Queen of Corinth. Basilius, much pitying the before-unheard death of so excellent a queen, willed the page to relate the circumstance, which being strange in itself, and of so great a subject, wrought a passionate willingness in the hearers to be attentive.

“After that fortune,” said he, “had bestowed, by the conquest of Amphialus, at Cecropia’s castle, the victory on his adversary the black knight, this queen (having long time, by the command of love, her inward tyrant, made all Greece a stage for her wandering passions) at length went thither, where the end of her search was the beginning of her sorrows. Finding the curtains of eternal night ready to close up his eyes, who (in the voyage her affection made) had alway been the port she steered to; yet hoping she knew not what, that if perhaps Proserpine should meet in Elysium his departed soul, she would in mere compassion of her sorrow, send it back to reinhabit her ancient seat; she carried the life little-desiring body, to Corinth, where, at that time, lived an aged man, by name Artelio, one whose fortunate experience in desperate cures had made famous. Him, by the powerful command of his queen, and the humble tears of a still-mistrusting lover, she conjures to employ the uttermost of his skill in preserving him in whom she lived. Some time there was ere his vital spirits, almost now proved strangers to their wonted mansion, would accept the tie of hospitality; but when the hand of art had taught them courtesy, and that each sense, though faintly, did exercise his charge, Amphialus, returning to himself, from that sweet ignorance of cares {636} wherein he lived, began to question, in what estate the castle was against the besiegers? thinking he had always been there; when Helen entered the room with a countenance where beauty appeared through the clouds of care and fear of his danger: Her, the double and deeply wounded patient (bearing still about him the inward picture of Philoclea, whom long I have heard, in vain he loved) thought to be the same saint, the remembrance of whom returned, together with his wandering soul, from which it was inseparable. Now, therefore, with a languishing look (the true herald of what he suffered) ‘Lady,’ said he, ‘though the welcome harbinger of a near-following death hath provided this body (while it was mine, alway devoted to your service) as a lodging for his master an ever-certain guest, yet when I pass to the Elysian plains (if any memory there remain of this world of comfort you now vouchsafe, heaven knows! your faithful, though unfortunate servant) I shall never cease to pay the eternal tribute of thanks to well-deserving death, who, with his presence brings the happiness in life denied me.’

“The Queen with a pensive silence, sorrowing she stood to act the counterfeit of her rival, and still desirous to enjoy the sweet speech of her revived Amphialus, was like a passenger, whom the loud command of the rough winds had forced to wander through the unevenness of the deep-furrowed seas, now in sight of land, equally distracted between the desire to leave his unnatural habitation, where each wave seems to be the proud messenger of destruction, and fear to approach it, being jealous of his hard entertainment on the rocky shore: thus did she continue (fixed in a doubtful imagination) loth to interrupt his pleasing speech, and more than grieved he meant not her whom he spoke to, until Amphialus (strengthening his newly recovered senses with the conceited presence of Philoclea) found his error, and then, with a look on his mistaken object (which he could not make disdainful, because his happy thoughts had once adored it for Philoclea) he suddenly fell into a deadly trance, whereat Helen (feelingly suffering in his danger) ran to him, and bedewing his even then lovely face with the loving oblation of her many tears, she together poured forth the most passionate plaints that love could invent, or grief utter; so as a while, this accident overthrowing the fabric of her half-built comfort with the suddenness of so unlooked-for an assault, constrained her (with bemoaning his case) to forget the care of his safety; but being withdrawn by her servants, the indisposition of her body, caused her a while to entertain in bed the fever of her affectionate sorrow.

“In the meantime, Amphialus, by the skilful care of Artelio, was again brought to enjoy that, whose loss he would account his {637} chiefest happiness; and faintly withdrawing the cover that obscured his weak sight, and settling his look upon Artelio, ‘Father,’ said he, ‘if you felt the inward agonies of my tormented soul, as you see the desperate state of my low-brought body, I assure myself you would not be so inhuman, there to employ your endeavours, where, when they have wrought their effect, they serve only to confirm the memory of fore-passed calamity, with the growing apprehension of future misfortune. But since my destinies have so set down, that the whole course of my life should be inevitably disastrous, I must think my tragedy is not yet acted; though what worse than hath befallen me cannot be imagined, or what may be kept in store (more than I have passed), far exceeds my apprehension, though not my expectation.’

“Here he began to run over his unfortunate love to Philoclea, the killing of Parthenia, his overthrow in the encounter with the black knight; inserting many more disgraces, which the most envious of his glory, would not have cast as aspersions on his well-known fame. Thus, with the thought that fate (whose working he could not limit) had reserved him for more mischief, he suffered his wounds to be cured; and soon after, walking one evening, as his manner was, in the garden, he chose a time, as he thought unespied by any, to convey himself through a back-door, and there finding his horse (which his page had brought by his appointment) he rode away, whither he knew not, and not much cared, so he might leave her, whose affection deserved a more courteous farewell. But alas! when she heard of his going, what tongue is able to express her sorrow, in whom the equally tormenting passions of grief and despair were lifted to their uttermost height?

“Two days, since the departure of Amphialus, posted away, striving in vain to overtake their irrecoverable fellows, and now the third was come, to be a prologue to the following tragedy: when Helen (slacking the violent course of her incessant plaints) gave occasion to her servants to be less mistrustful of her actions, thinking that time began to wear away her sorrows. But she (as by the event was gathered) using this as a policy to rid herself of the cumber of careful attendance, when (now her truce, in show, with sorrow, and the restraint of her plaints had wrought the effect she desired) taking her trusty servant Mylama with her, and leaving a letter with Lada (whom, besides Mylama, she only trusted with this secret) which, upon the first knowledge of her flight, should be given to Drenus the chief of her council; wherein she excused her secret stealing away, by a vow passed to Apollo, in such manner to go a pilgrimage to Delphos; she put herself on her journey, having an army of passions for her convoy, led by love, {638} and waited on by desire, in hope of what she knew was hopeless; yet often checking her despairing foresight with such unlikely possibilities as affection (upon these occasions) is wont to supply.

“Many days she had not wandered (changing places, to renew her companions in sorrow) when coming into a pleasant valley, where of each side, many trees (in the green-leaved mantle of their summer livery) did apparel two neighbour mountains, where some sunburnt sapless pines, by the advantage of the ground (like little-deserving, in themselves, birth-only ennobled men) overtopped the straight upraised cedar, the stock of self-begun honour. Through this flowery plain ran a many-headed crystal current that did indent the earth as it smoothly glided by, to make the obligation of friendship between them more firm; and where, it fame-like, increased by travel, there (as it was the natural) so, it seemed to have been the politic body of the state of springs, such was the constant care of the fountain magistrates, and such the well-agreeing union of the watery commons. Here she stayed (invited by solitariness, the best repose for wearied sorrow) yet giving no respite to her mind, she spoke nothing but Amphialus, or of Amphialus. ‘O Amphialus!’ did she say, and to this invocation the flattering nymph (that always seconds what is spoken) did join the like of her own; and Helen delighted to hear the sound of so sweet a name beaten back upon her, for a time sealed up her lips, listening (with attentive silence) what echo would have further said. But she (who of all the powers of a reasonable soul, only had a memory and a tongue only serviceable for that use) together gave over to reflect her borrowed language, expecting (with like stillness) her further speech. But Helen, not able longer to restrain the overflow of her panting heart, began to cry out, ‘Unkind Amphialus!’ This also did the echo repeat. But she hearing by the rebound of the words, Amphialus accused. ‘Discourteous nymph,’ said she, ‘and how is Amphialus unkind? Can the harmony of such excellence admit so foul a fault to bear a part with his virtues? Yet, woe is me! he is unkind. Could his hard heart else suffer this love of his (which I only name because it is the only part worth naming in me) thus long unregarded? Could not my crown (crowned in being a foot-stool to Amphialus) have purchased some respect? Alas! no: how could unhappy Helen expect the Fates reserved so great a blessing in store for her?’

“She had not long debated the reasons of her misfortune, when Rinatus (the only brother to Timotheus, but younger by many years) chanced to pass that way. A man on whom fame had bestowed, and deservingly, the name of valiant; yet of disposition so mischievously cruel, and ambitiously proud, that where his deeds might well have claimed so great an honour, there his {639} conditions (as well weighed) brought a reproachful burden to the balance of his reputation. He (his father dying young, and unwilling to dismember his estate, and unable otherwise to satisfy the hopes of his son’s ambition) hearing of the wars of Laconia, went thither; where soon he purchased the opinion of a man resolute to undertake, and fortunate to execute what he had undertaken: and serving under Eborbas (chief commander for the king) because of the sympathy of humours between them (whereby nature did insinuate for Rinatus, and taught him flattery without dissimulation) he grew great in his favour. Soon after this, Eborbas in a conflict between him and the Helots being mortally wounded, yet in death, careful of the welfare of his country, recommended this Rinatus (partly for his good liking of him, but principally for his experience in wars, and well-seconded judgment) to the king, who, though with some opposition (the country-men repining at his, a stranger’s advancement) after trusty Eborbas’s death, preferred him to the same place. His discharge of which, outwent so far the envy of the jealous noblemen, that well might their king and they, in the death of the valiant Eborbas, deplore the loss of a private man, but must confess that this watchful care and undaunted well-ordered courage, did survive in this their general.

“In this esteem he had scarce lived a year, when, hearing of his brother and nephew’s death, together with his undoubted right to the large territory which his brother in his life-time had enjoyed, he, notwithstanding, continued in the charge to which he was lately advanced: framing in his conceit his new-acquired greatness but as a step to climb the sovereignty of Laconia: which being elective, he thought the easier to be compassed, having by his bounteous affability gained the hearts of the soldiers, and being already possessed of the chief forts (the best strength of the country) wherein he had placed such who had their devotions linked to his will, because they owed him the benefit of their creation. But finding the accomplishment of these practices to depend upon the death of the king, which, his youth promised was unlikely soon to happen, and fearful to draw on the discovery of his practices by seeking any secret means to make him away, whom the watchful eye of dutiful observance did warrant secure from any traitorous plots, he solicits the King to dispense with his presence, who (seeing the ground of his journey to be the just cause of his long-deferred revenge for Timotheus his brother, and Philoxenus his nephew’s death, now a peace was lately concluded with the Helots, and therefore his absence the more excusable) upon condition of a speedy return, though unwilling, yet for his satisfaction, grants his request: who now on his journey, {640} and having in his way to cross this valley, met the unfortunate queen, whom, though her habit might disguise, her words (overheard) did assure Rinatus his willingness to believe that she was the same she so often spoke herself to be, the unfortunate Helen.

“Awhile he stood doubtful of the person, awhile amazed at so fortunate an encounter, and a long time perplexed what punishment his revenge would judge fit for (the conceited heinousness of) his brother and nephew’s death. At length the Queen (now first withdrawing her thoughts from that object whereto affection, in sweetest contemplation, had bound them, and suffering her mind, before retired within itself, now to be informed by her servant’s sense) seeing this stranger near her, began, as her manner was, to find by enquiry what he knew of Amphialus. ‘Wicked woman,’ replied Rinatus, ‘the all-seeing justice hath now delivered thee to receive fit punishment for Philoxenus’s and Timotheus’s death,’ and using no more words, presently caused her to be mounted on horseback, prolonging her life to make her death more miserable. Thus far hath Mylama discovered, who, poor lady, was there left, most cruelly beaten, to be the reporter of Rinatus’s revenge, and her mistress’s hard hap.

