——‘Fear and niceness, The handmaids of all women, or more truly, Woman its pretty self, into a waggish courage, Ready in gibes, quick-answer’d, saucy, and As quarrellous as the weazel’—— she interrupts him hastily— ‘Nay, be brief; I see into thy end, and am almost A man already.’ In her journey thus disguised to Milford-Haven, she loses her guide and her way; and unbosoming her complaints, says beautifully— ——‘My dear lord, Thou art one of the false ones; now I think on thee, My hunger’s gone; but even before, I was At point to sink for food.’ She afterwards finds, as she thinks, the dead body of Posthumus, and engages herself as a footboy to serve a Roman officer, when she has done all due obsequies to him whom she calls her former master— ——‘And when With wild wood-leaves and weeds I ha’ strew’d his grave, And on it said a century of pray’rs, Such as I can, twice o’er, I ‘ll weep and sigh, And leaving so his service, follow you, So please you entertain me.’ Now this is the very religion of love. She all along relies little on her personal charms, which she fears may have been eclipsed by some painted Jay of Italy; she relies on her merit, and her merit is in the depth of her love, her truth and constancy. Our admiration of her beauty is excited with as little consciousness as possible on her part. There are two delicious descriptions given of her, one when she is asleep, and one when she is supposed dead. Arviragus thus addresses her— ——‘With fairest flowers, While summer lasts, and I live here, Fidele, I’ll sweeten thy sad grave; thou shalt not lack The flow’r that’s like thy face, pale primrose, nor The azur’d hare-bell, like thy veins, no, nor The leaf of eglantine, which not to slander, Out-sweeten’d not thy breath.’ The yellow Iachimo gives another thus, when he steals into her bedchamber:— ——‘Cytherea, How bravely thou becom’st thy bed! Fresh lily, And whiter than the sheets! That I might touch— But kiss, one kiss—’Tis her breathing that Perfumes the chamber thus: the flame o’ th’ taper Bows toward her, and would under-peep her lids To see th’ enclosed lights now canopied Under the windows, white and azure, laced With blue of Heav’n’s own tinct—on her left breast A mole cinque-spotted, like the crimson drops I’ th’ bottom of a cowslip.’