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; nothing that flags, nothing that overflows.”  He pronounces “Sister Helen” the greatest ballad in modern English; but he thinks that “Stratton Water,” which is less independent in composition, and copies the formal as well as the essential characteristics of popular poetry, is “a study after the old manner too close to be no closer.  It is not meant for a perfect and absolute piece of work in the old Border fashion, . . . and yet it is so far a copy that it seems hardly well to have gone so far and no farther.  On this ground Mr. Morris has a firmer tread than the great artist by the light of whose genius and kindly guidance he put forth the first fruits of his work, as I did afterwards.  In his first book, the ballad of ‘Welland River,’ the Christmas carol in ‘The Land East of the Sun and West of the Moon,’ etc., . . . are examples of flawless work in the pure early manner.  Any less absolute and decisive revival of mediaeval form . . . rouses some sense of failure by excess or default of resemblance.”