“The last act of this tragedy, my master had the fortune to know, by one of trust and great esteem in the court of Laconia, to which Rinatus had conveyed Helen, where, for a time, she was honourably entertained, finding no want but of command and liberty; the king, belike fearing the power of the wronged Corinthians, preserving her as a sure card for a dead lift. But when he understood that one Tenarus (a man apt to practice innovations, and at this time able, when the many-headed multitude wanted the awful presence of their sovereign) took upon him the government, pretending a title to the crown, as descended from those, from whom Helen’s ancestors, as he alleged, had traitorously forced it, then did the tyrant of Laconia, finding the way secure for his mischievous practice, vehemently importuned by Rinatus, and urged forward by the politic wickedness of his own desire to pleasure the new king, secretly cause Helen to be poisoned: Such was the end of this great queen, justly beloved of all who heard the fame of her virtues, and therefore justly to be deplored of all who hear the unredeemable loss of so many perfections.”

Basilius, and the rest of the princes, were much moved with so tragical a story, especially Musidorus, who (in search of Pyrocles) having the fortune to see her, could witness, that though fame had borrowed all men’s mouths to proclaim her many excellencies, yet it was far from doing right to her desert. But {641} this was no fit lodging for pity to dwell in, where joy had so great a command. The messenger therefore being permitted to part, with free leave for his master to enter the lists, judges were appointed, and the challenge proclaimed.

The challenger understanding of the King’s liking of his demand, came forth of his pavilion, with armour so lively representing nakedness, wounded in many places (where the staunchless blood, in the course the workman had allotted it, seemed to drop destruction) that many thought a madness had possessed him (so unarmed, so wounded) to present himself in such a trial, where a surer defence, and a sounder body were more needful. Before him went six, as savages, bearing the lances for his first courses; who coming within distance to be heard, did sing these following verses.

Then one of them, reaching him a lance, he began his course against Tyro Prince of Andria, famous for his constant love to the fair Lydia, now married, and Queen of Epire, and ever fortunate in the course of his adventures: but here his fortune gave place to virtue, or rather joined with her to assist the naked knight; for, at the third encounter, he was put beside his saddle, much bruised in body, and no less afflicted in mind.

The next that supplied his place, was Pausanias, a Macedonian, one, who in his late wars had done Euarchus faithful service, and now, thinking to be as successful in this enterprise, had put on armour to do honour to his mistress: but his first course compelled him to acknowledge he was deceived, seeing himself fall so short of his expectation.

To him succeeded Nicanor, a Corinthian knight, advanced by the new king, one extremely confident of himself, because never tried, and now very forward, fearing to be prevented of the honour, for which already, in conceit, he had triumphed at Corinth with the great applause of the people, and the good liking of the king. But the naked knight, at second course, cut off both his life and imagined trophy: for, couching his lance, and allotting it in his course a just descent, rightly levelled by his well-judging experience, it met with Nicanor’s sight, and passing thorough that weak {642} resistance, it pierced his right eye, and with it his brain, so that Nicanor fell down, forgetful both of his forethought fame and following reproach. With this adventure the tilting that day ended; the sun with loose rays, posting to his western home, and the naked knight retired himself to his pavilion, whence he sent his page, who, humbly, for his master, entreated, that his unwillingness to be known should excuse the omission of his duty to the king.

Thus that night drew on, which to them who enjoyed delight, seemed to have put on all her sails to be the speedier in passing over. But far other was the naked knight’s apprehension: he (who made her ugly darkness a pattern of the sorrow his afflicted soul endured) thought she was becalmed in the sea of his misfortune. At length Phoebus, weary of his importunity, made haste to distribute his grateful light to his care-tired senses; and he as soon embracing the smallest show of comfort, put on his armour. About two hours after, the judges being set, and Basilius and Euarchus (with the rest of the court) present, Leonatus, the young King of Pontus (who had been there to acknowledge his beholdingness to them whom he was deservingly bound to) took the field. His armour was of a dark colour, through which many flames seemed to break out, as when the clouds, great in labour with exhalations, at length gave way to their more violent power: his three first courses promised a more happy event than fortune meant he should enjoy, for (having performed them with a well-ordered firmness in his seat, and a moving constancy in the carriage of his lance, to the great delight of the beholders) the fourth time he was dismounted; whose disgrace Pyrocles was ready to revenge, but he was, by a secret look from Philoclea, commanded the contrary. Then Telamon, Phelauceas and Diremus felt, with little advantage in fortune, the like success.

Thus, most part of that morning, the naked knight, with little resistance, had the best against all comers, which most of the lookers-on, with public acclamation, did testify, but he having given over the use of himself to sorrow, sometimes by the careless shaking of his head, did let them know, they burdened his desert with the unpleasing weight of his praise; and staying a while on horseback, he expected the next adventurer, with such a demeanour of himself, that (though it did accuse him of much grief) could not conceal the grace of his stately presence. But when he saw none ready to take the field, with an humble bend taking his leave of the king, he softly trotted towards his tent, not so much to repose his body, as to give a quiet way to the assaults of his mind. At length, when all the beholders’ expectations were almost wearied, there entered the lists a lady, attended only by one page, who {643} having alighted, presently went towards the place where Basilius sat, where first kneeling, then taking away a black scarf (which grief had hired to join with herself, in eclipsing the excellent feature of a most fair face) she began to speak; but Basilius and Gynecia hastily ran to embrace Helen Queen of Corinth, for this was she. Great was the joy of her revived presence, and great the desire to know the means of her safety. But she (accounting these gratulations cumbersome, and the relation of her adventures tedious) fixing her watery eyes on Basilius: “Great king, I am,” said she, “that unfortunate Helen, sometime Queen of Corinth, now both deprived of crown and kingdom by Tenarus. Yet why should I mention this, as fit to be inserted among my greatest misfortunes? The cause why now I come, is my care of Amphialus’s safety, in whom I live, to whose disdain I have vowed the tribute of my constant love. He (alas! why should I live to speak it?) not long since following the course of his adventures, came to Amasia, where he was made prisoner, and carried to Dunalbus prince of that country, whose brother it was Amphialus’s fortune to kill in rescue of a lady, to whom he would have offered dishonourable violence. These news came to mine ears (to add more to many miseries) at that time when I chanced to be at Delphos, pouring forth my heartiest devotions for my most beloved, my most unkind Amphialus: but the pitying God, either to stay my hands from the execution they intended (but to what end might that be? that God knows; for no time can unbend my affection) or, as heaven grant it may be, in commiseration of my case, thus comforted me:

“Thus far have I wandered, led by that divine promise, in pursuit of such a one: But nowhere can I find a happy event to confirm that oracle; yet dare I not despair, having so high a warrant; nor hope, having so bad success.”

“You are fortunately come,” said the King, “This knight, whose skill in arms hath made your well-deserving virtues famous, may be that man pointed out by the finger of heaven, to release Amphialus, who both in name and armour represents a naked knight.” “O no,” said the Queen, “it cannot be expected that Apollo, would leave so plain a way for us to track out the footsteps of his obscure mysteries.” “Madam,” replied Basilius (having first placed her in a chair by him) “the all-seeing providence, with whom the ends of all things are present, is sometimes pleased to cast forth the emblem of our destinies, so strangely hidden in the covert of ambiguous words, that, doubtless, {644} it serves to beget nothing but matters of distrust, and labyrinths of errors, where the imagination a thousand ways may be led astray; of this you have a present proof, confirmed by my experience. And sometimes the same justice unfolds the secret of our fate, and plainly lets us know the mystery of our fortune; yet even that plainness, to the curious search of our still-mistrusting brain, becomes a reason sufficient to enforce us to a contrary belief. This last, I think (if, in the interpretation of an oracle, my opinion may be received) is that mean, whereby Apollo both reveals and hides the author of Amphialus’s freedom.”

This said, he sends presently for the naked knight, who as soon obeying the king’s command, as he was completely armed, came before him; to whom Basilius cheerfully told (as glad to be the reporter of good news to him, whose prowess in arms deservingly gained much of his good opinion) of Helen’s being there, together with her desire to employ him in an action the heavens had also interested him in. “What is it,” replied the naked knight, “that, without such a command, I would not endeavour to accomplish for my most dear Helen?” And then, with excess of comfort and astonishment, his weak limbs were ready to give over the support of his joy-burdened body; but, being upheld by Musidorus, who stood next him, his overcharged spirits had time to recollect themselves.

The Queen gathering comfort from his promise, and seeing fair likelihood of the oracle’s accomplishment, with the oratory of love, who thinks no words but his own able to express his mind, began in this manner: “Sir, ill-fortune my awful governess, as in the most of my actions she is pleased to keep a hard hand over me, so in this (distrustful belike of my willingness) she forces me to repeat my wonted lesson of receiving courtesies without power of requital; making one undeserved favour from you become a cause of further beholdingness to you: But the glory that follows your good success in this adventure (the best spur to set forward brave spirits to noble actions) hath almost assured me that the love you profess, and a distressed lady’s cause, need not join petitioners in a request your virtue must be willing to grant. The reward of your victory, is the releasing of Amphialus, of whom I may speak, and the world with me, all praise-worthy things.” “Madam,” replied the naked knight, “I thought the gods could not have favoured me more than in giving you respite of life, and me power to be serviceable to you: but when I consider the end I must employ my endeavours to, it buries my conceited happiness in the grave of a certain misfortune. Shall I labour to preserve that monster of men, whose story (if the world will needs read) contains nothing but a volume of disasters, and a vain {645} discourse of a few adventures cast upon him by the blindness of chance? Shall I hazard my life for him, against whom, had I lives innumerable, I would venture them all? Shall I live to make another happy in your favour, and cross mine own desires? No, madam, I will sooner leave my blood here before you, as a testimony that fear hath no interest in my disobedience to your command, than I will make my after-life, truly miserable in the burden of a hopeless affection.” To this the Queen awhile in tears, as if her eyes strove to speak for her, made a silent answer; but when her sighs had breathed forth the over-charge of her breast, first she kneeled, then faintly said: “O eternal president of this court of cares, when will thy just pity commiserate my distress! Alas, Sir, what new way have the gods found to vent their malice on me! have I made disdain my only mishap, and must now affection towards me be another undeserved misfortune? Behold, Sir, and, if you can, with pity, a Queen born to command a suppliant at your feet, begging what goodness solicits you to grant, release Amphialus: and if your jealousy thinks he hath too much interest in my love, restore him to the world that wants him, I will vow a virgin’s life.” “Stay, virtuous Queen,” replied the naked knight, and lifting up his beaver, “receive,” said he, “thou best of women! the overjoyed Amphialus.”

