the planter of the olive, Pallas; Neptune, who directs the track of ships over the great ocean, and binds distant lands together in friendly commerce; the inventor of medicine and music, Apollo; and the cloud-compelling Thunderer of Olympus. Whereas the gifts of this idle Deity—if, indeed, he have a being at all out of the brain of his frantic worshipers, usually prove destructive and pernicious. My suit, then, is, that this unseemly Idol throughout the land be plucked down and cast into the fire; and that the adoring of the same may be prohibited on pain of death to any of your subjects henceforth found so offending."
Leontius, startled at this unexpected demand from the Princess, with tears besought her to ask some wiser thing, and not to bring down upon herself and him the indignation of so great a God.
"There is no such God as you dream of," said then Leucippus, boldly, who had hitherto forborne to second the petition of the Princess; "but a vain opinion of him has filled the land with love and wantonness. Every young man and maiden that feel the least desire to one another, dare in no case to suppress it, for they think it to be Cupid's motion, and that he is a God!"
Thus pressed by the solicitations of both his children, and fearing the oath which he had taken, in an evil hour the misgiving father consented; and a proclamation was sent throughout all the provinces for the putting down of the Idol, and the suppression of the established Cupid-worship.
Notable, you may be sure, was the stir made in all places among the priests, and among the artificers in gold, in silver, or in marble; who made a gainful trade, either in serving at the altar or in the manufacture of the images no longer to be tolerated. The cry was clamorous as that at Ephesus, when a kindred Idol was in danger; for "great had been Cupid of the Lycians." Nevertheless the power of the Duke, backed by the power of his more popular children, prevailed; and the destruction of every vestige of the old religion was but as the work of one day throughout the country.
And now, as the Pagan chronicles of Lycia inform us, the displeasure of Cupid went out—the displeasure of a great God—flying through all the dukedom, and sowing evils. But upon the first movers of the profanation his angry hand lay heaviest, and there was imposed upon them a strange misery, that all might know that Cupid's revenge was mighty. With his arrows hotter than plagues, or than his own anger, did he fiercely right himself; nor could the prayers of a few concealed worshipers, nor the smoke arising from an altar here and there which had escaped the general overthrow, avert his wrath, or make him cease from vengeance, until he had made of the once flourishing country of Lycia a most wretched land. He sent no famines—he let loose no cruel wild beasts among them—inflictions, with one or other of which the rest of the Olympian deities are fabled to have visited the nations under their displeasure—but took a nearer course of his own, and his invisible arrows went to the moral heart of Lycia, infecting and filling court and country with desires of unlawful marriages, unheard-of and monstrous affections, prodigious and misbecoming unions.
The symptoms were first visible in the changed bosom of Hidaspes. This exemplary maiden—whose cold modesty, almost to a failing, had discouraged the addresses of so many princely suitors that had sought her hand in marriage—by the venom of this inward pestilence came on a sudden to cast eyes of affection upon a mean and deformed creature, Zoilus by name, who was a dwarf, and lived about the palace, the common jest of the courtiers. In her besotted eyes he was grown a goodly gentleman. And to her maidens, when any of them reproached him with the defect of his shape in her hearing, she would reply that, "to them, indeed, he might appear defective, and unlike a man, as, indeed, no man was like unto him, for in form and complexion he was beyond painting. He is like," she said, "to nothing that we have seen; yet he doth resemble Apollo, as I have fancied him, when, rising in the east, he bestirs himself, and shakes day-light from his hair." And, overcome with a passion which was heavier than she could bear, she confessed herself a wretched creature, and implored forgiveness of God Cupid, whom she had provoked, and, if possible, that he would grant it to her, that she might enjoy her love. Nay, she would court this piece of deformity to his face; and when the wretch, supposing it to be done in mockery, has said that he could wish himself more ill-shaped than he was, so it could contribute to make her Grace merry, she would reply, "Oh, think not that I jest! unless it be a jest not to esteem my life in comparison with thine—to hang a thousand kisses in an hour upon those lips—unless it be a jest to vow that I am willing to become your wife, and to take obedience upon me." And by his "own white hand," taking it in hers—so strong was the delusion—she besought him to swear to marry her.
The term had not yet expired of the seven days within which the doting Duke had sworn to fulfil her will, when, in pursuance of this frenzy, she presented herself before her father, leading in the dwarf by the hand, and, in the face of all the courtiers, solemnly demanding his hand in marriage. And when the apish creature made show of blushing at the unmerited honour, she, to comfort him, bade him not to be ashamed, for "in her eyes he was worth a kingdom."
And now, too late, did the fond father repent him of his dotage. But when by no importunity he could prevail upon her to desist from her suit, for his oath's sake he must needs consent to the marriage. But the ceremony was no sooner, to the derision of all present, performed, than, with the just feelings of an outraged parent, he commanded the head of the presumptuous bridegroom to be stricken off, and committed the distracted princess close prisoner to her chamber, where, after many deadly swoonings, with intermingled outcries upon the cruelty of her father, she, in no long time after, died, making ineffectual appeals, to the last, to the mercy of the offended Power—the Power that had laid its heavy hand upon her, to the bereavement of her good judgment first, and, finally, to the extinction of a life that might have proved a blessing to Lycia.
Leontius had scarcely time to be sensible of her danger before a fresh cause for mourning overtook him. His son Leucippus, who had hitherto been a pattern of strict life and modesty, was stricken with a second arrow from the Deity, offended for his overturned altars, in which the prince had been a chief instrument. The God caused his heart to fall away, and his crazed fancy to be smitten with the excelling beauty of a wicked widow, by name Bacha. This woman, in the first days of her mourning for her husband, by her dissembling tears and affected coyness had drawn Leucippus so cunningly into her snares, that, before she would grant him a return of love, she extorted from the easy-hearted prince a contract of marriage, to be fulfilled in the event of his father's death. This guilty intercourse, which they covered with the name of marriage, was not carried with such secrecy but that a rumor of it ran about the palace; and by some officious courtier was brought to the ears of the old Duke, who, to satisfy himself of the truth, came hastily to the house of Bacha, where he found his son courting. Taking the Prince to task roundly, he sternly asked who that creature was that had bewitched him out of his honor thus. Then Bacha, pretending ignorance of the Duke's person, haughtily demanded of Leucippus what saucy old man that was, that without leave had burst into the house of an afflicted widow to hinder her paying her tears (as she pretended) to the dead. Then the Duke declaring himself, and threatening her for having corrupted his son, giving her the reproachful terms of witch and sorceress, Leucippus mildly answered that he "did her wrong." The bad woman, imagining that the Prince for very fear would not betray their secret, now conceived a project of monstrous wickedness, which was no less than to insnare the father with the same arts which had subdued the son; that she might no longer be a concealed wife, nor a princess only under cover, but by a union with the old man become at once the true and acknowledged Duchess of Lycia. In a posture of humility she confessed her ignorance of the Duke's quality, but, now she knew it, she besought his pardon for her wild speeches, which proceeded, she said, from a distempered head, which the loss of her dear husband had affected. He might command her life, she told him, which was now of small value to her. The tears which had accompanied her words, and her mourning weeds (which, for a blind to the world, she had not yet cast off) heightening her beauty, gave a credence to her protestations of her innocence. But the duke continuing to assail her with reproaches, with a matchless confidence, assuming the air of injured virtue, in a somewhat lofty tone she replied, that, though he were her sovereign, to whom in any lawful cause she was bound to submit, yet, if he sought to take away her honor, she stood up to defy him. That, she said, was a jewel
