an subjects, "Belphoebe" and "The Garden of Adonis", and one,
"Bride-Night" is suggested by Wagner's "Tristram und Isolde." Payne's
work as a translator is of importance, and includes versions of the
"Decameron," "The Thousand and One Nights," and the poems of Francois
Villon, all made for the Villon Society.

Jewels and flowers are set thickly enough in the pages of all this
school; but it is in Theophile Marzials' singular, yet very attractive,
verses that the luxurious colour in which romance delights, and the
decorative features of Pre-Raphaelite art run into the most _bizarre_
excesses. He wantons in dainty affectations of speech and eccentricities
of phantasy. Here we find again the orchard closes, the pleached
pleasances, and all those queer picture paradises, peopled with tall
lilied maidens, angels with peacock wings and thin gold hoops above their
heads, and court minstrels thrumming lutes, rebecks, and mandolins--

"I dreamed I was a virginal--
The gilt one of Saint Cecily's."

The book abounds in nocturnes, arabesques, masquerades, bagatelles,
rococo pastorals. The lady in "The Gallery of Pigeons" sits at her
broidery frame and works tapestries for her walls. At night she sleeps
in the northern tower where

"Above all tracery, carven flower,
And grim gurgoil is her bower-window";

and higher up a griffin clings against a cornice,

"And gnashes and grins in the green moonlight,"

and higher still, the banderolle flutters

"At the top of the thinnest pinnacle peak."

In a Pre-Raphaelite heaven the maidens sit in the blessed mother's
chamber and spin garments for the souls in Limbo, or press sweet wine for
the sacrament, or illuminate missals with quaint phantasies. Mr. Stedman
quotes a few lines which he says have the air of parody:

"They chase them each, below, above,--
Half madden'd by their minstrelsy,--
Thro' garths of crimson gladioles;
And, shimmering soft like damoisels,
The angels swarm in glimmering shoals,
And pin them to their aureoles,
And mimick back their ritournels."

This reads, indeed, hardly less like a travesty than the well-known
verses in _Punch_:

"Glad lady mine, that glitterest
In shimmer of summer athwart the lawn;
Canst tell me whether is bitterest,
The glamour of eve, or the glimmer of dawn?"

This stained-glass imagery was so easy to copy that, before long, citoles
and damoisels and aureoles and garths and glamours