The Queen, as when the ocean swells with the rage of a tempest, if on a sudden these blasts be appeased, yet the proud waves, mindful of their fore-passed injury, and indisposed to so speedy a reconcilement, some while retain the rough remembrance of the winds’ malice, so were her thoughts, before moved by the storm of despair, though now she had cause of contented quiet, on a sudden, incapable of so unlooked-for a happiness, first doubt, then amazement, lastly excess of joy, by succession, were admitted to the helm of her distressed heart. But when joy had once got to be the steersman, his want of practice (by his long absence from that employment) soon brought a confusion; here the warm tears of sorrow, there the cold drops of a present comfort, did strive whether should show itself most officious in drowning her pale blushing cheeks: At length they both, no longer able to resist this powerful invasion of their minds, as by mutual consent, fell the one entwined in the other’s arms, and made the earth happy in bearing such matchless lovers. But their senses being soon restored to their wonted function, after some passionate words (to which their eyes and touch of their hands gave the life of expression) Amphialus, divided into many minds by the turbulent working of his thoughts, turning towards his uncle, with his eyes fixed on the ground, stood with the grace of a man condemned, who having led a loathsome life in an ugly dungeon, is now {646} brought to a freedom of looking upon the open air, yet sees the day is but a taper to light him to his execution. Of the one side he was brought from the hell of despair, wherein he lived in the assurance of Helen’s death, to the certainty of her life and presence; of the other, what was his treason to his uncle to expect, but an infamous death, and a divorce from his new-born happiness. The shame also of a crime so foul as his rebellion, was not the least torment to his mind, unwillingly beaten from a settled course of virtue by Cecropia’s practices. At length, when these thoughts, that almost overcame all the powers of life in him, were themselves overcome by his resolution, casting himself at Basilius’s feet, thus said: “Great Sir, if treason in a subject, and unnaturalness in a nephew, be punishable, here you have before you a fit exercise for your justice, I am that subject whose rebellion interrupted the contented quiet of my King’s solitary life, and brought him to behold the bloody tragedy of a civil dissention in his divided state: I am that nephew, whom a wilful disobedience made a traitor to the nearness of his blood. Hither did I come, Orestes-like, tormented by the inward fright of my guilty conscience, with my blood to wash away (if good fortune, in the defence of the cause I undertook, would draw death upon me) the stains of such unpardonable faults; but now that I have found what I least looked for (and then he cast a side-look on Helen) for her, I confess, I should desire to live, if your just indignation might find mercy for so heinous offences, which I will not strive to mitigate, however justly I may; for I would think such faults ill-excused with which, to ease myself, I must have burdened my nearest friends.”

Basilius, first graciously lifting him from the ground: “Nephew,” replied he, “did I retain the memory of your youthful oversights, this your virtuous acknowledgment were sufficient to bear them away; but long since I have buried in oblivion the thought of your rashness because I knew (by what after happened) that the gods had made you an instrument to work their ends; it were injury therefore to question his actions, whose will was not his own, being over-ruled by their all-commanding decree. No, nephew, I do not only pardon these transgressions, but freely also do resign all such possessions as your father held in Arcadia, taken from you in the last war, and now in the hands of Philanax. Live happy in your choice, I shall be proud of our alliance with the crown of Corinth, and shall rejoice to see the succession continue in our blood.” This said, he led him to Gynecia, then to Euarchus, but when he came to Musidorus: “This, nephew, is that black knight,” said he, “who at your last meeting gave such evident proof of his unconquerable valour; this is Musidorus the Prince of Thessalia, {647} whom the gods have bestowed as a blessing on my daughter Pamela.” Amphialus, now assured by the king’s speech, unto whose hand the honour of his conquest had fallen (for doubt had long tormented him that, some baser hand had reaped the glory of his victory). “Prince Musidorus,” said he, “my hard success in our last encounter much perplexed me; not that my confidence of myself was lifted to such an arrogant presumption to think my strength and skill in arms matchless, but that it grieved me, an unknown knight (one, whom the world might think had concealed his name, lest, together with him, his bad fortune in trials of that kind might be discovered) should have the better of me. But now, that I know to whose lot my victory hath fallen, I do not only bring an excuse, but an honour from the worthiness of the conqueror.”

“Courteous Amphialus,” replied the Prince, “whose side the advantage of fortune did then incline to, if it may be determined, with greater reason, and more desert, should the honour be given you, than bestowed on me; but, however, such trial I then made of your manhood that, hereafter, I shall desire to be of your part.” “Worthy Prince,” said Amphialus, “your virtue will always choose to be of the weaker side.” And so turning to Philoclea, “Divine lady,” said he, “in your excellent choice of the famous Pyrocles, you have (besides the happiness gained to yourself, for which the world may envy you) showed me the way to my best hopes, by grafting my affection in the stock of my Helen’s constancy.” “Dear cousin,” replied Philoclea, “I am glad it was in my power, and your good fortune, so much to better your choice in so excellent a remove:” And so, casting a bashful look towards Pyrocles: “Sir,” said she, “we may join in thanksgiving. This is my cousin, whose virtuous disposition during our imprisonment was our safest defence against my Aunt Cecropia’s cruelty.” “I do acknowledge it,” said Pyrocles, “and besides this favour, in which we have a common interest, Sir, I must crave pardon for a wound given you at such a time when, belike, you made patience your only defence.”

Amphialus stood with his eyes fixed on Pyrocles, for his memory supplied him with a confused remembrance of such a face: Zelmane he could not take him to be, her sex and this change, at their first birth, destroyed these apprehensions. Pyrocles, his heart swore he was not, whose youth and beauty, God wot! were no fit livery for such achievements as the world famed him for. Thus awhile he continued, troubled with the uncertainty of conjectures, until Pyrocles (happily conceiving the cause of his amazement) stopped his further admiration by letting him know that the then Zelmane was the now Pyrocles. Whereat Amphialus, {648} as one newly waked out of a dream, cried out, “Anaxius, Anaxius,” said he, “’twas the Prince of Macedon (not a woman) overcame thee. Wheresoever thy soul be, let it keep this time festival as the birthday of thy glory.” And so, after mutual embraces, together with the rest of the princes, they entered the palace, where, when they were seated, the eyes of all the company were set on the Queen of Corinth, longing to know the story of her strange fortune; now a queen, then a prisoner; now alive, then dead; which she, at Basilius’s entreaty, with a majesty which her fortune could not change, because it was innate, thus declared.

“Great Sir! that I was made prisoner by Rinatus, and by him carried to Laconia, fame, together with the news of my supposed death, belike hath brought you; the rest, since you esteem worthy your hearing, I shall esteem worthy my relation. There yet governs, and then did, among the nobility of Laconia, one Creton, a man elected to the crown rather to recompense the desert of his ancestors, than for his own virtues, beloved and borne with for the same reason; such an everlasting monument of itself, can goodness leave to posterity. To him when I was brought, my guilt and my guilty self, with the best oratory Rinatus had, was made known, who, with vehement importunity, desired that my speedy punishment, as my fault, should be terrible. The king answered, though he found his demands reasonable, and such to which he was sure there could be no opposition made, yet he thought it fit the nobility should be acquainted with so weighty a cause before he proceeded further in it, and so, for this time (being committed to the charge of Pertinax, chamberlain to the king) I was dismissed. The next day, the council being sent for, my cause ran the hazard of many opinions; some thought it fit I should die; and though justice, said they, might not dispense with such severity, yet it was fit to please Rinatus, one who had deserved well, and had the power, if otherwise he were dealt with, to revenge his injury. Others, the more in number, and esteemed the wiser, because the King held with them, opposed this sentence, alleging, so inconsiderate an act might call the safety of Laconia in question; ‘For,’ said they, ‘shall we think the Corinthians so degenerate, that, being justly incensed against us they will not endeavour to revenge the death of their prince, in the shade of whose reign they enjoy that peace and plenty their neighbours envy them for? And if they stir in it, what people is so barbarous, whom the justness of their cause will not procure into the society of this war? See then if a private man’s satisfaction be to be compared to these ensuing dangers? No, let her live, and when the gods do otherwise dispose of her, let her death come without the ruin of Laconia.’ This determined, a new doubt arose, how I should be disposed of. {649} They that before thought it expedient I should die, now that opinion was put by, concluded that it was best to send me to Corinth, with an honourable convoy, so to tie them by a perpetual bond of gratitude, to be their friends whom they so much feared to be their enemies; the rest, to gratify the King, whose affection they perceived to lean that way, and well assured it was an advice too profitable to be rejected that gained a kingdom, though his promise after the queen’s death (who, not long before, left him a widower) had been passed to Lemnia, a fair and virtuous lady, daughter to my keeper Pertinax, yet they wished, if so he pleased, my crown might win me to his bed, little doubting but I had thought it an egregious felicity to be so graced. The King, after many protractions, at length, as if he were wrought to it by a desire to satisfy the nobility rather than self-will, declares his mind to be directed by them; which, once known, behold! the flattery of the court began to fawn upon me; who more observed? who more admired? Only Rinatus, much impatient of this my greatness in court, uttered some words in choler, which made known, by a further inquiry, a conspiracy of his against the king, so that soon after (the rather to give me, whom they studied to please, satisfaction) he was beheaded.

“But long it was not before fortune, neither constant to my happy adversity, nor adverse felicity, had brought thither (sent by the usurper Tenarus) a wise, but wicked instrument, whom he called his ambassador, who laboured, by the policy of his high-reaching brain, and the secret practices of his undermining gold, so far for his master’s ends, that now, in an instant, the still-changing face of court-respect began to frown upon me: my death was decreed, and until the time were appointed for it, myself made a close prisoner in my accustomed gaol. But the King, chiefly moved with the hope of my crown, and drawn by a self-conceit of liking to my sorrow, which, perhaps, had a sympathy with his melancholy, wouldst needs continue the suit of his affection to me, though he durst not interpose his over-ruled authority for my liberty. Thus, for a time, did I live, accompanied by some few whom the king might trust with his intents, he, in show, courting his first love Lemnia, and making that a pretence to come private to her father’s house near adjoining to court. But indeed, as at that time he could have no reason to dissemble with me, this kindness came another way; which Lemnia suspecting, and being as far gone in affection to this double-dealing king, as he was in the profession of a little-regarded love to me, her watchful eye soon found the advantage of a happy opportunity to hear himself speak his own deceit, with such a heart-burning vehemency that Lemnia (who had placed herself, unknown to either of us, behind the {650} hangings) scarce could suppress her entry to play a part in our comedy of affection. But to his demands truth answered for me plainly that death, in whose expectation I lived, would be far more pleasing than the marriage he thought so reasonable; adding withal to my speech much of Lemnia’s praise, which she deserved, to instruct his eyes that indeed were blind in his choice.

“But when he parted, vowing to be severe in my punishment, unless I resolved better at his next coming, behold Lemnia, with tears in her eyes, fell at my feet, and when she saw amazement in my looks, with a kind bashfulness, taking my hand, and rising with that help: ‘Virtuous lady,’ said she, ‘if ever you have been acquainted with the tyranny of all-commanding affection, to that judge I appeal, who (though courtesy and good manners oppose him) will find my fault excusable. This man, who in your presence hath been the trumpet of his own inconstancy, first with the vehement protestation of his sincere affection, won me in gratefulness to meet him, in recompense of his unknown dissimulation, if such then it were; and now with the good liking of the state, were the solemnities appointed for our marriage, when your arrival crossed those hopes, and drew his thoughts to their natural temper of unstayedness. But since I have found, by this fortunate unmannerliness, your answers so resolutely opposed to his demands, henceforth I vow to work your freedom, or bring myself to perish with you.’ Her fault found an easy pardon at the tribunal she appealed to—I thanked her, as there was good cause, for her desire of my good; only I wished, if my freedom could not be procured without danger to her, she should not heap miseries upon me by joining herself a companion in my disasters. She comforts me with the hope of a better event, and to bring her intention to a wished success, she wins my unwillingness to show some favour to the king: which next day I did, having placed Lemnia where she had placed herself the day before, to be a witness to our conference; for otherwise, perhaps, her love this second time might have egged her suspicion, already prone that way, to the distrust of a practice betwixt us. And happy was this forced dissimulation; for the King, not long before his coming to me, had received advertisement that the usurper of Corinth had levied an army, and set forth many ships to invade Laconia, making the delay of my promised execution the pretence of this war; which being also known, they (who, together with this foreign enemy, feared the rebellion of the Helots, who always lay in wait for an opportunity of such advantage) now, more than ever, began to solicit the King to satisfy so potent an enemy in so just a demand. The King, well weighing the imminent dangers that were to be prevented by my death, and seeing the little {651} comfort he did enjoy by the prolonging of my life (likely every day to increase my obstinacy, being none of those lovers that would die for his disdaining mistress) was ready to deliver me over as a sacrifice for the state and country, when, behold! his sails were filled with self-opinion of my favour. Borne up, therefore, with the wings of hope, he returns to court, where love (or some indulgent fate) inspired this project into his head; he calls the nobility, and after a long narration of the mischiefs that hung over Laconia, he desires their advice for prevention. They, glad that the only opposer, as they thought, of their designs, would have recourse to their directions, in that cause wherein they were jealous of his partaking after a flattering insinuation (the common exordium to men of his place) they concluded that it was fit Helen should die. ‘I doubt it not,’ said he (nor was it to that end I sought your counsel) ‘that the necessity of the times, the welfare of our person, and the preservation of our estate required her death; but it much perplexed me, that our fame should bleed with her, or that the world should say the threats of the King of Corinth had enforced us to behead her whom lately we were to take to wife. ’Twas this, my lords, that caused my misinterpreted resolution to hang in suspense; for this I have turned my invention into all forms, and now, behold, I have found an even way to lead me between the perils of a threatened war, and the ill-bought quiet of an ignominious peace. My will is she be brought to court (for Pertinax’s house I think not convenient for this project) and placed here, with such about her as I know most trusty in such a secret; then, that her keepers, at farthest within two days, poison her; which done, we will give it out she died of a disease; and to confirm this opinion in the vulgar, we will honour her death with such funeral pomp as the state of her life required. Thus shall our cause of dissention with Corinth be taken away, and we freed from that imputation the world might justly lay upon us.’ The nobility, with silent admiration, began to applaud what he had determined, chiefly Pertinax, who, making the common cause his pretence, laboured by all means to confirm a resolution so necessary for his daughter Lemnia’s happiness.

