The relation of this fragment to the Pre-Raphaelites of the mid nineteenth century and their work is altogether curious and interesting. It was natural that it should appeal to them by the pure and living freshness of English nature-description with which it opens, by the perfectly imagined scene of hushed movement in the twilight streets that follows, perhaps most of all by the insistent delight in vivid colour, and in minuteness of animated and suggestive detail, which marks the final indoor scene of the maiden Bertha over her book by firelight. But what is strange is that Rossetti should not only have coupled the fragment with _La Belle Dame sans Merci_ as 'the chastest and choicest example of Keats's maturing manner,' an opinion which may well pass, but that he should have claimed it as showing 'astonishingly real mediaevalism for one not bred an artist,' and even as the finest picture of the Middle Age period ever done. The truth is that the description of the Sabbath streets and the maiden's chamber are not mediaeval at all and probably not intended to be, while the one thing so intended, the illuminated manuscript from which she reads, is a quite impossible invention jumbling fantastically together things that never could have figured in the same manuscript, things from the Golden Legend, from the book of Exodus, the book of Revelation, with others from no possible manuscript source at all. Keats evidently took some interest in mediaeval illuminations, for in speculating on the old skulls of supposed monks at Beauly Abbey he had apostrophized one of them,-- Poor Skull, thy fingers set ablaze With silver saint in golden rays, The holy Missal: thou didst craze Mid bead and spangle, While others pass'd their idle days In coil and wrangle. But he can have seen few and made no study of them, and his imagined mystically illuminated book in _The Eve of St Mark_ is invented with no such fine instinctive tact or likelihood as his imagined Grecian urn of the ode.