led Love and the
Maiden. A girl has fallen asleep in a wood of olive trees, through whose
branches and grey leaves we can see the glimmer of sky and sea, with a
little seaport town of white houses shining in the sunlight. The olive
wood is ever sacred to the Virgin Pallas, the Goddess of Wisdom; and who
would have dreamed of finding Eros hidden there? But the girl wakes up,
as one wakes from sleep one knows not why, to see the face of the boy
Love, who, with outstretched hands, is leaning towards her from the midst
of a rhododendron's crimson blossoms. A rose-garland presses the boy's
brown curls, and he is clad in a tunic of oriental colours, and
delicately sensuous are his face and his bared limbs. His boyish beauty
is of that peculiar type unknown in Northern Europe, but common in the
Greek islands, where boys can still be found as beautiful as the
Charmides of Plato. Guido's St. Sebastian in the Palazzo Rosso at Genoa
is one of those boys, and Perugino once drew a Greek Ganymede for his
native town, but the painter who most shows the influence of this type is
Correggio, whose lily-bearer in the Cathedral at Parma, and whose wild-
eyed, open-mouthed St. Johns in the 'Incoronata Madonna' of St. Giovanni
Evangelista, are the best examples in art of the bloom and vitality and
radiance of this adolescent beauty. And so there is extreme loveliness
in this figure of Love by Mr. Stanhope, and the whole picture is full of
grace, though there is, perhaps, too great a luxuriance of colour, and it
would have been a relief had the girl been dressed in pure white.

Mr. Frederick Burton, of whom all Irishmen are so justly proud, is
represented by a fine water-colour portrait of Mrs. George Smith; one
would almost believe it to be in oils, so great is the lustre on this
lady's raven-black hair, and so rich and broad and vigorous is the
painting of a Japanese scarf she is wearing. Then as we turn to the east
wall of the gallery we see the three great pictures of Burne-Jones, the
Beguiling of Merlin, the Days of Creation, and the Mirror of Venus. The
version of the legend of Merlin's Beguiling that Mr. Burne-Jones has
followed differs from Mr. Tennyson's and from the account in the Morte
d'Arthur. It is taken from the Romance of Merlin, which tells the story
in this wise:

It fell on a day that they went through the forest of Breceliande, and
found a bush that was fair and high, of white hawthorn, full of
flowers,