[8] There is a certain, though slight enough, resemblance between some of these underground incidents and those which happen in a romance of travel, which Keats may very well have read, the _Voyage d'Antenor_, then popular both in France and in an English translation. Antenor is permitted by the Egyptian priests to pass through the triple ordeal by fire, water, and air contrived by them in the vast subterranean vaults under the temple of Osiris. The points of most resemblance are the suspended guiding light seen from within the entrance, the rushing of the water streams, and the ascent by a path between balustrades. The _Voyage d'Antenor_ was itself founded on an earlier and much rarer French romance, _Sethos_, and both were freely and avowedly imitated by Thomas Moore in his prose tale, the _Epicurean_ (1827). Mr Robert Bridges has noticed a point in common between _Endymion_ and the _Epicurean_ in the sudden breaking off or crumbling away of the balustrade under the wayfarer's feet. This does not occur in _Sethos_ or _Antenor_, and was probably borrowed by Moore from Keats. [9] How familiar, both with the text and the translator's commentary, is proved by his adopting as his own, almost literally, a phrase which Sandys brings in by way of illustrative comment from the _Imagines_ (a description of an imaginary picture-gallery) of Philostratus. Philostratus, coming to a picture of Glaucus, tells how the painter had given him 'thick and arched eyebrows which touched one another.' Keats writes,-- his snow-white brows _Went arching up_, and like two magic ploughs Furrowed deep wrinkles in his forehead large. It was the look and expression of Keats in reciting this same phrase, the reader will remember, which so struck Bailey that he found himself vividly recalling it thirty years later (see above, p. 144). [10] Mr Mackail sees in this shell and its secret characters a reminiscence of the mystic shell, which is also a book, carried in the right hand of the sheikh who is also Don Quixote in the dream narrated by Wordsworth in the third book of _The Prelude_. I owe so very much of the interpretation above attempted to Mr Mackail that I am bound to record his opinion: but as I shall show later (p. 251), it is scarcely possible that any passages from _The Prelude_ should have come to Keats's knowledge until after _Endymion_ was finished. [11] Ovid, _Metam._ xiii, 810-840; Theocr. _Idyll_. xi, 30 _sqq._ CHAPTER VII _ENDYMION._--II. THE POETRY: ITS QUALITIES AND AFFINITIES