Maiden, from my crystal surface,
    May thy image never fade;
  Longing, longing, to embrace thee,
    I, alas! embrace a shade.

  Fainter glows each beauteous image,
    Thy beauty vanishing before;
  I will clasp thy lovely shadow,
    Fate will grant to me no more.

If the verses were not very good, L’Isle was ready to acknowledge it; but, in fact, he had not the fear of criticism before his eyes; for when did lady ever criticise verses made in her praise?  But he had reckoned without his host.  Though Lady Mabel recited them exceedingly well, in a way that showed that she must have read them over many times, and dwelt upon them, there was an under-current of ridicule running through her tones and action—­for she had personified the river-god—­and when she was done, she criticised them with merciless irony.

“This is no timid rhymster,” she exclaimed, “but a true poet of the Spanish school:  No figure is too bold for him.  A mere versifier would have likened a lady’s eyes to earthly diamonds or heavenly stars; the blessed sun itself is not too bright for our poet’s purpose.—­My timid fancy dared not follow his soaring wing; to me at the first glance, the ‘stately Roman maid’ was building her mimic Rome on the banks of the Guadiana with solid stone and tough cement, and I saddened at the sight of her labors.  To come down to the mechanism of the verse,” she continued, “besides a false rhyme or two, the measure halts a little.—­But we must not forget that the river-god is taking a poetical stroll in the shackles of a foreign tongue.  In this case we have good assurance that the poet has never been out of his own country, and to the eye of a foreigner ‘flood’ and ‘wood’ and ‘home’ and ‘come’ are perfect rhymes.  We must deal gently with the poet while ’trying his ‘prentice hand,’ hoping better things when he shall ‘become an artist true;’ and when we remember that to the national taste sublimity is represented by bombast, artifice takes the place of nature, and sense is sacrificed to sound, the love of the ore rotundo demanding mouth-filling words at any price, we cannot fail to discover the genuine Spanish beauties of the piece.  I only wonder that in his chronological picture of the races he should omit to display the Phoenician, Jewish and Gipsy maidens to our admiring eyes.”

“Heyday!” exclaimed Colonel Bradshawe, who now came in with Major Warren, while she was still standing in the middle of the floor, with the paper raised in her hand, “Is this a rehearsal?  Are we to have private theatricals, with Lady Mabel for first and sole actress?  With songs interspersed for her as prima donna?  Pray let me come in as one of the dramatis personae.”

“It is no play!” said Lady Mabel, much confused.  “I have just been throwing away my powers of elocution in an attempt to make Colonel L’Isle perceive the beauties of a piece of model poetry, moulded in the purest Spanish taste.  I thought him gifted with some poetic feeling, but he shows not the slightest sense of its peculiar merits.”