It is not difficult to find prototypes for every one of these works of his. His sibyls recall Pompeii. His church decoration would never have arisen but for the mosaics of Ravenna. And those angels in golden drapery with grave, hieratical gestures in the pictures of the Trecentisti influenced him in his "Days of Creation." Other works of his suggest the Etruscan vases or the suavity of Duccio. "Laus Veneris" has the severe classicality of Mantegna saturated with Bellini's warmth of hue. The "Chant d'Amour," in its deep splendour of colour, is like an idyll by Giorgione. And often he heaps together costly work in gold and ivory like the Florentine goldsmith painters Pollajuolo and Verrochio. Many of his young girls are of lineal descent from those slender, flexible, feminine saints of Perugino, painted in sweeping lines and planted upon small flat feet. Often, too, when he exaggerates his Gothic principles and gives them eight-and-a-half or nine times the proportion of their heads, they seem, with their lengthy necks and slim hands fit for princesses, like younger sisters of Parmigianino's lithe-limbed women; while sometimes their movements have a more ample grace, a more majestic nobility, and their lips are moved by the mystical inward smile of Luini, so unfathomably subtle in its silent reserve. But it is Botticelli who is most often brought to mind. Burne-Jones has borrowed from him the fine transparent gauze draperies, clinging to the limbs and betraying clearly the girlish forms in his pictures; the splendid mantles, flowered and adorned with dainty patterns of gold; the taste for Southern vegetation, for flowers and fruits, and artificial bowers of thick palm leaves or delicate boughs of cypress, which he delights in using as a refined and significant embellishment; from Botticelli he has borrowed all the attributes with which he has endowed his angels--rose-garlands and vases, tapers and tall lilies; even his type of womanhood has an outward resemblance to that of the Florentine, with its long, delicate, oval face framed in wavy hair, its dreamy eyes and finely arched brows, its dainty and rather tip-tilted nose, and its ripe, delicately curving mouth slightly opened. Indeed, Burne-Jones's painting is like one of those gilded flower-tables where plants of all latitudes mingle their tendrils and their foliage, their bells and their clusters, their perfume and their marvellous glory of colour, in a harmony artificially arranged. In its strained archaism his art is an affected, artificial art, and would perish as swiftly as a luxuriant exotic plant, had not this pupil of the Italians been born a thoroughbred Englishman, and this Botticelli risen from the grave become a true Briton on the banks of the Thames. [Illustration: _Brothers, photo._ STANHOPE. THE WATERS OF LETHE. (_By permission of the Corporation of Manchester, the owners of the picture._)] [Illustration: STRUDWICK. ELAINE.