Legends & Romances of Spain Part 11

Before entering upon his career of adventure Esplandian had met Leonorina, daughter of the Emperor of Constantinople, of whom he had become greatly enamoured, and during the course of his war with the Turks he had dispatched many messengers to her, a.s.suring her of his undying affection. He now learned that she had taken umbrage at his long absence, so, when the capital of Turkey had fallen to his sword, he speedily set out for Constantinople. Arrived there, he purchased a cedar chest of exquisite workmans.h.i.+p, which he entrusted to certain messengers, commanding them to bear it to the lady. When she opened it in the privacy of her own apartment, to her mingled confusion and delight her long-absent lover himself emerged from its recesses. In Spanish romance it is inevitable that the loves of the hero and heroine should remain unknown to the lady's relatives, not only because this was demanded by the romantic susceptibilities of the average Spanish reader, but because Spanish opinion would have been seriously affronted by the idea of parental compliance in any intercourse between the lovers prior to marriage, save of the most formal kind. This sorry condition of affairs still obtains among the middle and upper cla.s.ses of Spain and Spanish America, and we can scarcely suppress amus.e.m.e.nt when we hear of ardent youths unable to converse confidentially with the maidens to whom they are formally affianced otherwise than by a.s.suming some ridiculous disguise, or through the kind offices of servants. Not infrequently young Spanish couples whose engagement is quite en regle, and to whose union not the slightest opposition is made, arrange and carry out an elopement, purely because of the romantic atmosphere surrounding such a proceeding. It is circ.u.mstances such as these which enable us to appreciate the firm hold of romance upon the Spanish heart.

But Esplandian had but little time for dalliance, as the Turks were once more arrayed against him in the field. He had, however, a firm ally in Urganda, but, to counterbalance this, the infidels were supported by the enchantress Melia, the sister of Armato, the defeated soldan, who had succeeded in making his escape upon the back of a flying dragon, dispatched for that purpose by this Turkish witch. With all speed he levied a large army, and set siege to Constantinople. Numerous as the sands of the sea were his allies, one of whom was a beautiful Amazonian queen, who brought with her to the scene of hostilities a squadron of fifty griffins, which flew over the city much in the manner of devastating aircraft, belching fire and smoke on the heads of the unhappy folk below.

So dire was the loss of life in this combat between the forces of Christendom and paganism that at last it was agreed that the question of pre-eminence should be settled by the issue of a double combat. Amadis and Esplandian were selected on the one side, and the Amazon queen and a celebrated pagan soldan on the other. The heathens were defeated, but so enraged were they at their downfall that they rushed to the attack with every available man (and woman) in their hosts. But the Christians, mightily encouraged by the victory of their champions, repulsed them with terrific loss, and drove them from the bounds of the Grecian dominions. The Greek Emperor, probably only too happy to rid himself of the burden of such a troublous inheritance, resigned his crown to Esplandian, who espoused his Leonorina and settled down to the task of governing the h.e.l.lenic realm.

Relieved from the pressure of military duties, in which she had proved herself no inefficient ally, the sage Urganda had now leisure to pay some attention to the private affairs of her mortal charges. On consulting her magic mirror and other divinatory apparatus, she was desolated to find that Amadis, Galaor, Esplandian, and indeed all of her favourite champions, were soon to pay the debt of nature. Had her prophetic soul been enabled to envisage the immensities of fiction to which their future adventures were to give rise, she would undoubtedly have allowed nature to take its course, so we must conclude that her powers of vision were limited. Resolved to frustrate unkindly Fate, she summoned her proteges to the Firm Island, and advised them, if they desired to escape mortality, to obey the injunctions she would now place upon them. They anxiously a.s.sured her that these would be carried out to the letter, and with the best possible grace submitted to be cast into a magic sleep, from which, it was decreed, they were not to awaken until disenchanted by Lisuarte, son of Esplandian, who, on gaining possession of a certain magic sword, would be enabled to bring them once more to life with renewed vigour.

