Paphian

True to his Paphian mother, trace by trace, / slowly the Love-god with prevenient art, / begins the lost Sychaeus to efface, / and living passion to a breast impart / long dead to feeling, and a vacant heart.

Cease admiration, sit to Cupid's feast, / The preparation to Paphian dalliance.

I lay, as it were, in the Paphian bower of bliss, in a state of exquisite sensations quite impossible to describe.

People passed, but they held me not. Paphian eyes rayed upon me, and left me unscathed.

Then thus incensed, the Paphian queen replies: / "Obey the power from whom thy glories rise: / Should Venus leave thee, every charm must fly, / Fade from thy cheek, and languish in thy eye. / Cease to provoke me, lest I make thee more / The world’s aversion, than their love before; / Now the bright prize for which mankind engage, / Than, the sad victim, of the public rage."

So ſaying, the might of Vulcan loos’d the ſnare, / And they, detain’d by thoſe coercive bands / No longer, from the couch upſtarting, flew, / Mars into Thrace, and to her Paphian home / The Queen of ſmiles, where deep in myrtle groves / Her incenſe-breathing altar ſtands embow’r’d.

They reach'd the hotel: forth stream'd from the front door / A tide of well-clad waiters, and around / The mob stood, and as usual several score / Of those pedestrian Paphians who abound / In decent London when the daylight's o'er; / Commodious but immoral, they are found / Useful, like Malthus, in promoting marriage.

A smile I had learned to know elsewhere lurked at one corner of my paphian's mouth.

Then there is the mastus. Apollodorus the Cyrenæan, as Pamphilus says, states that this is a name given to drinking-cups by the Paphians.