that may be vaguely described as “aesthetic.”  Even more distinctly than in Swinburne, English romanticism in these latest representatives is seen to be taking a French direction.  They show the influence not only of Hugo and Gautier, but of those more recent schools of “decadents” which exhibit French romanticism in its deliquescent stage; writers like Theodore de Banville and Charles Baudelaire; books like Aloysius Bertrand’s “Gaspard de la Nuit.”  Morbid states of passion, the hectic bloom of fever, heady perfumes of the Orient and the tropics; the bitter-sweet blossom of love; forced fruits of the hot-house (serres chaudes); the iridescence of standing pools; the fungoidal growths of decay; such are some of the hackneyed metaphors which render the impression of this neo-romantic poetry.

Marzials was born at, Brussels, of French parents.  His “Gallery of Pigeons” is inscribed to the modern Provencal poet Aubanel, and introduced by a French sonnet.  O’Shaughnessy “was half a Frenchman in his love for, and mastery of, the French language";[49] and on his frequent visits to Paris, made close acquaintance with Victor Hugo and the younger school of French poets.  O’Shaughnessy and Payne were intimate friends, and dedicated their first books to each other.  In 1870-72 they were members of the literary circle that assembled at the house of Ford Madox Brown, and there they met the Rossettis, Morris, Swinburne, and William Bell Scott.  O’Shaughnessy emerges most distinctly from the group by reason of his very original and exquisite lyrical gift—­a gift not fully recognised till Mr. Palgrave accorded him, in the second series of his “Golden Treasury” (1897), a greater number of selections than any Victorian poet but Tennyson:  a larger space than he gave either to Browning or Rossetti or Matthew Arnold.[50] Comparatively little of O’Shaughnessy’s work belongs to the department of mediaeval-romantic.  His “Lays of France,” five in number, are founded upon the lais of Marie de France, the Norman poetess of the thirteenth century whose little fable, “Du coq et du werpil,” Chaucer expanded into his “Nonne Prestes Tale.”  O’Shaughnessy’s versions are not so much paraphrases as independent poems, following Marie’s stories merely in outline.

The verse is the eight-syllabled couplet with variations and alternate riming, the style follows the graceful, fluent simplicity of the Old French; and in its softly articulated, bright-coloured prolixity, the narrative frequently suggests “The Earthly Paradise” or “The Story of Rimini.”  The most remarkable of these pieces is “Chaitivel,” in which the body of a bride is carried away by a dead lover, while another dead lover comes back from his grave in Palestine and fights with the bridegroom for possession of her soul.  The song which the lady sings to the buried man is true to that strange mediaeval materialism, the cleaving of “soul’s love” to “body’s love,” the tenderness intense that pierces the “wormy circumstance” of the tomb, and refuses to let the dead be dead, which was noted in Keats’ “Isabella”: