odite, despite her cestus and her promise to the
shepherd-arbiter that she would make him beloved by the most beautiful
woman in the world!...

'Alas! to think that such beauty is not immortal, and that years will
alter those divine outlines, that admirable hymn of forms, that poem
whose strophes are contours, and which no one in the world has ever read
or may ever read save myself; to be the sole depositary of so splendid a
treasure! If I knew even by imitating the play of light and shadow with
the aid of lines and colours, how to fix upon wood a reflection of that
celestial face; if marble were not rebellious to my chisel, how well
would I fashion in the purest vein of Paros or Pentelicus an image of
that charming body, which would make the proud effigies of the goddesses
fall from their altars! And long after, when deep below the slime of
deluges, and beneath the dust of ruined cities, the men of future ages
should find a fragment of that petrified shadow of Nyssia, they would
cry: "Behold, how the women of this vanished world were formed!" And
they would erect a temple wherein to enshrine the divine fragment. But I
have naught save a senseless admiration and a love that is madness! Sole
adorer of an unknown divinity, I possess no power to spread her worship
through the world.'

Thus in Candaules had the enthusiasm of the artist extinguished the
jealousy of the lover. Admiration was mightier than love. If in place
of Nyssia, daughter of the Satrap Megabazus, all imbued with Oriental
ideas, he had espoused some Greek girl from Athens or Corinth, he
would certainly have invited to his court the most skilful painters
and sculptors, and have given them the queen for their model, as did
afterward Alexander his favourite Campaspe, who posed naked before
Apelles. Such a whim would have encountered no opposition from a
woman of the land where even the most chaste made a boast of having
contributed--some for the back, some for the bosom--to the perfection of
a famous statue. But hardly would the bashful Nyssia consent to unveil
herself in the discreet shadow of the thalamus, and the earnest prayers
of the king really shocked her rather than gave her pleasure. The
sentiment of duty and obedience alone induced her to yield at times to
what she styled the whims of Candaules.

Sometimes he besought her to allow the flood of her hair to flow over
her shoulders in a river of gold richer than the Pactolus, to encircle
her brow wi