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Updated: May 2, 2025
This Basilio is a youth of the same village as Quiteria, and he lived in the house next door to that of her parents, of which circumstance Love took advantage to reproduce to the word the long-forgotten loves of Pyramus and Thisbe; for Basilio loved Quiteria from his earliest years, and she responded to his passion with countless modest proofs of affection, so that the loves of the two children, Basilio and Quiteria, were the talk and the amusement of the town.
"We'll take her before their very noses, and if that does not rouse them, I do not know what will," observed the captain, as he gave the orders to make sail in chase. The schooner, little expecting to be snapped up by an enemy in the very sight of port, endeavoured in vain to escape. The "Thisbe," like an eagle towards its prey, flew after her, and in a short time she was a prize.
As they stood, Pyramus on this side, Thisbe on that, their breaths would mingle. "Cruel wall," they said, "why do you keep two lovers apart? But we will not be ungrateful. We owe you, we confess, the privilege of transmitting loving words to willing ears."
The two leading ships of the enemy had been made out to be frigates, as it was thought probable were their consorts astern; and even though they might fail to capture the Thisbe, they might knock away her masts and spars, and so maul her that she would be compelled to succumb to the line-of-battle ship coming up from the westward.
Still the uninjured condition of the enemy's rigging gave her an important advantage; her shot came crashing on board the "Thisbe." Whatever Captain Courtney might have thought, he appeared as cheerful and confident as ever. His courage kept up that of the crew. The enemy was frequently hulled. Now one spar was shot away; now another; his fire slackened. The British crew cheered lustily.
"I am afraid that is more than she will do," observed Jack. "She is fast driving towards the shore." "Can she be the Thisbe?" exclaimed Jacob. "I think not," observed Harry, "her canvas has not to my eye the spread of a man-of-war." As the stranger drew nearer, most of the party agreed that Lieutenant Castleton was right, she was certainly not a man-of-war.
She heard the sound of a footfall and turned to behold not Pyramus, but a creature unwelcome to any tryst none other than a lioness crouching to drink from the pool hard by. Without a cry, Thisbe fled, dropping her veil as she ran. She found a hiding-place among the rocks at some distance, and there she waited, not knowing what else to do.
There is nothing more futile than a play in which we feel that there is no real obstacle to the inevitable happy ending, and that the curtain might just as well fall in the middle of the first act as at the end of the third. "Pyramus and Thisbe without the wall" may be taken as the formula for the whole type of play.
She died; but her face wore a calm expression, and she looked pityingly and forgivingly on her husband when he made her understand the truth. In Shakespeare's play just quoted, there is an allusion to Cephalus and Procris, although rather badly spelt. Pyramus says, "Not Shafalus to Procrus was so true." Thisbe. "As Shafalus to Procrus, I to you."
Like the tedious brief scene of young Pyramus and Thisbe, this is a poem of "very tragical mirth."
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