The Sixth Book of the Amadis series is concerned with the adventures of Florisando, his nephew, but as its hero is not in the line direct, and is, moreover, intolerably tiresome, we may well pa.s.s him over with a mere mention of his existence.

Lisuarte of Greece

More sprightly is Lisuarte of Greece, hero of the seventh and eighth books, which are believed to have been written by Juan Diaz, Bachelor of Canon Law, and published in 1526. Lisuarte is not, however, the sole hero of this romance, Perion, a later son of Amadis and Oriana, claiming a considerable share of the exploits which fall to be recounted in the volume. This young warrior, hearing of the prowess and address in arms of the King of Ireland, resolved to gratify a desire to be knighted by him, and for this purpose embarked for the Green Isle. While traversing St George's Channel, or its romantic equivalent, he encountered a damsel cruising in a boat managed by four apes. The animals begged Perion to accompany their mistress for the fulfilment of a great enterprise, so, quitting his own vessel, he embarked in the boat along with the apes and the lady. His attendants, chagrined by his acceptance of the adventure thus thrust upon him, turned their vessel eastward and sailed on until they eventually arrived at Constantinople, where they reported his virtual disappearance, on learning of which his kinsman Lisuarte decided to go in quest of him.

In the meantime young Perion had arrived with his strange fellow-wanderers in the kingdom of Trebizond, which, as we are all aware, is readily accessible from the Irish coast. In that city he had seen and fallen in love with the daughter of the Emperor, but did not have much leisure to pay his addresses to her, as the Lady of the Apes rather unduly hurried him in the preliminaries of the task she had set him. They had scarcely left Trebizond when Lisuarte arrived in the city, and promptly fell in love with Onoloria, the Emperor's remaining daughter. But one day, as the lovers were enjoying each other's society, an enormous giantess entered the Court and requested a boon from Lisuarte, which, in true romantic fas.h.i.+on, he granted without inquiring its nature. It proved to be his attendance for a year wherever the gigantic damsel chose to demand it. The giantess was, indeed, a pagan spy, and had concocted this device to withdraw Lisuarte, who was one of the great props of Christian Greece, from the support of the h.e.l.lenic throne at a difficult and dangerous time.

When Lisuarte had quitted Trebizond on the adventure in which he was an unwilling partaker, the Emperor of that country, father of his inamorata, was informed of the true character of the prodigious damsel who had carried him off by a letter which was closed with sixty-seven seals and which announced that Constantinople was about to be besieged by Armato, the Turkish Soldan, who had placed himself at the head of a league of sixty-seven princes for the purpose of waging war against the imperial city. Meanwhile Lisuarte was given into the care of the King of the Giants' Isle, whose daughter Gradaffile fell in love with him, procured his escape, and followed him to Constantinople, whence he at once betook himself for the purpose of combating the infidels who invested it. In this task he was a.s.sisted by Perion, who now arrived in Greece, after having accomplished the behest of the Lady of the Apes.

In course of time Lisuarte became conscious that duty now called him to effect the release of his sleeping ancestors from the spell in which they had been cast for the purpose of prolonging their existences. After many adventures, which we spare the reader, he obtained possession of the fatal sword and proceeded to the Firm Island, where he broke the enchanted sleep into which Amadis, Esplandian, and the rest had been lulled by the far-sighted Urganda. These, naturally refreshed by their long slumber, and longing for martial exercise, at once a.s.sisted him in routing the pagan forces before Constantinople, and achieving peace once more. Lisuarte, freed from his patriotic labours, now bethought himself of his lady-love, and turned his steps to the city of Trebizond. Perion had also gone thither from a similar reason, but on the request of the d.u.c.h.ess of Austria had accompanied that lady to her dominions, which were in the grip of a usurper. On his return from this chivalrous task he encountered his kinsman Lisuarte, and both champions were in the act of preparing their wedding festivities when Perion and the Emperor of Trebizond were carried off by pagan treachery in the midst of a hunting expedition. Lisuarte, following on their track, was also seized by the enemy, and imprisoned along with those he had sought to succour.

