LIVES OF FAIR AND GALLANT LADIES [Illustration: Decorative scrollwork above chapter start] FIFTH DISCOURSE Telling how fair and honourable ladies do love brave and valiant men, and brave men courageous women.[1*] 1. It hath ever been the case that fair and honourable ladies have loved brave and valiant men, albeit by natural bent they be cowardly and timid creatures. But such a virtue doth valour possess with them, as that they do grow altogether enamoured thereof. What else is this but to constrain their exact opposite to love them, and this spite of their own natural complexion? And for an instance of this truth, Venus, which in ancient days was the goddess of Beauty, and of all gentle and courteous bearing, being fain, there in the skies and at the Court of Jupiter, to choose her some fair and handsome lover and so make cuckold her worthy husband Vulcan, did set her choice on never a one of the pretty young gallants, those dapper, curled darlings, whereof were so many to hand, but did select and fall deep in love with the god Mars, god of armies and warlike prowess,—and this albeit he was all foul and a-sweat with the wars he had but just come from, and all besmirched with dust and as filthy as might be, more smacking of the soldier in the field than the gallant at Court. Nay! worse still, very oft mayhap all bloody, as returning from battle, he would so lie with her, without any sort of cleansing of himself or scenting of his person. Again, the fair and high-born Penthesilea, Queen of the Amazons, having learned of fame concerning the valour and prowess of the doughty Hector, and his wondrous feats of arms which he did before Troy against the Greeks, did at the mere report of all this grow so fondly enamoured of the hero, that being fain to have so valiant a knight for father of her children, her daughters to wit which should succeed to her kingdom, she did hie her forth to seek him at Troy. There beholding him, and contemplating and admiring his puissance, she did all ever she could to find favour with him, not less by the brave deeds of war she wrought than by her beauty, the which was exceeding rare. And never did Hector make sally upon his foes but she would be at his side, and was always as well to the front as Hector himself in the mêlée, wherever the fight was hottest. In such wise that ’tis said she did several times accomplish such deeds of daring and so stir the Trojan’s wonder as that he would stop short as if astonished in the midst of the fiercest combats, and so withdraw somewhat on one side, the better to see and admire this most valiant Queen doing such gallant deeds.