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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: night. She must not, however, see him, for light must not fall on his body or else he at once disappears. But the wife, instigated by her mother, steals a sight of him by lamp-light, with the consequence that he awakes and vanishes. Then follow her trials, pursuit, and recovery of him. The beautiful Greek tale of Psyche and Cupid is but a variation of the same myth. Psyche, the youngest of three royal daughters, incurs the wrath of Venus, who sends Cupid to inspire her with love for something contemptible; as Titania, in Shakespeare, is made to fall in love with the transformed weaver, Bottom. But Cupid, captivated by her beauty, falls in love with her himself, conveys her to a secret cave, and visits her only at night, under strict charge of her not attempting to see him by any light. Her jealous sisters persuade her that she is married to some ugly monster, and she accordingly determines to disobey his injunctions, and inspect him by lamp-light . In so doing, she allows in her admiration of his beauty, a drop of hot oil to fall on his shoulder, and he awakes, and escapes. She suffers woes untold in her pursuit of him, being finally a slave in the household of Venus, who treats her very cruelly. But, of course, she recovers her lost lover at long last. And, again, in India, in the old religious books of the Brahmins, is a somewhat similar taleâthe story of Urvasi and Pururavas, the main features of which are the same as the Gaelic and Greek tales already given. To the English reader, the well- known tale of " Beauty and the Beast" will at once occur as an exact parallel to all these. And, if we take the myths where the heroine is the loathly monster, we shall find an equally wide distribution. We have the Hindu tale, where the Princess is disguised as a withered old woman; the Lo...