I care not for my broken vow, Though God should come in thunder soon, I am sister to the mountains now, And sister to the sun and moon. A statement which we feel many of the Beardsley ladies cadaverous with sin or fat with luxury would have been quite capable of repeating. Again, his _Thirty Bob a Week_ in _The Yellow Book_ is as much a ninety effort as his _Ballad of Hell_, while his novel, _Earl Lavender_, is a burlesque of certain of the eccentricities of the period. In a poetical note to this volume he sings: Oh! our age end style perplexes All our Elders’ time has famed; On our sleeves we wear our sexes, Our diseases, unashamed. The prevalent realistic disease in poetry is well represented by _A Woman and her Son_: He set his teeth, and saw his mother die, Outside a city reveller’s tipsy tread Severed the silence with a jagged rent. Above all, Davidson handles with marked facility the modern ballad medium of narrative verse. _The Ballad of a Nun_, _The Ballad of an Artist’s Wife_, and others, relate their story in easy, jogging quatrains. As a sample one can quote from _A New Ballad of Tannhäuser_: As he lay worshipping his bride, While rose leaves in her bosom fell, On dreams came sailing on a tide Of sleep, he heard a matin bell. ‘Hark! let us leave the magic hill,’ He said, ‘and live on earth with men.’ ‘No, here,’ she said, ‘we stay until The Golden Age shall come again.’ But if Davidson could tell a tale in verse it cannot be said he understood the novel form. Although here it is rather noticeable that he has a strange, unique feature among his contemporaries. For he at least has a sense of humour. Max Beerbohm, it is true, had the gift of irony; but Davidson, almost alone, has a certain vein of grim Scotch humour, as, for example, in the character of little red-headed Mortimer in _Perfervid_. In Dowson, Johnson, Symons, and the others, one is sometimes appalled by the seriousness of it all. Lastly, but by no means least, Davidson occasionally attains the lyric rapture of unadulterated poetry in his shorter pieces, while his vignettes of nature linger in the memory on account of their truth and beauty. Both these qualities--the lyric rapture and the keen eye for country sights and sounds--are to be found, for instance, in _A Runnable Stag_: When the pods went pop on the broom, green broom, And apples began to be golden-skinned, We harboured a stag in the Priory coomb, And we feathered his trail up wind, up wind!