Amadis of Greece

The Ninth Book carries on the adventures and exploits of the race of Amadis, who in more senses than one may be said to be immortal. It was first published in 1535 at Burgos, a place of many literary a.s.sociations, and purports to have been imitated in Latin from the Greek, after the manner of the famous Troy romance Dares and Dictys, and at a later time translated into the Romance language by the potent and wise magician Alquife, evidently a supposit.i.tious Moor pressed into the service of the most imaginative but undisciplined writer who fabricated it. Amadis of Greece, indeed, approaches the sublime of imaginative excess and fictional unreason, and in its extravagant pages we are confronted with such a maze of marvel that to provide an intelligent account of it is a task of no little difficulty.

Following the wild career of the romancer with the halting step of modern incredulity, we learn that Amadis of Greece was, like his forbears, a child unwanted, the son of Lisuarte and Onoloria, Princess of Trebizond, born shortly after the period of their interrupted wedding. While the infant was being baptized at a fountain in a wild and deserted place, to which he had been conveyed for the purposes of secrecy, he was carried off by corsairs, who sold him to the Moorish King of Saba. Distinguished by the representation of a sword upon his breast, he adopted the name, when knighted by the pagan monarch, of 'The Knight of the Flaming Sword.' Soon after he had entered the ranks of chivalry he was falsely accused of cheris.h.i.+ng a secret love for the Queen of Saba, and, dreading the wrath of his benefactor, he made his escape, and embarked upon a career of adventure--which, indeed, it would have been difficult for anyone of his lineage to have avoided.

A pagan in religion and sentiment, he came to the vicinity of the Forbidden Mountain which his grandfather had been instrumental in liberating from the clutches of the infidel, and, reversing the pious work then accomplished, he defeated and expelled those who held it for the Emperor of Greece. Aroused by the menacing turn events had taken, the great Esplandian himself, now Emperor of Constantinople, hastened to the scene of hostilities and engaged in single combat with the doughty new-comer, only, however, to suffer defeat at his hands, an event which never could have entered into the calculation of the enthusiastic author who composed the romance of that hero, who would have been horrified at the mere thought of the eclipse of his invincible 'star.' Shortly after this Amadis encountered the King of Sicily. Their acquaintance commenced with a combat, as it was indeed essential that it should, as the only fitting means of introduction between gentlemen of errant tendencies, but when they came to know and esteem each other they patched up a comrades.h.i.+p which was the more powerfully cemented by the pa.s.sion of Amadis for the martial monarch's lovely daughter.

In the course of his voyage to Sicily, Amadis chanced to visit an island, where he found the Emperor of Trebizond, Lisuarte, Perion, and Gradaffile in a state of enchanted slumber. As we have seen, they had been spirited away by the emissaries of paganism. It chanced that at this time Amadis of Gaul, who was evidently not yet too old for adventurous pursuits, encountered the Queen of Saba, who was everywhere searching for a champion to defend her against her husband's false charges of conjugal infidelity. Amadis espoused her quarrel, and accompanied her to Saba, where he did battle with and overcame her accuser. He also succeeded in establis.h.i.+ng her innocence, and that of his namesake, Amadis of Greece, to the satisfaction of the King her husband.

After he had freed his ancestors from their charmed sleep, Amadis of Greece betook himself to Sicily. He had not been long in the island when he heard a knight reciting amorous verses in the vicinity of the palace. At once his jealous heart leapt to the conclusion that the singer was chanting the praise of his princess. Almost crazed by his suspicions, he searched everywhere for his supposed rival, but without success, d.o.g.g.i.ng his footsteps, but always failing to come up with him. During this chase he met with many adventures. But at last he seems to have convinced himself that his suspicions were groundless and that the singer he had heard had had no designs upon the heart of his inamorata.

Whilst these events were pa.s.sing, Lisuarte, the father of our hero, had returned to Trebizond, and had formally requested the hand of Onoloria. But Zairo, Soldan of Babylon, had seen this princess in a dream, and, accompanied by his sister Abra, had arrived at Trebizond to demand her in marriage. The Emperor was quite prepared to grant his suit, but not so Lisuarte, who had prior claims to the lady, and his opposition so enraged the Soldan that he resorted to warlike measures and set siege to "many-towered Trebizond." After the siege had progressed for some time champions were selected from either army to decide the pretensions of the rival parties. But the Soldan's paladins were defeated by Gradaffile, daughter of the King of the Giant's Isle, who disguised herself as a knight, and whose Amazonian fury the unfortunate Babylonians could scarcely be expected to confront with any chance of success. The Soldan, however, after the manner of the baffled in romance, broke the rules of the tourney and carried off Onoloria by a stratagem.

As his fleet sailed with all speed from Trebizond, it encountered that of Amadis of Gaul, who was hastening to the relief of that city, and had evidently not been r.e.t.a.r.ded in his pa.s.sage of the Dardanelles by any considerations of international law. In the circ.u.mstances it is scarcely necessary to chronicle the Soldan's overthrow, or dwell upon his untimely fate.

But the will to evil of the race of Babylon was not extinguished by the decease of the short-lived if romantically named Zairo. By his death his sister Abra succeeded to the throne of Semiramis. While sojourning at Trebizond in the happy days before hostilities had broken out between her brother and Lisuarte, she had fallen under the spell of that champion's attractions, and after the manner of Eastern womanhood as depicted by the writers of romance, made the first advances to the object of her affections. Let us hope that he did not repulse her as rudely as did blunt Sir Bevis of Hamton, when the fair Saracen Josiana sent her envoys to him to acquaint him with her pa.s.sion:

He said, if ye ne were messengers, I should ye slay, ye lossengers.

I ne will rise one foot fro' grounde For to speak with an heathen hounde.

She is a hound, also be ye: Out of my chamber swith ye flee.

But repulse her Lisuarte did, and all the fury of a woman scorned burned in the breast of the fair Babylonian. Out of the depths of her vengeance she sent emissaries to all the kingdoms of the earth, asking that the knighthood of every realm should a.s.sist her to destroy Lisuarte. One of her damsels while on this quest met with Amadis of Greece, who, still a pagan, was easily inveigled into promising that he would never rest until he had presented the lady Abra with the head of Lisuarte. On the arrival of Amadis at Trebizond a dreadful combat between father and son ensued, which was mercifully broken off by the timely appearance of Urganda, who, following her usual custom, made parent and child known to one another.

But the young Amadis was not to be exempt from the amorous advances of pagan princesses any more than his father had been. Niquea, the daughter of an Eastern soldan, had fallen in love with him by report, and had sent him her picture by the hands of a favourite dwarf. The lady's undoubted attractions were, however, seriously counterbalanced by the circ.u.mstance that all who beheld her resplendent beauty either died on the spot or were deprived of reason. Her father, in the exercise of ordinary wisdom, shut her up in an almost inaccessible tower, to which her relatives (who, like most family friends, were rather apt to discount her charms) alone had the entree.

Notwithstanding the former strong attachment of Amadis to the Princess of Sicily, he had no sooner set eyes on the portrait of Niquea than he renounced his former allegiance and devoted his affections to the Oriental beauty. In order that he might delight his eyes with the original of the portrait which had so enchanted him, he disguised himself as a female slave, and gained access to the tower in which Niquea was interned. They plighted their troth to each other, and Amadis remained in the tower in his disguise. Needless to say, Niquea's good looks wrought him no bale.