“The King having dismissed the council, acquaints me with these his proceedings, setting forth, with no mean pride, the pregnancy of his own wit, who had found a way to over-reach such grey-bearded dotards: ‘For,’ said he, ‘you shall that night when you are thought to be poisoned be conveyed hence (by two of chiefest trust about me) unto my castle of Nicos; then will I cause a statue, formed to your proportion, to be coffined up, on which, forsooth, my grave council shall solemnly wait, and perform the obsequies in that ceremony requisite; meantime you shall live, {652} and live beloved of him who hath undergone this dangerous enterprise, and will do many more to endear his affection to you. And when the limbs of this disjointed state be set again, you shall be restored to be yourself, and to enjoy this crown of Laconia so much envied you: till when, I lock these projects in the closet of your secrecy.’

“The good King was scarce gone from me when I made Lemnia of counsel with me, who, seeing the fitness of the time, seeing my journey to Nicos was to be performed in the night, and the easy execution of so dangerless an enterprise, my guard being only two of the King’s servants, she gives in charge to a sufficient number of such whom she knew faithful to her, to meet them mid way, and after they had well beaten my convoy, to discharge them of the suspicion of their consenting to the fact, to carry me to the next seaport, where there staid a ship bound for Delphos, to which I needs would bend my course. This being resolved upon, the lady (equally troubled with the care of my safety and the loss of my presence) wept many tears, which I confess, had been ingratitude in me not to second; so as a while sorrow seemed to have flown thither to bathe herself in our eyes: but love, at length, in both of one another’s good, had well near claimed this passion, when the guard appointed by the King, was come and ready to carry me to court. But why should I, great sir, any longer stay you in a story, whose tediousness I am well assured hath tired you? Know therefore, that this means of my safety was as fortunately executed as happily contrived: the King not once daring to send to seek me, lest he should by that discover his own craft used in this dangerous deluding of the Laconian noblemen.

“But I was scarce a month absent, when he, whose eyes held the reins of his constancy, the object being removed, married (as it was before determined) the beauteous Lemnia, who, now in possession of his love, sticked not to make known to him this whole matter, which otherwise in her behalf I was bound to keep secret. Thus, Sir, if my desire to obey your commands hath made the story of my misfortunes tedious, you may excuse me, since all is done for your satisfaction.”

“Fair Queen,” replied Basilius, “the sweetly-delivered strangeness of the story would still ravish the hearers with a desire of a further cause of attentiveness, did not a greater desire in us, who know your virtues, hasten to hear the end of your much pitied distress.” And so, calling Amphialus to him, having agreed on the day of marriage between the Queen and him, they all arose; for now their appetites (growing jealous of the satisfaction their minds received by the former discourse) began to solicit them in the behalf of their stomachs.

After dinner, when most of the company began to imp the wings of time with the feathers of several recreations, Amphialus and Helen privately went together into an arbour in the garden, where, first with tears, the common apology of overjoyed affection, they speak their minds in silence, their panting hearts, as they embraced, with mutual desire, beating their envious garments that gave them not leave to meet. At length Helen, gracefully shaking her head as if she would shake away the drops that, like the morning-dew on full ripe cherries, hung on her rosy cheeks: “O Amphialus!” said she, and then kissed him, as loth to leave so perfect a sentence without a comma; “I will not say you were unkind, but——,” and there with his lips (loth, loth, belike, to accuse him) she closed up her speech. “My sole happiness!” replied Amphialus, softly wringing her hand, “though the foulness of my fault be no fit subject for her to speak of who breathes nothing but goodness, yet I want not an accuser: my soul sets forth my ingratitude; nor can I yet conceive how mercy can be so far removed from justice, as to find a pardon from my offence: But you have given it, and, if it be any requital, it shall be my after-life’s study to love and honour your virtues, as it was hitherto to offend you.” “It is fit therefore,” said Helen, with the counterfeit settledness of majesty, “we impose a penance upon you for your oversight, and this it shall be, that henceforth you neither speak nor think of that you account your fault: and to help you in obeying my commands, I must entreat you to keep your mind and tongue, for a time, busied in telling me what befell you in your travels since our being at Corinth; and do it not so niggardly, as if you meant to conceal what fame hath so largely blown abroad: yet, if you were exposed at any time to much danger, dwell not there too long, lest I forget I have you here.”

“Most dear lady,” said Amphialus, “to conform my speech to your last request would make me disobedient to your first command. Shall I begin with my departure from you? alas! at what time should I more employ my memory and speech in discovery of my faulty self than now? But I see your eyes begin to take anger into them; I will no longer insist on mine own accusation.

“Know therefore, most constant lady, that, accompanied only with Fidutio my page, when I had passed the limits of your dominion, at that time of day when the high-mounted sun makes least shadows, wearied with travel, and desirous of some shelter from the sun’s violent rays, I laid myself under the protection of an olive tree, thinking to set my mutinous thoughts at peace, but it would not be: these outward signs could not appease the fury of an inward enemy. Thus I lay, dearly purchasing the little {654} ease of my body with the affliction of mind, until mine ears, like faithful servants, desirous to end this dissention between their master and himself, caused all the powers of my mind to join in attentiveness; and mine eyes, loth to be outgone in such good offices, did look that way from whence the noise came; where I might discern six men armed, on horseback, carry a fair lady with them, whose tears and out-cries well showed her indisposition to that journey. This sight moved compassion in me, and pity brought a desire to help her distress, but my horse (divining, belike, my intent, and unwilling to leave his food) could by no means be taken; so that, mad with anger, I began to repeat over all the misfortunes that ever had befallen me, to let this know it wanted no fellows, when there came posting that way, one whom by his haste I guessed to have been of the company gone before. Of whom I entreated to know what fault could be so heinous that might take away the name of injury from so unmanly a violence as they offered to so beauteous a lady: But he, with a scornful silence, smiled, and would be gone; and so, perhaps, he might, had not the narrowness of the way, and his courteous horse that would not tread upon me, compelled him to stay. Whereat his anger burst forth into these threats: ‘Villain!’ said he, ‘thy want of armour shall not excuse thee from a death wilfully drawn upon thee; and though there be no glory, there will be satisfaction in thy overthrow.’ Then, drawing his horse a little back, he alighted, and without further complement, ran towards me: But his fury brought him too hastily to his death, for thinking, belike, his threatening mouth was able to defend itself, he forgot to put by my sword that by good fortune lay in his way, and so justly his death entered at his mouth, whose life I think was in his tongue. At his fall Fidutio came in, who helping to fit on the armour, of which we had disfurnished this unserviceable knight, I mounted on his horse, that seemed to have regarded my haste more than mine own, and riding on the spur, I overtook my company, for so they would needs make themselves, saluting me by the name of my friend Satibarsis. But the better observance soon put them out of that opinion. So that guessing (indeed rightly) that I had killed Satibarsis, and by that means got his armour, without desire to be further than by their own conjecture satisfied, they joined all hands in his revenge. But the lady’s cause was just, whose rescue I came to, and the all-seeing providence that would not see justice over-laid, fought for me. And now five of them had either received their well deserved payment of death, or were kept by their wounds from further opposition, when the sixth, who all this while had held the lady, and looked on, seeing my hand (whose weakness had left such {655} precedents of the effects of a good cause) now set against him alone, took his prisoner by the hair, and with his sword gave her a deep wound in the neck. That inhuman act would have given desire to the most barbarous, and power of revenge to the most cowardly: but he, as if he meant to save me a labour, making haste that their warm blood should meet, with the same sword runs himself through, dying as just a judge as he was a traitorous offender. Amazement would have fixed mine eyes upon him, but the lady’s wound brought them to her succour. Experience on myself, made me skilful, and my fair patient officious, so that tying up the wound, for some time I staunched the blood; she, in the meantime, with her watery eyes bent toward heaven, heartily praying for my good fortune, and many times thanking her destiny, that, with her death, had ended the miseries of her ever-dying life. When I had done comforting her, as I thought, with my opinion of her safety, I entreated to know her name, and the cause of this injury done to her. ‘No, no,’ replied she, ‘courteous stranger, the comfort of my near-coming death (in spite of the torment the memory of my most wretched life puts me to) brings this cheerfulness I now present in my looks: and though the least delay of my end is accompanied with a world of sorrows, yet I am glad, for satisfaction of your demand, my breath is a while preserved.

