Such was the Muse’s response to Peters’ wooing; while he, in that strange bohemian world of so many of the young writers of that day, wrote in another short poem the epitaph of the majority of those who gave so recklessly of their youth, only to fail. It is called _To the Café aux Phares de l’Ouest, Quartier Montparnasse_: The painted ship in the paste-board sea Sails night and day. To-morrow it will be as far as it was yesterday. But underneath, in the Café, The lusty crafts go down, And one by one, poor mad souls drown-- While the painted ship in the paste-board sea Sails night and day. Such, indeed, was too often the fate of the epigoni of the movement. Their nightingales were never heard; they were buried with all their songs still unsung. The only other volume which Theodore Peters essayed, to my knowledge, was a little poetic one-acter like his friend Ernest Dowson’s _Pierrot of the Minute_ (for which work he wrote an epilogue). Peters’ play, entitled _The Tournament of Love_, is a very scarce item of the nineties’ bibliography. He calls it a pastoral masque in one act, and it was published by Brentano’s at Paris in 1894 and illustrated with drawings by Alfred Jones. As Bantock wrote the music for _The Pierrot of the Minute_, Noel Johnson composed the melodies for _The Tournament of Love_. The masque was put on at the Théâtre d’Application (La Bodinière), 18 rue St. Lazare, May 8, 1894. Peters himself took the part of Bertrand de Roaix, a troubadour, while among the cast were Wynford Dewhurst, the painter, and Loïe Fuller, the dancer. The scene is an almond orchard on the outskirts of Toulouse, on the afternoon of the 3rd May, 1498. ‘A group of troubadours discovered at the right of the stage, seated upon a white semicircular Renaissance bench, some tuning their instruments. Other poets towards the back. A laurel tree at the right centre. On the left centre two heralds guard the entrance to the lists.’ Pons d’Orange, the arrived poet, will win at this tournament of love, the Eglantine nouvelle, ‘that golden prize of wit.’ But it is won by Bertrand de Roaix, who wants it not, but the love of the institutress of this court of love, ‘Clémence Isaure, the Primrose Queen of Beauty.’ At his love protestations she laughs; the troubadour goes outside the lists and stabs himself. As he lies dying Clémence, clothed in her white samite, powdered with silver fleur-de-lys and edged with ermine, her dust-blonde hair bound with a fillet of oak-leaves, comes forth from the lists and finds her boy lover’s body: Love came and went; _we_ Knew him not. I have found my soul too late. V