Dorus did so well in answering Thyrsis that everyone desired to hear him sing something alone. Seeing therefore a lute lying under the Princess Pamela’s feet, glad to have such an errand to {103} approach her, he came, but came with a dismayed grace, all his blood stirred betwixt fear and desire, and playing upon it with such sweetness, as everybody wondered to see such skill in a shepherd, he sung unto it with a sorrowing voice, these elegiac verses: DORUS Fortune, Nature, Love, long have contended about me, Which should most miseries cast on a worm that I am, Fortune thus gan say, “Misery and misfortune is all one, And of misfortune, Fortune hath only the gift With strong foes on land, on sea with contrary tempests, Still do I cross this wretch, what so he taketh in hand.” “Tush, tush,” said Nature, “this is all but a trifle, a man’s self Gives haps or mishaps, even as he ordereth his heart. But so his humour I frame, in a mould of choler adusted, That the delights of life shall be to him dolorous.” Love smiled, and thus said: “Want join’d to desire is unhappy: But if he nought do desire, what can Heraclitus ail? None but I work by desire: by desire have I kindled in his soul Infernal agonies into a beauty divine: Where thou poor nature left’st all thy due glory, to Fortune Her virtue’s sovereign, Fortune a vassal of hers.” Nature abash’d went back: Fortune blush’d: yet she replied thus: “And even in that love shall I reserve him a spite.” Thus, thus, alas! woeful by Nature, unhappy by Fortune, But most wretched I am, now Love awakes my desire. Dorus when he had sung this, having had all the while a free beholding of the fair Pamela (who could well have spared such honour; and defended the assault he gave unto her face with bringing a fair stain of shamefacedness unto it) let fall his arms, and remained so fastened in his thoughts as if Pamela had grafted him there to grow in continual imagination. But Zelmane espying it, and fearing he should too much forget himself, she came to him, and took out of his hand the lute, and laying fast hold of Philoclea’s face with her eyes, she sung these sapphics, speaking as it were to her own hope: