her
worshippers.

Loveliness shall sit at the toilet, watching her oval face in the oval
mirror. Her smooth fingers shall flit among the paints and powder, to
tip and mingle them, catch up a pencil, clasp a phial, and what not
and what not, until the mask of vermeil tinct has been laid aptly, the
enamel quite hardened. And, heavens, how she will charm us and ensorcel
our eyes! Positively rouge will rob us for a time of all our reason;
we shall go mad over masks. Was it not at Capua that they had a whole
street where nothing was sold but dyes and unguents? We must have such
a street, and, to fill our new Seplasia, our Arcade of the Unguents, all
herbs and minerals and live creatures shall give of their substance.
The white cliffs of Albion shall be ground to powder for Loveliness, and
perfumed by the ghost of many a little violet. The fluffy eider-ducks,
that are swimming round the pond, shall lose their feathers, that the
powder-puff may be moonlike as it passes over Loveliness' lovely face.
Even the camels shall become ministers of delight, giving many tufts
of their hair to be stained in her splendid colour-box, and across her
cheek the swift hares foot shall fly as of old. The sea shall offer her
the phucus, its scarlet weed. We shall spill the blood of mulberries
at her bidding. And, as in another period of great ecstasy, a dancing
wanton, la belle Aubrey, was crowned upon a church's lighted altar,
so Arsenic, that 'greentress'd goddess,' ashamed at length of skulking
between the soup of the unpopular and the test-tubes of the Queen's
analyst, shall be exalted to a place of consummate honour upon the
toilet-table of Loveliness.

All these things shall come to pass. Times of jolliness and glad
indulgence! For Artifice, whom we drove forth, has returned among us,
and, though her eyes are red with crying, she is smiling forgiveness.
She is kind. Let us dance and be glad, and trip the cockawhoop!
Artifice, sweetest exile, is come into her kingdom. Let us dance her a
welcome!

Oxford, 1894.

Poor Romeo!

Even now Bath glories in his legend, not idly, for he was the most
fantastic animal that ever stepped upon her pavement. Were ever a statue
given him (and indeed he is worthy of a grotesque in marble), it would
be put in Pulteney Street or the Circus. I know that the palm trees of
Antigua overshadowed his cradle, that there must be even now in Boulogne
many who set eyes on him in the time of his less fatuou