We now return to the fair but vindictive Abra, who, having marshalled an immense army, marched against Trebizond. After a furious encounter, the forces of paynimrie were duly routed. But as Onoloria had in the meantime been so obliging as to shake off the trammels of mortality, Lisuarte, at the persuasion of his platonic friend Gradaffile, agreed to cement a lasting peace by espousing the Babylonian queen, who was thus lucky in love if unlucky in war.

Niquea, tiring of her virtual imprisonment, succeeded in eloping with Amadis, and soon afterward arrived with him at Trebizond, where their nuptials were celebrated. Later she gave birth to a son named Florisel de Niquea, the subject of a future tale.

This romance, like that of Esplandian, ends with the enchantment of the Greek heroes and princesses in the Tower of the Universe by the spells of the wise magician Zirfea, who warned them that by this means alone could they escape mortality. But, unlike the enchantment of the Firm Island, the spell which they must needs undergo in this tower of marvels was not of a somnolent character, so that the enchanted paladins and their lady-loves were enabled to cultivate each other's society for a century or so, an advantage at which they had small occasion to grumble, when their long separation as relatives is taken into account. Even did they tire of one another's society, they were not likely to fall under the more dreadful spell of boredom, since the accommodating magician who undertook their enchantment had provided an apparatus by means of which they could behold every event which took place in the world, a vehicle of solace and amus.e.m.e.nt which Madame d'Aulnoy introduced into one of her fairy fictions.

Cervantes' barber and priest were especially caustic regarding Amadis of Greece and its immediate successors. "Into the yard with them all,"

quoth the priest, "for rather than not burn the queen Pintiquinestra and the shepherd Darinel with his eclogues and the devilish intricate discourses of its author, I would burn the father who begot me, did I meet him in the garb of a knight errant."

Florisel of Niquea

The composition which chiefly seems to have excited the wrath of Cervantes' unromantic churchman and even more unpoetic barber is the Tenth Book of Amadis, which is ent.i.tled as above, and is feigned to be written by no less a person than Cirfea, Queen of the Argives, who doubtless composed it in the intervals of repose stolen from the more important duties of royalty. Her Majesty does not degrade her exalted position by revealing to us the fee which she received from the Valladolid publishers who produced the work in 1532, but if one may place a value on her compositions without breaking the dread law of lese-majeste, it might be suggested that a penny a line would amply remunerate the literary output of this most imaginative sovereign. In a word, Cirfea, or the scribbler who sought to shelter himself behind her royal robes, is tiresome to a degree, and her pastoral absurdities can scarcely be described otherwise than in a vein of humorous tolerance. The one thing that renders her work of any importance is that she was probably the first to import the sylvan element into romance, and is thus the creator of that long line of artificial and over-amorous shepherds and shepherdesses whose tears and sighs fall upon or are wafted over the poetic pages of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the insistence of whose plaints makes one dread to open a volume which seems in any way reminiscent of l'esprit de bergeres.

The romance introduces us to Sylvia, the daughter of Lisuarte and Onoloria, who was, in the course of nature, removed from her parents in infancy, and was brought up to a pastoral life in the neighbourhood of Alexandria, which, if it enjoyed a reputation in her day as a sheep-rearing district, must have owed it to the well-known properties of sand as a medium for the fattening of those animals for the market. As Sylvia grew up she became conscious of her beauty, and, relying upon her good looks, and no doubt also upon her pretty name, she enslaved to her will the handsome swain Darinel, whose appellation, like that of his lady-love, is racy of the land of the Pharaohs. Sylvia conceived it as being correct in a shepherdess to be 'cruel' to her lover, who, thus setting the fas.h.i.+on for many a future sonneteer, complained bitterly of her indifference, and signified his intention of ending his days by exposing himself to the fury of the elements on a mountain-top--rather a prolonged operation, one would think, in a region especially suited to pulmonary patients. Probably finding that the climate of Egypt scarcely lent itself to the consummation of such a fate, he betook himself to the region of Babylonia, where, in the intervals of searching for mountains in a land where they are tantalizingly absent, he found time to make a friends.h.i.+p with Florisel, whose good nature must have been sorely tried by his plaintive apostrophes to his mistress's eyebrow. So glowing, indeed, were Darinel's descriptions of Sylvia's charms that Florisel became infected with his unhappy comrade's emotion, so that at last, unable to combat the pa.s.sion which was consuming him, he disguised himself as a shepherd and prevailed upon the luckless Darinel to conduct him to Sylvia's abode. But although Florisel had paid her the great compliment of walking all the way from Babylon for a glance from her bright eyes, she showed herself every whit as cold to him as she had been to Darinel.

