Thus one finds in the delightful fantasy of _Arria Marcella_ not only a dream of "Pompeiian Days," pictured with an idealistic brilliancy beyond the art of Coomans, but a rich knowledge, likewise, of all that fascinating lore gleaned by antiquarian research amid the ashes of the sepultured city--a knowledge enriched in no small degree by local study, and presented with a descriptive power finely strengthened by personal observation. It is something more than the charming imagination of a poetic dreamer which paints for us the blue sea "unrolling its long volutes of foam" upon a beach as black and smooth as sifted charcoal; the fissured summit of Vesuvius, out-pouring white threads of smoke from its crannies "as from the orifices of a perfuming pan;" and the far-purple hills "with outlines voluptuously undulating, like the hips of a woman." And throughout these romances one finds the same evidences of archæologic study, of artistic observation, of imagination fostered by picturesque fact. The glory of the Greek kings of Lydia glows goldenly again in the pages of _Le Roi Candaule_; the massive gloom and melancholy weirdness of ancient Egypt is reflected as in a necromancer's mirror throughout _Une Nuit de Cléopâtre_. It is in the Egyptian fantasies, perhaps, that the author's peculiar descriptive skill appears to most advantage; the still fresh hues of the hierophantic paintings, the pictured sarcophagi, and the mummy-gilding seem to meet the reader's eye with the gratification of their bright contrasts; a faint perfume of unknown balm seems to hover over the open pages; and mysterious sphinxes appear to look on "with that undefinable rose-granite smile that mocks our modern wisdom." Excepting _Omphale_ and _La Morte Amoureuse,_ the stories selected for translation are mostly antique in composition and coloring; the former being Louis-Quinze, the latter mediæval rather than aught else. But all alike frame some exquisite delineation of young love-fancies; some admirable picture of what Gautier in the _Histoire du Romantisme_ has prettily termed "the graceful _succubi_ that haunt the happy slumbers of youth." And what dreamful student of the Beautiful has not been once enamoured of an Arria Marcella, and worshipped on the altar of his heart those ancient gods "who loved life and youth and beauty and pleasure"? How many a lover of mediæval legend has in fancy gladly bartered the blood of his veins for some phantom Clarimonde? What true artist has not at some time been haunted by the image of a Nyssia, fairer than all daughters of men, lovelier than all fantasies realized in stone--a Pygmalion-wrought marble transmuted by divine alchemy to a being of opalescent flesh and ichor-throbbing veins?