of her most white body by Demetrios of Anatolia leaves her soul
immaculate and almost unperturbed. In this tale love is canonized:
throned on alabaster above all the vulgar gods it diffuses among its
worshipers a crystal radiance in which mortal imperfections perish--or
are at least forgotten during certain rapturous hours.

Ordinarily one cynical touch will break such pretty bubbles; but Mr.
Cabell, himself a master of cynical touches and shrewdly anticipant of
them, protects his invention with the competent armor of irony, and now
and then--particularly in the felicitous tenson spoken by Perion and
Demetrios concerning the charms of Melicent--brings mirth and beauty to
an amalgam which bids fair to prove classic metal. A much larger share
of this mirth appears in _Jurgen_, which narrates with phallic candor
the exploits of a middle-aged pawnbroker of Poictesme in pursuit of
immortal desire. Of course he does not find it, for the sufficient
reason that, as Mr. Cabell understands such matters, the ultimate magic
of desire lies in the inaccessibility of the desired; and Jurgen, to
whom all women in his amorous Cockaigne are as accessible as bread and
butter, after his sly interval of rejuvenation comes back in the end to
his wife and his humdrum duty with a definite relief. He may be no more
in love with Dame Lisa than with his right hand, and yet both are
considerably more necessary to his well-being, he discovers, than a
number of more exciting things.

Love in _Jurgen_ inclines toward another aspect of the passion which Mr.
Cabell has studied somewhat less than the chivalrous--the aspect of
gallantry. "I have read," says John Charteris, "that the secret of
gallantry is to accept the pleasures of life leisurely, and its
inconveniences with a shrug; as well as that, among other requisites,
the gallant person will always consider the world with a smile of