merly sworn by travellers at Highgate—such as "never to stir the fire with a sword, and never to kiss any woman above two-and-twenty"[1]—they should in good time find their way there again. Just as the writer is taking his leave, "Ulysses, unknown to Penelope, slipped into his hand a note to Calypso, directed to the island of Ogygia." The note, in the course of their subsequent wanderings, was duly delivered, and Calypso entertained the hearers very handsomely in her island; asking, not without tears, many questions about her old lover; and also—whether Penelope was really so very lovely and so virtuous? to which, very prudently, says Lucian, "we made such a reply as we thought would please her best."
They meet with some other adventures, tedious to our ears, sated as they are with fiction in all shapes, but probably not so to the hearers or readers to whom Lucian addressed them. But either he grew tired of story-telling, or the conclusion of this "Veracious History" has been lost; for it breaks off abruptly,
- ↑ This latter caution bears a curious similarity to one of the parting injunctions which Perceval (or Peredur), when setting out from home in quest of adventures, receives from his mother, and which appears with little variation in the Welsh, Breton, and Norman legends—to kiss every demoiselle he meets, without waiting for her permission; it is, she assures him, a point of chivalry. He carries out his instructions, according to one raconteur, by kissing the first lady he falls in with "vingt fois," in spite of her resistance, pleading his filial obligation:
"Ma mère m'enseigna et dit
Que les pucèles saluasse
En quel lieu que je les trovasse."
—Chrestien de Troyes.
