,
The bedstead shall be gold two spans,
The bedfoot silver fine."

"The Masque of Queen Bersabe" is a miracle play, and imitates the rough
_naivete_ of the old Scriptural drama, with its grotesque stage
directions and innocent anachronisms. Nathan recommends King David to
hear a mass. All the _dramatis personae_ swear by Godis rood, by Paulis
head, and Peter's soul, except "Secundus Miles" (_Paganus quidam_), a bad
man--a species of Vice--who swears by Satan and Mahound, and is finally
carried off by the comic devil:

"_S. M._ I rede you in the devil's name,
Ye come not here to make men game;
By Termagaunt that maketh grame,
I shall to-bete thine head.
_Hic Diabolus capiat eum_." [59]

Similarly "St. Dorothy" reproduces the childlike faith and simplicity of
the old martyrologies.[60] Theophilus addresses the Emperor Gabalus with
"Beau Sire, Dieu vous aide." The wicked Gabalus himself, though a
heathen, curses by St. Luke and by God's blood and bones, and quotes
Scripture. Theophilus first catches sight of Dorothy through a latticed
window, holding a green and red psalter among a troop of maidens who play
upon short-stringed lutes. The temple of Venus where he does his
devotions is a "church" with stained-glass windows. Heaven is a walled
pleasance, like the Garden of Delight in the "Roman de la Rose,"

"Thick with companies
Of fair-clothed men that play on shawms and lutes."

Swinburne has also essayed the minstrel ballad in various forms. There
were some half-dozen pieces of the sort in the "Laus Veneris" volume, of
which several, like "The King's Daughter" and "The Sea-Swallows," were
imitations of Rossetti's and Morris' imitations, artistically overwrought
with elaborate Pre-Raphaelite refrains; others, like "May Janet" and "The
Bloody Son," are closer to popular models. The third series of "Poems
and Ballads" (1889) contains nine of these in the Scotch dialect, two of
them Jacobite songs. That Swinburne has a fine instinct in such matters
and holds the true theory of ballad imitation is evident from his review
of Rossetti's and Morris' work in the same kind.[61] "The highest form
of ballad requires, from a poet," he writes, "at once narrative power,
lyrical and dramatic. . . . It must condense the large, loose fluency of
romantic tale-telling into tight and intense brevity. . . . There can be
no pause in a ballad, and no excess; nothi