Page:Lives of Fair and Gallant Ladies Volume II.djvu/178

Rh same luscious pictures, as that she cannot see out of her eyes till the fourth page, and at the fifth did fall in a dead faint. A terrible swoon truly! very different to that of Octavia, sister of Cæsar Augustus, who one day hearing Virgil recite the three verses he had writ on her dead son Marcellus (for which she did give him three thousand crowns for the three alone) did incontinently swoon right away. That was love indeed, but of how different a sort!

I have heard tell, in the days when I was at Court, of a great Prince of the highest rank, old and well stricken in years, and who ever since the loss of his wife had borne him very continently in his widowhood, as indeed was but consistent with his high repute for sanctity of life. At last he was fain to marry again with a very fair, virtuous and young Princess. But seeing how for the ten years he had been a widower he had never so much as touched a woman, and fearing to have forgot the way of it (as though it were an art that a man may forget), and to get a rebuff the first night of his wedlock, and perform naught of his desire, was anxious to make a previous essay. So by dint of money he did win over a fair young maid, a virgin like the wife he was to marry; nay more, 'tis said he had her chosen to resemble somewhat in features his future wife. Fortune was so kind to him that he did prove he had by no means forgot as yet his old skill; and his essay was so successful that, bold and happy, he did advance to his wife's fortress, and won good victory and high repute.

This essay was more successful than that of another gentleman whose name I have heard, whom his father, although he was very young and much of a simpleton,