altered or departed from in the course of composition.  It is difficult to conceive for what purpose the character of Calligone, the sister and fiancee of Clitophon, is introduced among the dramatic personae.  She appears at the beginning only to be carried off by Callisthenes as soon as Clitophon’s passion for Leucippe makes her presence inconvenient, and we incidentally hear of her as on the point of becoming his bride at the conclusion; but she is seen only for a moment, and never permitted to speak, like a walking gentlewoman on the stage, and exercises not the smallest influence on the fortunes of the others.  Gorgias is still worse used:  he is a mere nominis umbra, of whose bodily presence nothing is made visible; nor is so much as his name mentioned, except for the purpose of informing us that it was through his agency that the love-potion was administered to Leucippe, and that he has since been killed in the action against the buccaniers.  The whole incident of the philtre, indeed, and the consequent madness of the heroine, is unnatural and revolting, and serves no end but to introduce Choereas to effect a cure.  But even had it been indispensable to the plot, it might have been far more probably ascribed to the Egyptian commander Charmides, with whose passion for Leucippe we were already acquainted, and who had, moreover, learned from Menelaus that he had little chance of success by ordinary methods, from the pre-engagement of the lady to Clitophon.

Nor are these defects compensated by any high degree of merit in the delineation of the characters.  With the exception of Leucippe herself, they are all almost wholly devoid of individual or distinguishing traits, and insipid and uninteresting to the last degree.  Menelaus and Clinias, the confidants and trusted friends of the hero, are the dullest of all dull mortals—­a qualification which perhaps fits them in some measure for the part they are to bear in the story, as affording some security against their falling in love with Leucippe, a fate which they, of all the masculine personages, alone escape.  Their active intervention is confined to the preservation of Leucippe from the bucoli by Menelaus, and a great deal of useless declamation in behalf of Clitophon before the assembly of Ephesus from Clinias.  Satyrus, also, from whose knavish ingenuity in the early part of the tale something better was to be expected, soon subsides into a well-behaved domestic, and hands his master the letter in which poor Leucippe makes herself known to him at Ephesus, when she imagines him married to Melissa, with all the nonchalance of a modern footman.  Clitophon himself is hardly a shade superior to his companions.  He is throughout a mere passive instrument, leaving to chance, or the exertions of others, his extrication from the various troubles in which he becomes involved:  even of the qualities usually regarded as inseparable from a hero of romance, spirit and personal courage,