and damask roses. On
a table by her side lay a mandolin and an apple. There were large
green rosettes upon her little pointed shoes. He knew her life, and
the strange stories that were told about her lovers. Had he something
of her temperament in him? These oval, heavy-lidded eyes seemed to
look curiously at him. What of George Willoughby, with his powdered
hair and fantastic patches? How evil he looked! The face was
saturnine and swarthy, and the sensual lips seemed to be twisted with
disdain. Delicate lace ruffles fell over the lean yellow hands that
were so overladen with rings. He had been a macaroni of the eighteenth
century, and the friend, in his youth, of Lord Ferrars. What of the
second Lord Beckenham, the companion of the Prince Regent in his
wildest days, and one of the witnesses at the secret marriage with Mrs.
Fitzherbert? How proud and handsome he was, with his chestnut curls
and insolent pose! What passions had he bequeathed? The world had
looked upon him as infamous. He had led the orgies at Carlton House.
The star of the Garter glittered upon his breast. Beside him hung the
portrait of his wife, a pallid, thin-lipped woman in black. Her blood,
also, stirred within him. How curious it all seemed! And his mother
with her Lady Hamilton face and her moist, wine-dashed lips--he knew
what he had got from her. He had got from her his beauty, and his
passion for the beauty of others. She laughed at him in her loose
Bacchante dress. There were vine leaves in her hair. The purple
spilled from the cup she was holding. The carnations of the painting
had withered, but the eyes were still wonderful in their depth and
brilliancy of colour. They seemed to follow him wherever he went.

Yet one had ancestors in literature as well as in one's own race,
nearer perhaps in type and temperament, many of them, and certainly
with an influence of which one was more absolutely conscious. There
were times when it appeared to Dorian Gray that the whole of history
was merely the record of his own life, not as he had lived it in act
and circumstance, but as his imagination had created it for him, as it
had been in his brain and in his passions. He felt that he had known
them all, those strange terrible figures that had passed across the
stage of the world and made sin so marvellous and evil so full of
subtlety. It seemed to him that in some mysterious way their lives had
been his own.

The hero of the wo