engagement of the lady to
Clitophon.

Nor are these defects compensated by any high degree of merit in the
delineation of the characters. With the exception of Leucippe herself,
they are all almost wholly devoid of individual or distinguishing
traits, and insipid and uninteresting to the last degree. Menelaus and
Clinias, the confidants and trusted friends of the hero, are the
dullest of all dull mortals--a qualification which perhaps fits them
in some measure for the part they are to bear in the story, as
affording some security against their falling in love with Leucippe, a
fate which they, of all the masculine personages, alone escape. Their
active intervention is confined to the preservation of Leucippe from
the _bucoli_ by Menelaus, and a great deal of useless declamation in
behalf of Clitophon before the assembly of Ephesus from Clinias.
Satyrus, also, from whose knavish ingenuity in the early part of the
tale something better was to be expected, soon subsides into a
well-behaved domestic, and hands his master the letter in which poor
Leucippe makes herself known to him at Ephesus, when she imagines him
married to Melissa, with all the nonchalance of a modern footman.
Clitophon himself is hardly a shade superior to his companions. He is
throughout a mere passive instrument, leaving to chance, or the
exertions of others, his extrication from the various troubles in
which he becomes involved: even of the qualities usually regarded as
inseparable from a hero of romance, spirit and personal courage, he is
so utterly destitute as to suffer himself to be beaten and ill
treated, both by Thersander and Sostratus, without an attempt to
defend himself; and his lamentations, whenever he finds himself in
difficulties, or separated from his ladye-love, are absolutely
puerile. As to the other characters, Thersander is a mere vulgar
ruffian--"a rude and boisterous captain of the sea,"--whose brutal
violence on his first appearance, and subsequent unprincipled
machinations, deprive him of the sympathy which might otherwise have
been excited in behalf of one who finds his wife and his property
unceremoniously taken possession of during his absence; while, on the
other hand, the language used by the high-priest of Diana, in his
invectives against Thersander and his accomplices, gives but a low
idea of the dignity or refinement of the Ephesian hierarchy. But the
female characters, as is almost always the case in the Greek romances,