--SUBTLETY OF THE MAGICIAN.--HE
IS DEFEATED.--END OF THE SECOND DAY.
The magician, overwhelmed and confounded with uninterrupted
disappointment, was now ready to give himself up to despair. "I have
approached the inflexible fair one," cried he, "by every avenue that
leads to the female heart. And what is the amount of the advantages I
have gained? I tempted her with riches. But riches she considered with
disdain; they had nothing analogous to the temper of her mind, and her
uncultivated simplicity regarded them as superfluous and cumbersome. I
taught her to listen to the voice of flattery; I clothed it in all that
is plausible and insinuating; but to no purpose. She was still upon her
guard; all her suspicions were awake; and her integrity and her
innocence were as vigilant as ever. Incapable of effecting any thing
under that form she had learned to detest, I laid it aside. I assumed a
form most prepossessing and most amiable in her eyes. Surely if her
breast had not been as cold as the snow that clothes the summit of
Snowdon; if her virtue had not been impregnable as the groves of Mona, a
stratagem, omnipotent and impenetrable as this, must have succeeded. She
beheld the figure of him she loved, and this was calculated in a moment
of distress to draw forth all her softness.
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