“A little month, or ere those shoes were old With which she follow’d my poor father’s body. Like Niobe, all tears:—why she, even she,— O God! a beast that wants discourse of reason. Would have mourn’d longer;—within a month; Ere yet the salt of most unrighteous tears Had left the flushing in her galled eyes, She married.” Tiresias, the blind soothsayer of Thebes, had foretold that the comely Narcissus would live as long as he could refrain from the sight of his own countenance,— “But he, ignorant of his destiny,” says Claude Mignault, “grew so desperately in love with his own image seen in a fountain, that he miserably wasted away, and was changed into the flower of his own name, which is called _Narce_, and means drowsiness or infatuation, because the smell of the Narcissus affects the head.” However that may be, Alciatus, edition Antwerp, 1581, exhibits the youth surveying his features in a running stream; the flower is behind him, and in the distance is Tiresias pronouncing his doom. “Self love” is the motto. Φιλαυτία _EMBLEMA LXIX._ [Illustration: _Alciat, 1581._] QVOD _nimium tua forma tibi Narciſſe placebat, In florem, & noti eſt verſa ſtuporis olus. Ingenij eſt marcor, cladesque. Φιλαυτία, doctos Quæ peſſum plures datque, deditque viros: Qui veterum abiecta methodo, noua dogmata quærunt, Nilque ſuas præter tradere phantaſias._ Anulus also, in the “PICTA POESIS” (p. 48), mentions his foolish and vain passion,— _Contemnens alios, arsit amore sui,—_ [Sidenote: _i.e._] “Despising others, inflamed he was with love of himself.” From Alciat and Anulus, Whitney takes up the fable (p. 149), his printer Rapheleng using the same wood-block as Plantyn did in 1581. Of the three stanzas we subjoin one,— “Narcissvs lou’de, and liked so his shape, He died at lengthe with gazinge there vppon: Which shewes selfe loue, from which there fewe can scape, A plague too rife: bewitcheth manie a one. The ritche, the pore, the learned, and the sotte, Offende therein: and yet they see it not.” It is only in one instance, _Antony and Cleopatra_ (act ii. sc. 5, l. 95, vol. ix. p. 48), and very briefly, that Shakespeare names Narcissus; he does this when the Messenger repeats to Cleopatra that Antony is married, and she replies,— “The Gods confound thee!... ... Go, get thee hence: Hadst thou Narcissus in thy face, to me Thou wouldst appear most ugly.” [Illustration: _Aneau, 1551._]