subject: Earlier Literary Manifestations [print this page] And yet, at a time, in the early 1650s, when royalists including Hyde were arguing that Charles's personal qualities were all that royalism and Charles himself could now survive on, the figure of Artaxerxes remains a potent one with which to identify him. Accordingly, Cotterell's portrayal of Artaxerxes continues in equally encomiastic terms: And truly I must confess to you, that the Sun never had any thing more lovely than Artaxerxes, and that I have not attributed any qualities to my Master, which that Prince possessed not as advantageously as he: You already know something of his valor, his handsomeness was admirable, his goodness went beyond it, and in all his actions he had a grace so little common, that it was impossible to know him and not to love him. Moreover, Cassandra, as with the romance genre in general, displays a usefully flexible interface with current events, so that when Artaxerxes dies in battle, and widespread mourning for him takes place among the Asian royal family, topical attention can seamlessly and poignantly be transferred from Charles to the still-recent death of his father: I will not tell you Darius his grief, nor that of the Queens and Princesses for the death of a son, and of a brother, to whom it was so due, we were too far off to be witnesses of it; but we have known since, that the King bore that loss with less patience then that of his Dominions, and that the Princesses by whom he was so ardently beloved, being weary of their lives when he was gon, were like to have followed him to his grave; and one may truly say, that never Prince was so generally bewailed in Asia.
