A fair piece of writing............................

      By nature Sir Oliver was a shrewd fellow ("cunning as twenty devils," is my Lord Henry's phrase) and he was also a man of some not inconsiderable learning.  Yet neither his natural wit nor his acquired endowments appear to have taught him that of all the gods that rule the destinies of mankind there is non more ironic an malicious than that same Dan Cupid in whose honor, at it were, he was now burning the incense of that pipe of his.  The ancients knew that innocent-seeming boy for a cruel, impish knave, and they mistrusted him.  Sir Oliver either did not know or did not heed that sound piece of ancient wisdom.  It was to be borne in upon him by grim experience, and even as his light pensive eyes smiled upon the sunshine that flooded the terrace beyond the long mullioned windows, a shadow fell athwart it which he little dreamed to be symbolic of the shadow that was even then falling across the sunshine of his life.
-Rafael Sabatini,  The Sea-Hawk

reference for Dan Cupid here