We may take a few examples in order to illustrate the decoration. It consists of painting on the surface, of carved figures in unglazed relief, and of forms glazed and attached to the surface. Of the first of these the choice is wide. On some appear hunting dogs full of life and action and in many attitudes. On another is a Cupid with full-drawn bow, rosy and chubby, and evidently bent upon dealing a fatal wound. On a third is a nymph and satyr (Fig. 241). A fourth shows us a barn-yard pair, a duck and drake, the latter preening himself in the sun, under which his many-hued plumage glitters with a lustre almost iridescent. On a fifth a gayly feathered open-throated songster appears to be warbling his even-song upon a tiny spray. Flowers are painted with all the splendor of nature, and cling round the forms with gracefully sweeping stem. One in particular is made attractive simply by its color, a mottled gray, into the depths of which we look as into the clouds hanging over the couch of the sun in the early mornings of summer. Its beauty is in its suggestiveness, which strikes us again in many of the flower-wreathed vases where there are openings of green, into which one can look as into a forest glade. The mind creates what the eye cannot see, and the glade is peopled with beings whose forms are never caught. This is, no doubt, an example of fancy helping out the artist, but the artist is none the less fortunate and skilful who can thus induce the fancy to take wing. He leaves her room to take flight, and the vase he has decorated with a simple flower becomes a poem suggesting far more than it tells. Of the vases showing unglazed carvings in bas-relief there is a single pair, sufficient for illustration. On one is represented Phœbus, the golden-haired god of day, and on the other the triform goddess Luna. Phœbus stands with bow drawn full to the shoulder, just as we picture him in Homer. It will be remembered that when Lyrnessus was taken by the Greeks and the spoils divided, Chryseis, the wife of the king of the captured place, and daughter of Chryses, one of the priests of Apollo, fell to the share of Agamemnon. Her father sought her restoration from the “king of men,” and on his request being refused, asked aid from the god he served. We here have Apollo in the attitude of returning an answer to his suppliant priest. “Bent was his bow, the Grecian hearts to wound, Fierce, as he moved, his silver shafts resound; Breathing revenge, a sudden night he spread, And gloomy darkness rolled around his head. The fleet in view, he twang’d his deadly bow, And, hissing, fly the feather’d fates below. On mules and dogs the infection first began, And last, the vengeful arrows fixed in man.”