Lindsay, likewise a painter, to afford himself and his comrades a place of exhibition independent of the Academy--that Burne-Jones once more made his appearance before the eyes of the world. But his pictures, like those of Rossetti, had found their way in secrecy and by their own merit, and of a sudden he saw himself regarded as one of the most eminent painters in the country. [Illustration: _L'Art._ BURNE-JONES. THE ENCHANTMENT OF MERLIN. (_By permission of Mr. F. Hollyer, the owner of the copyright._)] His art is the flower of most potent fragrance in English æstheticism, and the admiration accorded to him in England is almost greater than that which had been previously paid to Rossetti. The Grosvenor Gallery, where he exhibited his pictures at this period, was for a long time a kind of temple for the æsthetes. On the opening day men and women of the greatest refinement crowded before his works. There was a cult of Burne-Jones at the Grosvenor Gallery, as there is a cult of Wagner at Bayreuth. One had to work one's way very gradually through the crowd to see his pictures, which always occupied the place of honour in the principal room of the gallery, and I remember how helplessly I stood in 1884 before the first of his pictures which I saw there. In a kind of vestibule of early Gothic architecture there was seated in the foreground an armed man, who, in his dark, gleaming harness and his hard and bold profile, was like a Lombard warrior, say Mantegna's Duke of Mantua, and as he mused he held in his hand an iron crown studded with jewels; farther in the background, upon a high marble throne, a maiden was seated, a young girl with reddish hair and a pale worn face, looking with steadfast eyes far out into another world, as though in a hypnotic trance. Two youths, apparently pages, sang, leaning upon a balustrade; while all manner of costly accessories, brilliant stuffs, lustrous marble, grey granite, and mosaic pavement, shining in green and red tones, lent the whole picture an air of exquisite richness. The title in the catalogue was "King Cophetua and the Beggar-Maid," and any one acquainted with Provençal poetry knew that King Cophetua, the hero of an old ballad, fell in love with a beggar-girl, offered her his crown, and married her. But this was not to be gathered from the picture itself, where all palpable illustration of the story was avoided. Nevertheless a vague sense of emotional disquietude was revealed in it. The two leading persons of the strange idyll, the earnest knight and the pallid maiden, are not yet able themselves to understand how all has come to pass--how she, the beggar-maid, should be upon the marble throne, and he, the king, kneeling on the steps before her whom he has exalted to be a queen. They remain motionless and profoundly silent, but their hearts are alive and throbbing. They have feeling which they cannot comprehend themselves, and the past and present surge through one