years of age, that going between Cenchreas and Corinth, met such a phantasm in the habit of a fair gentlewoman, which taking him by the hand, carried him home to her house in the suburbs of Corinth, and told him she was a Phoenician by birth, and if he would tarry with her, [4676]"he should hear her sing and play, and drink such wine as never any drank, and no man should molest him; but she being fair and lovely would live and die with him, that was fair and lovely to behold.”  The young man a philosopher, otherwise staid and discreet, able to moderate his passions, though not this of love, tarried with her awhile to his great content, and at last married her, to whose wedding, amongst other guests, came Apollonius, who, by some probable conjectures, found her out to be a serpent, a lamia, and that all her furniture was like Tantalus’s gold described by Homer, no substance, but mere illusions.  When she saw herself descried, she wept, and desired Apollonius to be silent, but he would not be moved, and thereupon she, plate, house, and all that was in it, vanished in an instant:  [4677]"many thousands took notice of this fact, for it was done in the midst of Greece.”  Sabine in his Comment on the tenth of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, at the tale of Orpheus, telleth us of a gentleman of Bavaria, that for many months together bewailed the loss of his dear wife; at length the devil in her habit came and comforted him, and told him, because he was so importunate for her, that she would come and live with him again, on that condition he would be new married, never swear and blaspheme as he used formerly to do; for if he did, she should be gone:  [4678]"he vowed it, married, and lived with her, she brought him children, and governed his house, but was still pale and sad, and so continued, till one day falling out with him, he fell a swearing; she vanished thereupon, and was never after seen.” [4679]"This I have heard,” saith Sabine, “from persons of good credit, which told me that the Duke of Bavaria did tell it for a certainty to the Duke of Saxony.”  One more I will relate out of Florilegus, ad annum 1058, an honest historian of our nation, because he telleth it so confidently, as a thing in those days talked of all over Europe:  a young gentleman of Rome, the same day that he was married, after dinner with the bride and his friends went a walking into the fields, and towards evening to the tennis-court to recreate himself; whilst he played, he put his ring upon the finger of Venus statua, which was thereby made in brass; after he had sufficiently played, and now made an end of his sport, he came to fetch his ring, but Venus had bowed her finger in, and he could not get it off.  Whereupon loath to make his company tarry at present, there left it, intending to fetch it the next day, or at some more convenient time, went thence to supper, and so to bed.  In the night, when he should come to perform those nuptial rites, Venus steps between him and his wife