high over her head among the branches, her delicate fingers just meeting
round one of the burnished apples that glow amidst the leaves like
'golden lamps in a green night.' An amethyst-coloured serpent, with a
devilish human head, is twisting round the trunk of the tree and breathes
into the woman's ear a blue flame of evil counsel. At the feet of Eve
bright flowers are growing, tulips, narcissi, lilies, and anemones, all
painted with a loving patience that reminds us of the older Florentine
masters; after whose example, too, Mr. Stanhope has used gilding for
Eve's hair and for the bright fruits.

Next to it is another picture by the same artist, entitled Love and the
Maiden. A girl has fallen asleep in a wood of olive trees, through whose
branches and grey leaves we can see the glimmer of sky and sea, with a
little seaport town of white houses shining in the sunlight. The olive
wood is ever sacred to the Virgin Pallas, the Goddess of Wisdom; and who
would have dreamed of finding Eros hidden there? But the girl wakes up,
as one wakes from sleep one knows not why, to see the face of the boy
Love, who, with outstretched hands, is leaning towards her from the midst
of a rhododendron's crimson blossoms. A rose-garland presses the boy's
brown curls, and he is clad in a tunic of oriental colours, and
delicately sensuous are his face and his bared limbs. His boyish beauty
is of that peculiar type unknown in Northern Europe, but common in the
Greek islands, where boys can still be found as beautiful as the
Charmides of Plato. Guido's St. Sebastian in the Palazzo Rosso at Genoa
is one of those boys, and Perugino once drew a Greek Ganymede for his
native town, but the painter who most shows the influence of this type is
Correggio, whose lily-bearer in the Cathedral at Parma, and whose wild-
eyed, open-mouthed St. Johns in the 'Incoronata Madonna' of St. Giovanni
Evangelista, are the best examples in art of the bloom and vitality and
radiance of this adolescent beauty. And so there is extreme loveliness