“‘My name is Leaucade, the only daughter to Count Brunio, a man of large possessions in this country, whom, you may well think, because in expectation of his lands, many sued for, and those not of the meanest esteem: but my carelessness of love had taught me such a carriage, that further than of the favour of my courtesy (of which they did all indifferently partake) none could boast. And this, till about a year since, was my daily practice, disdaining (as most that have not known it do) so ridiculous a passion as I then esteemed love. At which time this Fluento, whose happy hand hath done us both right, came to my father’s court. A neighbour prince, with whom (for encroaching upon the bounds of his territory) my father hath had much dissention. But a reconcilement being made between them, and both alike thinking the best means to persevere in amity were to have us two joined in marriage; without my knowledge (as if it were fit I should be a stranger to their proceeding) determine of the match. But, alas! Sir, at this time I was so far from being at their dispose, that I was not at mine own: for love (I think keeping mischief until it were ripe for me) had presented a gentleman to mine eyes, by birth noble, whose ancestors, all to his father, being men of known virtue in the country, were admitted to the prime offices of the kingdom. But he taking a pride to be unthrifty, and little esteeming these public {656} employments, lavished exceedingly both his fame and patrimony; yet it seemed he only made away his estate to purchase goodness for his child: such a son he was father to, so rare, so excellent. His name was Persidas;’ and at that word the tears gushed forth in such abundance that it seemed her blood had changed his course and colour to run forth at the sluices of her eyes: ‘Alas! Sir, what shall I say of him? or who, from Leaucade, will believe the desert of Persidas? But, alas! if they deserve no credit that love him, in this country you must hear nothing of him; the knowledge of his person, and the love of his virtues, being things inseparable. In him begun this tragedy, in me it ends: for when my father and Fluento had drawn their agreement to a head, then, and not before, he thought it time, he said, to let me know my happiness.’ And thus, finding me alone, he breaks the matter to me: ‘Dear child, I have, ever since the death of your virtuous mother (though much importuned by many) reserved you to these years unmarried, because your content should be of counsel with me in your choice: and happy was this delay for the honour of our house; for, behold! Fluento makes his fortunes serviceable to your will: Prince Fluento, daughter, whose powerful greatness the neighbour potentates stand in awe of: him I have won for you, and so forward we be that this day-fortnight he is to take you to wife.’ ‘Father,’ said I, ‘that your wisdom hath deferred my marriage hitherto to give me the comfort of election, my obedience, my only requital, shall be the same it ever was to you: and yet I wonder, that having attained to these years, when my judgment in my choice may be received, you will exclude me from the end for which I was so long reserved; just like a physician that telleth his patient he hath brought a potion to cure him, yet says he must by no means take it. I must be married to Prince Fluento, and yet your meaning is, I should have liberty to choose; as if this enforcement destroyed not my freedom of election. That he is a man, beyond all respects, as you praise him, fit for your estate, I may well grant you, but that he is unfit for your daughter, I am privileged to say.’ At this, his severe look, before he spoke, began to lay before me my obedience: and when he had walked two or three turns in the room, ‘Daughter, daughter,’ said he, ‘I never thought you were so wilful! Where, I pray you, is there a match fit for your birth, if not Fluento? Beware, beware, you do not give your posterity just cause to curse you, that denied them so great, so good a father.’ I answered that I thought it were too tender a respect of children, whom perhaps I might not have, or should not enjoy, to choose for them, and not a husband for myself, and too senseless a feeling of the honour of my house, to wrong myself to do my birth right. Then kneeling on my knees, {657} ‘Sir,’ said I, ‘solicit me no more, I have not power to grant.’ He hastily, when it was scarce delivered, snatched this word: ‘And why not power to grant?’ said he. ‘Because Persidas is the anchor-hold of my life and love.’ ‘Persidas!’ cried out my father, ‘Now all misfortune fall thick upon me, shall my means help to make up a bankrupt in his estate? Accursed be my fate that gave me life to hear it. Persidas! Why, sure it cannot be.’ ‘Sir,’ said I, ‘if my love were not far past, my desperate presumption would not bring a truth, much less an untruth, to move your anger. And if those after hopes have not clean compelled you to forget you are my father, have pity on me? If so, I crave the trial of the law.’ This last request (after conference with Fluento) finding my obstinacy, he condescended to. But because, I perceive, Sir, you are a stranger here, and that the knowledge of this law doth much concern the story of my present mishap, I will make it known to you.

“This kingdom of Argos, wherein you are, was governed not long since by Phenissa, a woman worthy to have come to that place by election if nature had not bestowed it upon her by descent from her famous ancestors. This queen (that you may see we want not the precedent of greatness to excuse affection) in her father’s life-time, though by him she was promised to Deoxippus, the tyrant of Syracusa, was enamoured of one Eumenes, governor (for the Lacedaemonians) of the island and city of Delphos. And when it well might be thought the king’s death, and her succession, had taken away the restraint of her will, yet she, growing less willing when she was most powerful, like a horse that finding the reins hang loose upon him begins to stay his fury; so she, though by this change she had not received any slackness into her affection, began to tender the cause of her country that lay open to the invasion of her proud enemy Deoxippus, if so she would have made him. Preferring therefore now this common respect, before her private satisfaction, as she had done her obedience in her father’s life-time before her love, she buries herself in the grave of Deoxippus’s loathsome bed.

“When the unexpected news of Phenissa’s marriage came to the ears of her faithful lover Eumenes, his passion (as Agamemnon’s at the death of Iphigenia) can best be expressed in silence, all the wild furies that distracted grief could gather, being summoned to the siege of his soon-overthrown heart: hastily thereupon to the temple his mad passion bears him, where, casting himself at the feet of Apollo, ‘Unjust god!’ said he, ‘have I for this thy ungratefulness given up the offerings of my daily prayers? But if I wrong thy name, show thy justice in revenging my death.’ Whereat, transported with violence of sorrow, running his head {658} against the altar, his bloody brains flew forth of their battered lodging. Soon after, the contagion of a most pestilent air brought such a plague among the Argians, that many daily felt the fury of the gods revenging indignation: amongst whom, the King and Queen (reserved, belike, the more to be punished in their subjects’ calamity) after the desolation of their well-peopled country, both in one day, by the same infection, ended their lives and government; wherewith this mortality ceased, as hitting now at length the mark it aimed at.

“The few remnant of the nobility sent to Delphos to know what fault of theirs had brought these miseries upon their country? Where, being informed of what was past, Apollo advised them to provide, that no such mischief should after happen. They, well weighing whence it arose, being fully satisfied by the oracle, enact this law: that neither private nor public respect should detain a virgin from revealing her love; and if her friends, or parents, think another than she hath chosen more fit for her, the combat between the two shall determine the god’s pleasure. How unwilling I was to hazard my Persidas in this trial, love, that bleeds in the thought of a danger, can best assure you: but his earnestness that it might be so, and the hard constraint that it could not be otherwise, won me to it.

“The day therefore being appointed, Fluento (upon whom fame the flatterer of greatness had pinned the opinion of valour) entered the lists, mounted on a bay courser, whose armour all over represented a green plain, through which ran little rivulets of blood that sprang from the wounds of many centaurs dispersed over all the field. In his shield he bore the counterfeit of Hercules and Deianira, with these words, ‘Endeared by Conquest.’ From him my Persidas drew the eyes and hearts of all the company; his horse was a fiery sorrel; his armour like the azure sky, curiously spotted with many stars (whose glimpse the well set diamonds, by reflection of the sun, represented) showed as if night had flown thither to end, in that assembly, some controversy between her and her brother. In his shield he caused Andromeda and Perseus to be engraven, with these words, ‘Never too dearly bought.’ ‘But I must hasten to the event,’ said she; ‘for long I find you may not enjoy your historian: Know, therefore, that my Persidas, contenting himself only with the victory, when he might have taken (woe is me that he was so merciful!) Fluento’s life, was accepted by my father for his son-in-law; good fortune, as I then thought, changing my husband, and not my day of marriage. In the meantime Fluento, repining at this disgrace, and desirous, even now upon the basest terms to be revenged, plotted a treachery unheard-of against him. This morning, having before heard we {659} were to hunt in this forest, Fluento (with that company your valour hath brought to their deserved ends) lay in wait for us; and when myself and my Persidas (Count Brunio my father, and the rest, having followed the chase) were left alone, behold these bloody villains, coming unawares upon him, with many wounds, sent his soul to that place whither mine (hoping to find a more lasting union in that life than our loves hath done in this) doth also hasten.’ And with this word, her dull languishing eyes began to roll as if they strove to reserve motion in spite of death: yet, raising herself a little, her love found breath to say this, ‘Let me be buried by my Persidas!’ and so grasping my hand, as it were, to put me in mind of her last words, alas! she dies.

“But many tears I could not have bestowed as obsequies upon her, when some of her father’s train, who by chance crossing that way where Persidas lay dead, guided by Fidutio (who, with their helps, had now taken my horse) came to this place; to whom when I had related all what I learned from Leaucade of Persidas’s death, together with her last will, we all joined hands in carrying her to the next village; whither also certain of their fellows (whom they had left behind to that end) conveyed the body of Persidas; from whence, soon after, Count Brunio (having begged of grief a little respite of life to fulfil his daughter’s testament) brought them both with all funeral pomp to his chief city Coniga, where he caused a stately tomb to be built for them, on which this epitaph was engraven,

“Leaving the woeful kingdom of Argos, no better accompanied than with Fidutio, yet better guarded by Satibarsis’s armour, my sorrow, I think, that bore infection with it, made all places where I came, fit stages for tragedies: for, descending into a green valley, where, of each side the rocky mountains threatened the humble earth with the frowns of their downcast brows, I might see a young man leaning with both hands on his sword, breathing as over-toiled with labour, and round about him four or five cast prostrate at his feet, who were dead, or thought their counterfeiting so to be, would prove their best defence against this young man’s fury. But the clashing of my armour had no sooner made known my approach, than he came running towards me, uttering words whereby I might gather his quarrel to me brought the excuse of mistake with it. Not to draw on therefore his misconceived opinion, that his breathless companions did witness would be {660} dangerous for me; ‘Sir,’ replied I, ‘I am so far from maintaining their cause, whose revenge upon a lone man, being so many, mine own eyes do persuade me was injurious, that had I come at the beginning of your fight (though this event shows I should but have robbed you of part of the honour of this action) I would have joined myself to you.’

“‘Alas! Sir,’ said he, ‘to oppose yourself against me (though it were the more unjust) would be the more secure way, for what you see is but a fore-runner of a certain destruction soon at hand. Leave me therefore, courteous sir, and seek for safety: death to me is so grateful that I envy you should be a partner in so great a gain. But it were a fault unpardonable, to have abandoned the most accomplished man that ever mine eyes before that time, beheld.’ My resolution therefore, though hard against his will, must have prevailed with him: so that entreating to know the cause of his former fight, and further doubt, I found his courtesy as forward in the relation of his own danger as it was obstinate in the care of my safety.

“‘Sir,’ said he, ‘seeing my story will be but a heap of misfortunes, I shall do well to lay the foundation myself, than whom the sun looks not upon a more miserable creature: My name is Cariclio, nephew, by his brother Castor, to the King of Natolia, brought up in my youth in the good opinion of my uncle, and the great expectation of many; fortune, then belike, proroguing my miseries until a more serious age should make me more sensible of them: which time had no sooner brought on, but that my ill fate, to train me up for the burden of the mischief that was prepared for me, began by little and little to make me acquainted with the course I was to run; first taking away my father, whose virtuous age deserved (if that may be thought a recompense for desert) a longer time in this life: When he was dead, and that the slippery steps of my rash youth wanted the stay of his fatherly advice, presently (not knowing what one man’s hands I should put the reins of my then unbridled youth into, and yet well seeing I might not trust myself with mine own government) I chose many friends; and being by nature given to hate pride, to eschew a vice so loathsome (thinking it might not be done otherwise) I began to affect popularity. But I had scarce lived thus a twelve-month, when my cousin the King’s son, a young man, who (besides the hope of succession, for which the courtiers did adore him) had nothing more than ordinary in him, grew suspicious of my practices, as he termed them: to which humour (besides the mistrust of his own little desert) his sycophants, the bellows of this fire, did daily add further causes to increase his jealousy. But seeing the discovery of his suspicion would little please the king, {661} who ever since the death of my father had doubled his care upon me; he was compelled to dissemble a good liking towards me. In meantime a truce, made for some few years with the Duke of Amasia, being expired, the war grew hot on both sides. At length, after the trial of many changes in fortune, necessity meditating peace between them, myself being given as a hostage for performance of certain conditions of my uncle’s part, a perpetual league was concluded on: ’Twas now, and not before, mischief began to unmask herself, and take a pride to grow terrible. There was at court, during my abode there, attending upon the Duchess, a lady, by name Alcida, whose many excellencies won as many hearts as she had beholders, nature making her beauty and shape but the most fair cabinet of a far fairer mind. To her, mine eyes at first sight gave up my heart, with so unfortunate an encounter in affection, that this surrender was but a mutual exchange, she having, in a merciful gratefulness, fixed her love on mine. But her parentage, though not base, was so mean in respect of my birth, that thence whole armies of afflictions did invade my mind, equally distracted between my desire to enjoy this my best of happiness and fear of my uncle’s displeasure, on whom this match (for his care and love of me) I was sure would draw on an untimely death. But before I could determine a doubt of so great consequence, the conditions of the league being faithfully performed, I was safely, at a day prefixed, sent back to Natolia, desirous, even in my soul desirous, I am sure, rather by their breach of covenant to have hazarded my life, than thus cruelly to be taken away from her presence, who, far beyond my life, was most dear to me. Soon after my return, the King, as if the gods had stayed him to see the quiet of his state, now that was brought to pass, worn with age, and much broken with travel and care in his last wars, left his kingdom to his degenerate son and successor, who had no sooner seized upon the government, but, meaning to begin his reign with an admirable act of policy, now his power was unrestrained, limits me to the absence from my country, declaring my blood for ever incapable of succession: and not content with this, to such a height his undeserved malice to me was raised, that he dealt with some bad ministers of his wickedness, secretly to make me away. To prevent therefore what was plotted against me, disguising myself, I hastily fled away, and making use of necessity, to further my affection, I put myself into the service of a nobleman here in the court of Amasia, easily remaining undiscovered, among them who would sooner fall out with their eyes than believe that the greatness wherein they lately had seen me, could admit so great a change: by mean whereof, I enjoyed the presence of my Alcida, whose constancy, neither time, nor absence (the mothers of {662} affection) nor what is more, this my change in fortune, could alter.

