ALTAMO’RUS, king of Samarcand’, who joined the Egyptian armament against the crusaders.  He surrendered himself to Godfrey (bk. xx.).—­Tasso, Jerusalem Delivered (1575).

ALTASCAR (Senor).  A courtly old Spaniard in Bret Harte’s Notes by Flood and Field.  He is dispossessed of his corral in the Sacramento Valley by a party of government surveyors, who have come to correct boundaries (1878).

ALTEMERA.  Typical far-southern girl, with a lovely face, creamy skin, and a “lazy sweet voice,” who takes the leading part in Annie Eliot’s An Hour’s Promise (1888).

ALTHAEA’S BRAND.  The Fates told Althaea that her son Melea’ger would live just as long as a log of wood then on the fire remained unconsumed.  Althaea contrived to keep the log unconsumed for many years, but when her son killed her two brothers, she threw it angrily into the fire, where it was quickly consumed, and Meleager expired at the same time.—­Ovid, Metaph. viii. 4.

  The fatal brand Althaea burned. 
  Shakespeare, 2 Henry VI. act i. sc. 1 (1591).

ALTHE’A (The divine), of Richard Lovelace, was Lucy Saeheverell, also called by the poet, Lucasta.

  When love with unconfined wings
  Hovers within my gates,
  And my divine Althea brings
  To whisper at my grates.

(The “grates” here referred to were those of a prison in which Lovelace was confined by the Long Parliament, for his petition from Kent in favor of the king.)

ALTHEETAR, one of the seven bridegrooms of Lopluel, condemned to die successively, by a malignant spirit.  He is young, beautiful, and endowed with rare gifts of soul and mind.  While singing to her, his lyre falls from his hand and he dies in her arms, her loosened hair falling about him as a shroud.

  “So calm, so fair,
  He rested on the purple, tapestried floor,
  It seemed an angel lay reposing there.”

Lopluel, or the Bride of Seven, by Maria del Occidente (Maria Gowen Brooks) (1833).

ALTISIDO’RA, one of the duchess’s servants, who pretends to be in love with don Quixote, and serenades him.  The don sings his response that he has no other love than what he gives to his Dulcin’ea, and while he is still singing he is assailed by a string of cats, let into the room by a rope.  As the knight is leaving the mansion, Altisidora accuses him of having stolen her garters, but when the knight denies the charge, the damsel protests that she said so in her distraction, for her garters were not stolen.  “I am like the man looking for his mule at the time he was astride its back.”—­Cervantes, Don Quixote, II. iii. 9, etc.; iv. 5 (1615).