CHAPTER II. HIS MAJESTY.
"From nature's lawes he did decline,
For sure he was not of my mind:
He cared not for women-kinde,
But did them all disdaine."
Kophetua was undoubtedly the handsomest man in his kingdom. The slightest suspicion of Moorish blood, incurred from a Spanish ancestress, had only added, as it were, a tropical richness to the beauty which he had inherited from the founder, and that was no small inheritance. It was part of the constitution that every king of Oneiria should be known by the name of Kophetua, but a grateful and imaginative people had been dissatisfied with the bald arithmetical distinctions which this law entailed. In the old fashion they had begun to speak of their sovereigns by surnames, till an unforeseen difficulty arose. After the death of the founder, his splendid sons succeeded him one after another with an alarming rapidity, due to the reckless exposure of their persons to the early Berber enemies of the State. Every brother was handsomer than the last, and obviously demanded a surname expressive of personal beauty. It was a characteristic so dazzling that the popular mind could not fix itself on any other of the family qualities, brilliant as they were. To a humorous people the monotony soon became ridiculous, and every one was relieved when, before two generations had passed away, it was found that every word in the Oneirian vocabulary in any way synonymous with "handsome" was already exhausted, and by tacit agreement the country fell back restfully upon the limitless resources of the ordinal numbers.
So our Kophetua was simply known as "Thirteenth." Yet it made a pretty name when you got used to it. It is a soft-sounding one as it stands, and was still prettier in the popular dialect. As the trade of the country was almost entirely with the Canaries, the common people counted in Spanish, and so by a diminutive of affection their King was known to them as "Trecenito."
Yet of all the line of Kophetuas he most deserved a more distinctive surname. Any one must have so agreed who could have seen him as he sat to-day in his library with a copy of Rousseau's Origin of Inequality dropped listlessly on his knees. It was an ideal book-room, in the style of the early French Renaissance. The whole palace indeed was designed in the same manner. It was the most eclectic style the founder could light upon, and everything in Oneiria was eclectic.