“‘Thus, while I lived in this happiness of servitude, Mermidon (brother to the Duke) having commanded, with fortunate success, against the Dacians, returned to court, where seeing this lady, he became enamoured of her, to no other end than to satisfy his lust: and thinking, at first (because he was in good esteem with himself) she would have strained her modesty to sue for the acceptance of a present so grateful to him, a while he was silent; but when he perceived the vanity of his fruitless expectation, and found that this delay increased the fury of his passion, dispensing with the majesty he had taken on, he began to make known his love to her (for such a title did he give to so base a desire) forgetting not withal to tell her that to excuse her modesty he had first spoken her wishes. But the virtuous Alcida, loathing as much the thought of such a sin, as she loved the memory of me, together with a resolute denial, let him know how base his mind was that made so injurious a request. Whereat Mermidon, because this answer came unexpected, was so much the more amazed. But bringing arguments from his late practice in the war, he began to think his honour would be the greater, if, after long resistance, he did surprise a well-defended fort: and therefore daily, both by rich gifts, the base enamel of affection, and many promises (which, to win the more upon her, were sent by one of her own sex, who, if example might move her, could tell of such a precedent in herself) did he seek to undermine her resolution. Meantime, my constant Alcida, seeing the intemperance of Mermidon’s lust to bring threats of force with it, not daring to speak with me, because our conference began to be suspected, sent me a letter to hasten her carrying away, appointing this the fatal place of our meeting.

“‘I much rejoiced to be so near my happiness, the rather that since our last conference, I received intelligence that my young cousin of Natolia being made away by one whom he had raised to an undeserved height in his favour, the country was in great distress by the factious ambition of the nobility, and that the best affected to the state, much desired my presence. But these means, how well soever, as I thought, conducing to my happiness, by the unmercifulness of my hard destiny were prevented, as one of those, whom it was my fortune to kill, at his death revealed: for Mermidon having intercepted the messenger, mad with rage to find his hopes crossed by so mean a man as he took me to be, having again sealed up the letter, he caused it to be delivered, and determining to be revenged, sent these men to apprehend me, himself intending to follow presently, leading with him my dearest Alcida, whom, in my presence (to add a glory to the execrableness of the offence) {663} he means to ravish. And now, Sir, you have heard,’ said he, ‘of my birth and fortune, till this time (when, I am well assured, my end is near at hand) kept secret.’

“He scarce had closed up this lamentable story with a hearty sigh, the compendious abridgment of his sufferings, when we might discern Mermidon, with twenty more (so distrustful is treachery though there be no cause to fear) make towards us: but that sight, together with the thought of Alcida’s distress, was a signal sufficient for Cariclio to begin his unequal encounter, so as, like a she-tiger, who, at her return to her cave, finds her little ones to be stolen, with a wild fury, breathing nothing but destruction, he runs amongst them, making way for my willingness to second his attempt. Awhile, the justice of the cause, and Cariclio’s valour (to which the glory is only due) with the death of many, did hold the victory in an equal balance: At length, the multitude of our assailants made injury the stronger, bringing to a death much to be pitied, so incomparable a man at arms as was Cariclio; yet, not before he had, in the sight of Alcida, sent Mermidon to be his harbinger at Charon’s ferry. And when by his death the only stay and support of the fight was removed, if sometimes my desire of revenge made good the ground Cariclio had bequeathed me; alas! how could I long resist without him? Know therefore, excellent lady, that, here I was made prisoner, and, together with Alcida, carried back to court; though I call Cariclio’s ghost to witness, I sought all means to join myself, even in death, a companion to his virtues. The solemnity intended for our execution, and the preparation of new forms of torment for us that had been parties in the murder of the Duke’s brother, won some lingering days of life to the inward torture of our expectation: In meantime the everlasting providence, that by changing the intentions and dooms of men, will let them know there is a power beyond theirs, sent an unexpected mean to help our distress.

“Plangus, the famous Prince of Iberia, at this time making haste with a few, such as virtue had joined partners in his cause, and taking into his army such of Euarchus’s soldiers, as in a tempest at sea were driven to Byzantium, to the succour of Erona (whose story you cannot be ignorant of) and being to pass through Amasia, sent to the Duke to demand a thorough-fare for his soldiers. But he, who of long time had observed an inviolable league with the Armenians, knowing the pretence of this war, and despising the weakness of those few Plangus led with him, not only denied his request, but, gathering a great power of soldiers (whom since his last wars he had kept in garrison in his frontier towns) meant, with the overthrow of her ungrateful nephew, to gratify Artaxia, and her ill-chosen husband Plexirtus. But the excellent Plangus (than {664} whom this age shows not, for conduct in war, a better general) with the well-ordering those few resolute troops, and skilful industry in choice of advantages, in two set battles put him to the worst; after which, the Duke not able to reinforce his weakened power, put himself, with the relics of his late overthrow, into his chief city, wherein we were prisoners; to which Plangus, finding no other resistance, with wonderful celerity followed him: and though the town by nature and art, for site and fortification were thought impregnable, yet being defended but by such, who, by their own loss, held a too superstitious opinion of the enemies, it was soon forced by Plangus’s victorious troops, who believed the success of nothing impossible to which their ever-fortunate captain would lead them. With the sack of this city (wherein he took the Duke, with his son, prisoners) Plangus having enriched his soldiers with the booty, and his own fame by the speediness of the conquest, not able to assure the country to his devotion, otherwise than by dismembering his army, and delaying his chief ends, moved with a necessary clemency, having first received six months’ pay for his soldiers, and the Duke’s son a hostage, to bar his desire of revenge (making Alcida and myself, to secure our freedoms, companions in his travel) he leaves the Amasians to their former government.

“Many days’ journey we had not been in our way to Armenia, when the good Alcida, by the inward working of her thoughts, began to find the burden of her grief too heavy for her, which when the dullness of her ever-watery eyes, and the paleness of her cheeks had betrayed to us, we carried her to a monastery near adjoining, dedicated to Diana, and much famed for the strictness of virgins’ orders that be attendants on the goddess her ceremonies, where having recommended her to the governess of the house, alas! I left her, bound, even by the greatest tie of gratefulness, to follow him whom I owe my life to.

“These former accidents, most dear lady, together with the excellent Plangus’s company, in whom sorrow was drawn to the life, made me reflect upon my ungrateful self, and consider how cruel I had been to you, whose desert passed my best endeavours of requital; so that (far engaged to the memory of your virtues) thenceforth the thought of my most dear Helen, won my heart to a most passionate affection.”

The Queen at this interrupted his speech, with this answer: “My Amphialus, they who follow examples in their actions are to match rightly what they are to do, and what they see done. Leaucade, Alcida, and Erona might justly claim the reward of love, but Helen (whose desert was far short) could expect but disdain.” “Disdain!” said Amphialus, “you renew a punishment your mercy did once forgive.” And here, with tears in his eyes, {665} he would have kneeled to beg a further pardon; but Helen, kissing away the burden his eyes went with, made as much haste to prevent his suit with the like of her own; so that a friendly composition being made (as it well might be where both were parties, and both judges in one cause) the Queen got the continuance of the story (which Amphialus would put off to another time) to boot; and then, willing to discharge himself of the debt he owed for so good a bargain, he thus began.

“Madam, though my memory be a continued record of much sorrow, yet, among the many stories grief hath engraven in me, there is none, compared with the disaster of Plangus and Erona, that deserves compassion: Know therefore, my only happiness, that Plangus having received advertisement how the nobleman, unto whose faithful custody Erona (upon the accord between him and Artaxia) was delivered, being hardly besieged by Plexirtus, and brought to an extremity by famine, had yielded to a composition that if within five days he was not succoured, he must deliver the castle, Plangus therefore over-running the fame of his coming with his presence, the fifth night was near Plexirtus’s camp, where (by one of the enemies whom his scouts had taken) he was informed that late that evening, the keys of the city and fort were given up to Plexirtus, but that he deferred his entry till morning, leaving the next gate to the camp open that all night his officers might prepare a magnificent triumph for him. As for Erona, he would determine nothing of her until he had received the honour due to his victory. At this news Plangus, causing the reporter to be safely kept, and giving to his wearied soldiers some time to refresh themselves after the toil endured in their last day’s travel, an hour before day (rightly imagining the air was then apt to disperse a dull sleepiness among Plexirtus’s careless soldiers) he calls his troops together, and setting before them the easiness of the victory, the riches of the camp, and the necessity of the time, he did encourage them with the repetition of their former conquest in Amasia, the justness of their cause, and the fame of their enterprise; and then presently disposing of them for his most advantage, he sets upon his enemy, who dreamed of nothing but security. But what should I fright you, most dear lady, with the particulars of this fight; it will suffice you to know that Plangus (doing things in his own person past the power of expression) made a bloody slaughter among them. Some few there were that escaped—among whom Plexirtus (fortune being always indulgent to mischief) found in the speed of his horse a dishonourable safeguard for his wretched life. This tumult being soon perceived by the citizens (whom sorrow made watchful, and the well-known treacheries of Plexirtus, suspicious) they as soon imagined this was a practice of {666} his, contrary to his faith given, to sack the town. This once conceived, it seemed by the hideous cries and confused lamentations, that, as sorrow had put on the vizard of night to make grief ugly, so black night had borrowed the mouth of sorrow to implore compassion. The people leaving their walls and houses, ran to their temples and altars, offering up, as they thought, their last devotions to their gods. Nor did this mistake bring forth the effect of mistrust only in the city; the camp had likewise this fear added to their present misfortune; for Plexirtus’s soldiers (like satyrs, frightened with the sound of the horn themselves blow) thinking the vanguard of the enemy had entered the town, and caused this confusion, durst not venture to make themselves masters of it; but between both, unable to determine of a mean of safety, stood fixed in a stupid irresolution.

“Meantime Aurora, weary of aged Titan’s bed, began to warn Phoebe of her brother’s approach, when Erona who had set down in her settled judgment, a death worthy the greatness of her birth, now first giving ear to the cries of the citizens, and misdoubting the same false measure they expected, and not long after, hearing a man armed coming up the stairs to her lodging, she took a poisoned cup, long before for that end prepared, and making haste lest she should be made a present to the proud conqueror the wicked Plexirtus, she drank more than half, when her eyes met with the eyes of Plangus, who, unfortunate gentleman! desirous to be the messenger to Erona of Erona’s freedom, had made this haste. The sight of Plangus stayed her full draught a while; but, unable to satisfy herself how he might come thither, she began to imagine that it was the force of the poison which dimmed her eyes, and placed the character of Plangus (ever present to her mind) upon each object. With this thought she was ready to begin again, when Plangus, falling at her feet, let her know the event of so many dangers undergone for her: whereat Erona being much astonished, lifting him up from the ground, thus said: ‘Prince Plangus, you come in a fit time to receive a hearty welcome, and as hearty a farewell. What I mean by this leave-taking, alas! you will too soon know: Now suffer me, only at such a time when the end will assure you I did not flatter, speak a few words I would have you believe; yet I am sorry, for your sake, I have practised such a mean to work a belief in you: True it is, most excellent Plangus (nor let that truth accuse me of inconstancy) that since the death of Antiphilus, whose memory even at this time is dear to me, though at first the excess of sorrow had closed up my mind from the thought of a second choice; yet, enforced by your desert, and to reward mine own love in rewarding your desires, I was resolved to satisfy you, and make myself {667} happy; but my envious fate, finding the times fit to cause me to despair, hath made yourself the instrument to bar our hopes for ever.’ ‘Dear Erona,’ replied the Prince, ‘what may there now be that the most partial judgment can equal to the excess of content Plangus enjoys in the welfare of his free and loving Erona? for this I have paid the merciful heavens the tribute of my vows and tears: to this harbour, through the sea of grief (having embarked my careful love in the ship of my desire) I have always bent my course; and shall I now, when my wishes be at anchor in so secure a haven, fear fortune? No, no, most dear lady, you are the life and being of what I only esteem happy.’ ‘Alas! Plangus,’ said the sweet Erona, ‘the testimonies of your love have been so many that I fear (and only fear) they who have heard your undeserved affection, and are not present at this my dying protestation, will for ever record, together with my want of judgment, my injury to your virtues.’ ‘Your dying protestation!’ said Plangus, ‘affright not my soul with such heavy news. Long may you live; the Fates must be indulgent to your youth and beauty.’ ‘And perhaps,’ said she, ‘so they might, had not myself hastened Clotho to cut in two the half-spun thread of my life.’ And then she let him know how (to prevent the tortures and disgraces Artaxia’s indignation had prepared for her, seeing the city brought to that desperate state in which he found it, and thinking himself to have been an officer sent by Plexirtus to bring her before him) she had poisoned herself. Plangus at these last words, with a fixed look upon Erona, as if his eyes would for ever dwell there, indenting his hands, and suffering them to fall down, or rather not able to stay them, sinks to the ground, and was a while happy in this excess of sorrow that made him senseless of all sorrow. Erona would have forced herself to help him, but this sight (joined with the inward working of the poison) constrained her to bear him company in his happy forgetfulness of his misfortunes. But when, by the help of her women, her senses were restored, and that my endeavours wrought the same effect on Plangus, as if this had been but grief’s dumb show: ‘Alas! excellent Prince,’ said she, ‘what unexpected effects hath the speech of my death brought forth; and yet though I were silent, I believe the deadly signs in mine eyes, this trembling in my full-swollen veins, and the often set and rise of the blood in my cheeks, would express it. But, my Plangus, should you, whom the world is proud of, take it so to heart? Erona loves you; why so may a more deserving lady: Yet, Plangus, remember me, and it will be the best part of my soul’s life to live in your memory.’ Then, taking his hand, and placing it on her heart, that now proudly began to beat the loud alarm of death, ‘Feel here,’ said she, ‘the battery is begun, and this fort is abandoned of all the {668} powers of life, only my desire to be with you, desperately a while keeps the breach. But, O my Plangus!——’ and at that word death closed up in eternal silence her tongue, that yet still moved as loth to leave her speech imperfect.

“It was a desperate grief, and wild passion, that seized upon the heart of the poor Plangus. ‘Accursed earth!’ did he say, ‘how darest thou support the burden of these many mischiefs cast by the spiteful heavens into this sink of misery? ’Twas I, Erona, brought an untimely set to thy sun-shine of goodness; and do the heavens mean I should breathe that have so much wronged them? What do they do? Will they hear me speak that killed Erona? But they would have me live, to torture me with the memory of my guilt. No, no, I will prevent their project; that were a punishment fit for an ill-meant offence, not an unfortunate.’ And with these words, drawing his sword, and lifting up his bases, he would have run himself through the belly, but I stayed his hand from so unmanly, as I then alleged it, a violence, forcing (with the remembrance of our friendship, and my much prevailing tears) the sword, but not his resolution from him. Then did I begin to allege all that I thought in reason might remove him from this purpose; for well I might see in the unappalled stayedness of his countenance, the greatness of some determination. To all my objections, for a time, his eyes gave a more heedful attention than did his ears; but when I came to call his valour in question, whose unspotted memory hitherto, I said, this last inconsiderate act would accuse of a little firm constancy in bearing the changes of fortune; ‘Alas!’ said he, ‘and will you, my friend, be cruel to me? Is it certain, Amphialus, that it well becomes that courage you would have in your friend, to bear an equal temper both in the frowns and smiles of fortune? And is it not as certain that when the malice of heaven hath joined with fortune in producing a monstrous effect, there cannot be left in man so infinite a power of suffering which he dare oppose to such unlimited works? No, I will not, giant-like, bandy against the gods; such is their will; I must die.’ Then leading me softly over to Erona, as if he would persuade me the violence of passion had not been his guide to this resolution: ‘See Amphialus,’ said he, ‘this is she whom you would have me to live after; what can mine eyes, now she is gone, desire to look on! Erona, a woman, could die for Plangus, and would you have me wrong mankind with a greater fear of death, or my love with a less desire to die?’ This said (but with a countenance that promised no suddenness in the execution, especially to me who was master of his sword, his only offensive weapon) behold! with a downcast look, which sorrow excused, though deceit had then, I am sure, put it on for further mischief, {669} and such a pace as used slowness to the same end, he approached the window, where the remains of Erona’s intercepted draught, appointed by the destinies to be fatal to them both, stood in a gilt cup: This he hastily takes, and as hastily drinks off. I, all confused, pale and trembling, as if the poison had wrought its effect in me, made, alas! too slow speed to him. But Plangus (now first presenting an unfeigned cheerfulness in his looks, as if this draught had given him life) kneeling near Erona: ‘Divine soul,’ said he, ‘if confidence in thy Plangus’s constancy makes thee hover near this sacred mansion of thine to see the end of his sufferings, O stay awhile, and bear me with thee; thy presence, when I appear before Radamanth, will be a countenance to my cause.’ Then turning himself to me, ‘Amphialus, revenge, Amphialus, Erona’s death upon the wicked Plexirtus; his blood will be the best sacrifice to my ghost. Lead the army to Byzantium and restore the Amasian hostage.’ Then putting his trembling lips to the pale lips of Erona, he coldly kissed away his life.

“What my sorrow was, to be a looker on these tragedies, these tears, even at the remembrance of that time, may testify; yet leaving the bodies to be embalmed with the nobleman, who, in her life-time, had been faithful to Erona, dissembling the death of Plangus, lest it should work an innovation among the soldiers, with some choice troops of light horsemen, I followed Plexirtus, who, posting to court, had received advertisement from thence, how Arguto (the admirable engine by whom he wrought much mischief) being lately fallen from the faith vowed to his practices, had revealed to Artaxia the purpose his master had to dispatch her out of his way, since now he had a son by her to whom he might be guardian, esteeming it more content to be great alone than to share the royalties of her own kingdom with Artaxia. These news made his flight as dangerous as would be his stay; but when he understood (for the heavens had made this the rendezvous where his misfortunes should meet) that the Princes of Thessaly and Macedon, of whom his treacheries were to expect their just reward, did live, and should be happy in the addition of Arcadia to their greatness; that Leonatus had seized upon his seigniories in Trebizond for his treason to Pyrocles and Musidorus, of which not long before he had gloriously boasted; that there was no new form of dissimulation left, to which, in this extremity, he might have recourse: O then the ugliness of his guilty conscience, that until this time had made peace with his wickedness, presented before him the progress of his ill-spent days, drawn to life in the colours of despair: now his father, now his friends, Tydeus and Telenor were summoned by his soul to make party against him. In this fright he continued all that day, {670} which scarce was time sufficient for him to read over his misdeeds, and when the silent night, drawn in her ebon chariot, had spread her curtains to hide her brother’s face, Plexirtus, glad to see her flatter his mind in this likeness of darkness, resolved, by despair, that the gods wanted mercy for his faults, and well-assured men had less, he secretly went into a garden, to which a back-door from his chamber led him; where, loathing as much to die, as wishing he were dead, he spent some time in execrations on himself. At length, tying a cord (newly taken out of his bed) to the stump of an elder tree that stood with such convenience as if it would invite him to that exercise, he slipped into his death, easing the earth until morning of the burden of so detestable a wretch.

“But when the day appeared, and made known his death, the magistrates of the town, striving who could be best-sighted in the discovery of the murder, hoping to have the reward of their diligence from the Queen Artaxia, soon found out, as a man to be most suspected, the messenger come from court, whom Plexirtus had, till late in the night, kept in his chamber, to know of him the particulars of Arguto’s revolt. This fellow, because none more likely in the wild form of their popular justice, was to die a thousand manner of deaths; but he making just protestations of his innocency, being questioned what occasion he had so long to stay the last night with the king if not for that end, he plainly let them know what Arguto discovered, which he then reported to Plexirtus. The many-headed multitude called not the truth much in question of what they heard, but with the same violence as before, everyone, in this also thinking to gratify the queen, ran to as uncertain a form of execution on the dead as they did before to a judgment of the living; first they stripped the body naked, then dragged it through the streets; now they open his belly and suffer his guts to mark forth his progress, doing many more indignities to him who had deserved many more. I much rejoiced to hear Plexirtus had been so just to himself; yet I determined to join Erona’s revenge on Artaxia to Plexirtus’s judgment on himself; but her an untimely death had freed from my revenge, for taking to the heart Plexirtus’s treacheries, and her brother Tyridates’s unrevenged death, she calmly gave herself over to a life-oppressing grief, leaving her kingdom and young son to the care of Salindor, whom she appointed protector during the minority.

“Returning, therefore, somewhat grieved that both Plangus and Erona’s death without my help had been revenged, I conveyed the bodies to Lycia, where the sumptuousness of their tombs shows their estates, and their everlasting fame their ever-living virtues. {671} From hence I would have parted private, but remembering Plangus’s last will, I passed through Amasia, restoring his son to the Duke, and coming to Byzantium, I gave up my charge into the hands of Lisantus a Macedonian, leaving the soldiers full of hearty sorrow for the death of Plangus their general.

“Soon after, hearing of your death, and resolved to sacrifice my blood to your memory, to disengage myself of some part of my faultiness, leaving Fidutio in Thrace, lest by him I should be discovered, disguising myself in an armour, fitly, as I thought, presenting the massacre of my naked heart; passing the court of Elis and Argos, and, lastly, coming hither, I met (what should I more say?) with thee my Helen, reserved to be a blessing beyond what most I could desire.”

And so, with a sincere servency, kissing her hand, they both walked towards the palace, where, having ended supper, where Basilius and Euarchus, with the rest, expected a mask prepared for them; the Queen of Corinth let them know what she had heard of Plangus and Erona, together with Plexirtus’s deserved end, and the death of Artaxia. The audience greatly pitied their fortunes, especially Pyrocles, who much grieved to hear of Plangus’s death, for the love he bore his virtues, and was no less troubled at Plexirtus’s mischance, for his dear servant Zelmane’s sake. But the entry of the maskers caused him to put over those thoughts to more solitariness, his eye being fed with dainty variety of representations, and his ears with most harmonious well-agreeing music, to which the footing kept so good time, that doubtful it was whether the music conformed itself to the life of their motion, or the masters their motion to the music’s liveliness. But night (masked in these sports) crept on undiscovered; and though Pyrocles and Musidorus at other times would dispense with the length of the sports, yet now, in respect of the armfuls of joy they were to expect in bed, they thought them tedious; which once perceived, their dances were sooner at an end than was intended.

Thus days and nights passed over, as if they had no other sphere than delight to move in; and the appointed time for Amphialus’s marriage was at hand, to which Basilius invited the shepherds, both to change their daily pleasures, as also to show Euarchus that though a greater cause had moved him to the solitary course of life by him embraced, yet the wits of Arcadia, and the pleasantness of their harmless life, might have drawn him to that retiredness.

THE ECLOGUES

Kalodulus now minded to marry his daughter, and uncertain whether he should bestow her on the contended young Arcadian Menalcas, or the much having, much wanting Thessalian Corydon, who both were then present, hearing of this summons; puts over their cause to be determined by Basilius; and Strephon and Claius, no less desirous to bring Urania’s name to court, joined themselves to the rest. Nor was Agelastus wanting, who, not for a mistress, but, Heraclitus-like, thinking man was made to mourn, and repining at the vanity of greatness, had maintained a religious sorrow. No sooner was the company set, and that their silence began to proclaim their expectation, but Strephon, who, before his coming, had prepared an Epithalamium, began thus to sing.

Amphialus thanked Strephon for his hearty wishes; but he had scarce ended, when Claius, looking upon him with as sour a countenance as their friendship could allow, thus said:

Then Claius pausing a while, with crossed arms and a downcast look, began again these following verses to Strephon, whom he spoke to as representing the person of sorrow.

When they ended, Musidorus (in whose memory their courtesy to him, had engraven a beholdingness) forgot not to approve what they had said. But the audience had little time to determine whether they deserved what the Prince thought them worthy of, when Corydon, who longed to hear the debate between him and Menalcas, for Kalodulus’s daughter, ended, clapping him on the shoulder, thus said:

Corydon, inwardly out of countenance to hear his own words bite so sore upon him, would have shrunk away, but hoping he had found a judge whom the cause concerned stood a while to attend what Basilius would have said. But the King put it over to Musidorus, who (glad to find an occasion to pleasure Menalcas, his first master in the practice of a shepherd’s life) thus ended it.

“Corydon,” said he, “could I as well lop away some of your over-grown years, to make your match with Kalodulus’s daughter equal, as I can add to Menalcas’s state, I would, for a time, suspend my judgment: for readily I know not whether of you two deserves best: but in the one, my power seconds my will; as in the other, my will over-goes my power. Kalodulus’s daughter I therefore adjudge to Menalcas, and I will make him worthy of her, the rather, that I know his rash youth would impatiently bear a repulse, where your experience (when it reflects upon itself), with more discretion may consider she was but a woman.” Glad was Menalcas to speed so well: nor was Corydon displeased, because the Prince, as he conceived, had entertained a good opinion of his wisdom. Thus, when they ended, Pyrocles, who marked Agelastus’s silent pensiveness, desired to hear him disburden his mind of the thoughts that brought him to so deep a study: thinking that Agelastus stood fixed, with the eye of his mind cast upon the beauty of some fair mistress: but he, who thought of nothing less, thus answered his expectation.

Then looking round upon the princes, as if by their survey he were again enabled to speak, he thus said:

When Agelastus ended, the company might see a man who seemed to be misfortune’s herald, with a rope about his neck, make towards the Queen of Corinth, and cast himself at her feet. They, thinking it had been some shepherdish invention, expected awhile the conceit of it: but approaching, after a time, nearer to him, they might discern it was Tenarus the usurper of Corinth, {678} who, hearing of the Queen’s welfare, and her happy marriage to Amphialus (finding in his own practice for the crown the Corinthians aptness to embrace change, and considering the powerfulness of his enemies) had come thither, in the basest form of humbleness to set a belief upon his submission. Him the Queen (because he was a suitor on her marriage-day) pardoned, and restored to his possessions, forfeited by his treason to the crown; only she caused his liberty to be restrained until her going to Corinth, whither, after she had taken leave of Basilius, and the rest of the royal company, she took her journey; making Amphialus, within a year after her departure, a happy father of a much-promising son, whom they named Heleamphialus. Euarchus also, soon after, with his son Pyrocles and Philoclea, and his nephew Musidorus, together with Pamela (who was desirous both to accompany her sister, and to see her mother of Thessaly) parted from Mantinea; leaving Basilius and Gynecia, when they had accompanied them to the frontiers of Arcadia, to the happy quiet of their after-life.

ENDNOTES

INTRODUCTION NOTES

[1] The French prose says simply that King Arthur was at Carlisle: the poem takes twenty verses to tell how “When Titan with his lusty heat had made his court for twenty days in Aries, and all with divers hues had apparelled the fields and branches … in this time the worthy conqueror, Arthur, who had the flower of all the chivalry of this world pertaining to his crown, so passing were his knightes in renown, was at Carlisle, etc.” Then the prose records that the king went one morning early into the woods to hunt. This the verse expands into ten lines describing the hunt. In another place the French says, “Et quant il fut entre en la bataille il fist sonner ses busines tant que tout en retentissoit.” This the Scots turns into,

The Black Knight says, “Seigneurs, vous estes tous amys du roy. Or y perra comment vous le ferez.” This is the sole foundation for thirty-one lines in the Scots poem, including a response from his followers that is not in the prose. The Scot uses his material freely, translating faithfully when a mere pedestrian course was sufficient, letting himself go when his imagination was aroused. He is more vivid and circumstantial in narrative, fuller and more sensuous in description. Take the following; French, “Et fut a leur venue le chevalier noir mis a terre; Et aussi les six compaignons qui toute jour avoyent este pres de luy;” Scots,

A good deal of this expansion is obviously occasioned by the demands of metre and rhyme.

[2] Mr H. R. Plomer, in an interesting paper contributed to the Library, vol. i. (New Series), pp. 195-205, shows that this was a pirated edition; and perhaps the same is the case with the Dublin edition of 1739, mentioned below.

[4] See his “Life,” written by Sir Fulke Greville, Kt. Lord Brook. Printed Ann. 1652, 8vo, p. 5.

[22] We cannot fix the date, nor on what occasion this great appearance of nobility was then at Oxford, only that the Earl of Leicester was high chancellor of that University.

BOOK I NOTES

[1] running at Base] The old game of prisoner’s-base, then a common rustic pastime.

[4] Tarantula] A venomous Spider (so called from Tarento a city of Naples) whose bite is of such a nature, that it is to be cured only by music.

[5] Quintain] A rural sport, chiefly used at marriages, wherein, running a tilt on horse-back with poles, at a large stake fixed in the ground, against which, he that breaks most poles, gains the prize.

[6] Barley-break] Running-matches made by the country girls, with each other, as hereafter described.

BOOK II NOTES

BOOK III NOTES

[3] Keep] i.e. A strong tower in the middle of a castle, the last resort of the besieged.

[5] Atropos] One of the three sisters which are said to cut the thread of life.

[6] Catoblepa] The Catoblepa is a beast bred near the rise of Nile. See Pin, Nat. Hist.

[8] A chasm being occasioned in this place, by the loss of some of the Author’s invaluable papers; it was excellently supplied, as follows, by Sir W. A.

[9] From hence the history is again continued out of the author’s Papers. If this little essay have not that perfection which is required for supplying the want of that place for which it was intended, yet shall it serve for a shadow to give a lustre to the rest. I have only herein conformed myself to that which preceded my beginning, and was known to be that admirable author’s own, but to differ in some things from that which follows, especially in the death of Philisides, making choice of a course, whereby I might best manifest, what affection I bear to the memory of him, whom I took to be alluded unto by that name, and whom I only by this imperfect parcel (designing more) had a mind to honour. W. A.

[10] The superscripted numbers in this song appear above the preceding word in the source text.—Transcriber.

BOOK V NOTES

TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES

The title-page to the 1593 edition—taken from The Complete Works of Sir Philip Sidney, Volume II (Cambridge, 1922)—is used as a cover.

Amongst the different editions Bithynia and Pontus are sometimes used interchangeably.

Endnote markers are given in [square] brackets, and page-numbers in {curly} brackets.

The following editions were consulted for most of the changes listed below: 10th edition, printed by William Du-Gard (London, 1655); 14th edition, printed for E. Taylor, et al. (3 vol., London, 1724-1725); Samson Low, Son, & Marston (London, 1868); and Penguin Classics (London, 1987).

Some minor spelling inconsistencies (e.g. gray/grey, sheep-hook/sheep hook/sheephook, etc.) have been preserved.

Modernize/regularize the spelling of: befel (befell), Bithinia (Bithynia), Bizantium (Byzantium), Cameleon (Chameleon), chastly (chastely), chrystal (crystal), dolor (dolour), dulness (dullness), e’er (ere), e’re (ere), enterprize (enterprise), fancie (fancy), fulness (fullness), gastful (ghastful), Hircania (Hyrcania), impressa (impresa), jerfaulcon (gyrfalcon), letchery (lechery), lilly (lily), loathesome (loathsome), Mantinæa (Mantinea), me seems (meseems), Missenia (Messenia), o’re (o’er), Panonia (Pannonia), porphyrie (porphyry), pye (pie), recompence (recompense), Seistine (Sestine), spie (spy), subtilty (subtlety), Trebisond (Trebizond), unchastly (unchastely), vail (veil), wherof (whereof), woful (woeful). Note: old word forms (e.g. dost, gat, sith, spake, etc.) have been preserved.

Punctuation is largely preserved save for the following changes: quotation mark pairings/nestings, possessives lacking apostrophes, missing periods, direct addresses lacking commas, etc. Also adjust some hyphenation: far fetched (far-fetched), illwill (ill-will), straw coloured (straw-coloured), etc.

“Jorge de Montemayor, the author of Diana Enamorada” change Diana Enamorada to Diana. (Jorge de Montemayor wrote Diana; Gaspar Gil Polo wrote Diana Enamorada, a continuation of Montemayor’s work.)

“love in its various aspects; Helen, Queen of Corinth...” change semicolon to comma.

“of the older romances In imitation of Montemayor” add period after romances.

Change a few instances of “Fulke Grevil” to “Fulke Greville”, “Robert Walde-graue” to “Robert Waldegrave”, and Johnstoun to Johnstone.

“that as our remembrance came everclothed unto us in the” to ever clothed.

(that occasion, I kneeled down, and with humble heartedness, and hearty earnestness printed in my graces; “Alas!” said I,) to he, his, and he, respectively.

“To cause full-wrath, which thou can’st not resist” to causeful wrath.

“any entertainment of so unwelcome a guest the made Cecropia” delete the and add comma after guest.

“great clerks into the world to serve as shields to keep them from those faults” to shewels (“scarecrows”).

“thy wretched heart think it was timerousness that made” to timorousness.

“repine with never so much grieving-Mother,” replace hyphen with period and space.

“took a body to show his (self unconceivable) beauty” to else-unconceivable.

“self-love then first in him divided itself from vain glory” to vainglory.

“a strong cask bravely covered, wherewith he covered his head” to casque.

(“can Musidorus have anything wherein I have no interest?” “I,” said he, “and for the present a greater wonder...) to Aye.

“Nay higher thoughts (though thralled thoughts)” add I call to the end of the line.

“or the licourishness of dominion make you beyond justice” to lickerishness.

“Had she I say no practice to lead her unto it?” add commas after she and say.

“the name of this mankind courtisan shall ever be remembered” to courtesan.

“much pitying the before-unheard of death of so excellent a queen” delete first of.

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THE COUNTESS OF PEMBROKE’S ARCADIA

CONTENTS