rson,
It beggar'd all description: she did lie
In her pavilion (cloth-of-gold of tissue)
O'er-picturing that Venus, where we see
The fancy outwork nature: on each side her
Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,
With diverse-color'd fans....
Her gentlewomen, like the Nereides,
So many mermaids, tended her i' the eyes.
... At the helm
A seeming mermaid steers....
... From the barge
A strange invisible perfume hits the sense
Of the adjacent wharves. The city cast
Her people out upon her; and Antony,
Enthroned i' the market-place, did sit alone,
Whistling to th' air; which, but for vacancy,
Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too,
And made a gap in nature."

On the arrival of this siren queen, Antony had invited her to
supper,--the dinner of the Romans,--but she, with woman's instinct, had
declined, till he should come to her; and he, with the urbanity of a
polished noble,--for such he probably was,--complied, and found a
banquet which astonished even him, accustomed as he was to senatorial
magnificence, and which, with all the treasures of the East, he could
not rival. From that fatal hour he was enslaved. She conquered him, not
merely by her display and her dazzling beauty, but by her wit. Her very
tones were music. So accomplished was she in languages, that without
interpreters she conversed not only with Greeks and Latins, but with
Ethiopians, Jews, Arabians, Syrians, Medes, and Parthians. So dazzled
and bewitched was Antony, that, instead of continuing the duties of his
great position, he returned with Cleopatra to Alexandria, there to keep
holiday and squander riches, and, still worse, his precious time, to the
shame and scandal of Rome, inglorious and without excuse,--a Samson at
the feet of Delilah, or a Hercules throwing away his club to seize the
distaff of Omphale, confessing to the potency of that mysterious charm
which the sage at the court of an Eastern prince pronounced the
strongest power on earth. Never was a strong man more enthralled than
was Antony by this bewitching woman, who exhausted every art to please
him. She played at dice with him, drank with him, hunted with him,
rambled with him, jested with him, angled with him, flattering and
reproving him by turn, always having some new device of pleasure to
gratify his senses or stimulate his curiosity. Thus passed the winter of
41-40, and in the spring he w