EU’MENES (3 syl.), Governor of Damascus, and father of Eudo’cia.—­John Hughes, Siege of Damascus (1720).

EUMNES’TES, Memory personified.  Spenser says he is an old man, decrepit and half blind.  He was waited on by a boy named Anamnestes. [Greek, eumnestis, “good memory,” anamnestis, “research.”—­Faery Queen, ii. 9 (1590).]

EUNICE (Alias “Nixey").  A friendless, ignorant girl, who bears an illegitimate child, while almost a child herself.  She is taken from the street by a Christian woman and taught true purity and virtue.

In her horror at the discovery of the foulness of the sin, she vows herself to the life of an uncloistered nun.  Her death in a thunderstorm is translation rather than dissolution.—­Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Hedged In (1870).

EUPHRA’SIA, daughter of Lord Dion, a character resembling “Viola” in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.  Being in love with Prince Philaster, she assumes boy’s attire, calls herself “Bellario,” and enters the prince’s service.  Philaster transfers Bellario to the Princess Arethusa, and then grows jealous of the lady’s love for her tender page.  The sex of Bellario being discovered, shows the groundlessness of this jealousy.—­Beaumont and Fletcher, Philaster or Love Lies A-bleeding (1608).

Euphra’sia, “the Grecian daughter,” was daughter of Evander, the old king of Syracuse (dethroned by Dionysius, and kept prisoner in a dungeon on the summit of a rock).  She was the wife of Phocion, who had fled from Syracuse to save their infant son.  Euphrasia, having gained admission to the dungeon where her aged father was dying from starvation, “fostered him at her breast by the milk designed for her own babe, and thus the father found a parent in the child.”  When Timoleon took Syracuse, Dionysius was about to stab Evander, but Euphrasia, rushing forward, struck the tyrant dead upon the spot.—­A.  Murphy, The Grecian Daughter (1772).

[Illustration] The same tale is told-of Xantippe, who preserved the life of her father Cimo’nos in prison.  The guard, astonished that the old man held out so long, set a watch and discovered the secret.

  There is a dungeon, in whose dim drear light
  What do I gaze on!... 
  An old man, and a female young and fair,
  Fresh as a nursing mother, in whose veins

  The blood is nectar ... 
  Here youth offers to old age the food,
  The milk of his own gift....  It is her sire,
  To whom she renders back the debt of blood.

Byron, Childe Harold, iv. 148 (1817).

EU’PHRASY, the herb eye-bright; so called because it was once supposed to be efficacious in clearing the organs of sight.  Hence the archangel Michael purged the eyes of Adam with it, to enable him to see into the distant future.—­See Milton, Paradise Lost, xi. 414-421 (1665).