glow, for it was enclosed in a globe of prelatial purple glass. We passed on to a chamber in which purple velvet curtains were caught back by heavy silver ropes, exposing at symmetrical intervals, the black walls, on which there were several pictures: Martin Schongauer's copperplate engraving of The Temptation of Saint Anthony, in which the most obscene and foulest of fiends tear and pull and bite the patient and kindly old man; Lucas Cranach's woodcut of the same subject, more fantastic but less terrifying; two or three of Goya's Caprichos; Félicien Rops's Le Vice Suprême, in which a skeleton in evening dress, holding his head in the curve of his elbow, chapeau claque in hand, opens wide an upright coffin to permit the emergence of a female skeleton in a fashionable robe; black ravens flit across the sky; Aubrey Beardsley's Messalina; Pieter Bruegel's allegorical copperplate of Lust, crammed with loathsome details; and William Blake's picture of Plague, in which a gigantic hideous form, pale-green, with the slime of stagnant pools, reeking with vegetable decays and gangrene, the face livid with the motley tints of pallor and putrescence, strides onward with extended arms, like a sower sowing his seeds, only the germs of his rancid harvest are not cast from his hands but drip from his fusty fingers. The carpet was black and in the very centre of the room was a huge silver table, fantastically carved, the top upheld by four basilisk caryatides. On this table stood a huge egg,
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