One evening, when Florisel deigns to grant the reader a blessed intermission from his pleadings to the fair shepherdess, he described to her how the prince Anastarax, brother of Niquea, had been enclosed in a fiery palace by the enchantments of the potent magician Zirfea. On hearing the story, the petulant Sylvia fell headlong in love with Anastarax, and persuaded Florisel and Darinel, who no longer hankered after Alpine rigours, to attempt the deliverance of the fire-encircled prince. But when they arrived in the vicinity of the tower in which he was detained they learned that the adventure was reserved for Alastraxare, a fair Amazon, daughter of Amadis of Greece and the Queen of Caucasus. The reader is now compelled to follow the fortunes of this female Hercules, whose tongue-encircling name has proved a stumbling-block to generations of printers. These are spread over many pages. The little party from Alexandria went in search of this heroine, and encountered many adventures, as per arrangement with the booksellers. Chief among these was the amorous dalliance with Arlanda, princess of Thrace, who had fallen in love with Florisel by report, as ladies had a disconcerting habit of doing in the days of high romance. She donned the clothes of the immaculate Sylvia, and thus beguiled him to a moonlight rendezvous, where she succeeded in gaining his favour while he was under the impression that she was the shepherdess whom he had vainly pursued so long.

In the course of their wanderings Sylvia became separated from the rest of the party during a great storm, and, retracing her steps, made her way back to the flaming prison of Anastarax. Meanwhile Florisel and Darinel arrived on the coast of Apollonia, where the former happily forgot the charms of the capricious little shepherdess, who by this time had been duly discovered as the daughter of Lisuarte, and had been united to her beloved Anastarax. But it was not because he suffered from a failing memory that Florisel became oblivious of Sylvia, but rather on account of the bright eyes of the Princess Helena of Apollonia.

The sequence of the tale is now broken up in a manner calculated to aggravate the most hardened of readers. Florisel was not left much leisure to enjoy the society of the fascinating Apollonian princess, as the deliverance of his kindred from the enchanted tower had all along been reserved for him. When at last he had satisfied the promptings of duty, he set his face once more toward Apollonia, but was not, of course, destined to arrive on the sh.o.r.es of that delectable kingdom without undergoing still further adventures. Landing at Colchos, he met with Alastraxare, who had found happiness with Falanges, a brilliant warrior of Florisel's train. Arriving at last in Apollonia, he found the Princess Helena on the eve of a marriage with the Prince of Gaul, a match ordained by the lady's politic father. But Florisel would have belied the adventurous blood which he drew from a long line of heroes who had never yet remained inactive in such a contingency if he had failed to defeat the tyrannical father's intentions, so, as our royal auth.o.r.ess remarks, he repeated the exploit of Paris in the tale of Troy by carrying off this second Helen.

Like its prototype of Homeric story, this action very naturally precipitated the kingdoms of the East and West, real and apocryphal, into a condition of chaotic warfare. a.s.sisted by the Russians, who even at that distant epoch appear to have had a predilection for the task of social demolition, the countries of the West poured their myriads upon the plains of Constantinople, and inflicted a serious reverse upon the h.e.l.lenic arms. But the erratic Slavs, true to type, turned later upon their allies of the Occident, drove them from the sh.o.r.es of the Golden Horn, and finally secured Florisel in the possession of the capital of the East and the Princess Helena.

Here the august Cirfea might with all judiciousness have written "Finis" with her golden pen to this amazing history. But at this stage of events, if a phrase so familiarly colloquial may be employed regarding one so exalted, she 'gets her second wind,' probably in view of the circ.u.mstance that her bargain with the booksellers of Valladolid stipulated that their patrons were to be regaled with so many thousand lines of her glowing periods, an arrangement in which she was probably loath to disappoint them, for reasons to which, as a crowned head, she should have been superior. But her domain of Argolis is proverbially a poor country, whose populace possesses a rooted and hereditary bias against taxation. Be that as it may, she was not the last Balkan sovereign to supply herself with pin-money by literary labours. Equipping herself, therefore, with a fresh ream of parchment from the Department of Archives (for Government paper has proverbially been everybody's property, even from the times of Khammurabi), she cast about for fresh situations and addressed herself to the task of 'spinning out.'

When the treacherous Russians had accounted for the armies of the West, they embarked for their own country, there to hatch fresh schemes for the further disturbance of a hara.s.sed Europe. But Amadis of Greece was in no mind that a people who owed so many debts to civilization (to say nothing of vast pecuniary obligations) should escape unpunished for their original adherence to the enemy. Pursuing them, but losing track of their vessels, he came to the inevitable desert island, where he resolved to stay and do penance for his infidelity to the Princess of Sicily. Quite naturally, that lady herself landed on its sh.o.r.es, and, after upbraiding her unfaithful lover, very sensibly advised him to return to his sorrowing wife Niquea, which he at last consented to do.

When, after a reasonable interval, Amadis did not return to Constantinople, the imperial city was in an uproar, and Florisel and Falanges elected to go in quest of him. They arrived in time at the island, where, under the a.s.sumed name of Moraizel, the former fell in love with and espoused its queen, Sidonia, who, however, did not scruple to show her preference for his companion. But Florisel soon tired of his island bride, who bore him a beautiful little daughter, Diana, destined to prove the heroine of the eleventh and twelfth books of this interminable history.

Agesilan of Colchos

The young Agesilan of Colchos was prosecuting his studies at Athens when he chanced to see a statue of the beauteous Diana. Irresistibly attracted by it, he resolved to search for and behold the original, so, donning the garb of a female minstrel, he fared to the Court of Queen Sidonia, the royal maiden's mother. Here he was employed as a companion to the princess. But when a succession of adventurous knights arrived in the island he could not refrain from giving them battle in the guise of an Amazon, with results invariably in his favour.

Learning from the Queen how she had been neglected by Florisel, Agesilan obligingly offered to bring her the head of the erring warrior, revealing, at the same time, his own personality. Sidonia, who bore her husband a deep grudge for his desertion of her, readily accepted his champions.h.i.+p. So Agesilan repaired to Constantinople and defied the recreant to mortal combat. It was arranged that the encounter should take place in the dominions of Sidonia, but on the would-be combatants arriving in these regions they found them beleaguered by the ubiquitous Russians, who, not content with the freedom of their own vast steppes, seem to have hankered after a place in the sun in a more genial clime. It was scarcely fair to the ebullient Slavs to launch two such renowned paladins upon them at one and the same time, but, the brief battle over, victory seems to have made Florisel and Sidonia forget their estrangement, and all went merry as a marriage bell, Agesilan being duly affianced to Diana.

It was agreed, however, that the splendours of Constantinople would provide a more fitting background to their nuptials, and accordingly all set sail for the Golden Horn, having first been honoured by a visit from Amadis of Gaul in person, who, notwithstanding his patriarchal years, still continued to prove the delights of errantry. He was accompanied by Amadis of Greece, who, though almost as venerable as his great-grandfather, could yet break a lance with any like-minded champion.