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"He sees everything," as Mr. Watts-Dunton once said to the writer "through the gauze of poetry." His love for beautiful words and phrases leads him to express his thoughts in the choicest language. He puts his costliest wine in myrrhine vases; he builds his temple with the lordliest cedars. Mr. Payne does not write for the multitude, but few poets of the day have a more devoted band of admirers.
I as yet understood this only vaguely, though I saw clearly enough that beauty is so great a gift that talent, genius, and even virtue are nothing when weighed in the balance with it; so that the woman who is really beautiful has the right to hold herself superior to everybody and everything, inasmuch as she combines not in a creation outside of herself, but in her very person, as in a Myrrhine vase, all the qualities which genius painfully endeavours to reproduce.
In the centre of the room as they entered there rose slowly from the floor, to the sound of unseen minstrelsy, a table spread with all the viands which sense ever devoted to fancy, and vases of that lost Myrrhine fabric, so glowing in its colors, so transparent in its material, were crowned with the exotics of the East.
It is probable, also, that the myrrhine cups, about which there has been so much disputing, were no strangers to the Jewish toilette. Metallic mirrors are alluded to by Job, xxxvii. 18. For a general contribution of mirrors being made upon one occasion by the Israelitish women, they were melted down and recast into washing vessels for the priestly service.
Thus had the evening passed, not long nor tediously to any of the party; and midnight was at hand; when there entered from the atrium a grey-headed slave bearing a tray covered with light refreshments—fresh herbs, endive and mallows sprinkled with snow, ripe figs, eggs and anchovies, dried grapes, and cakes of candied honey; while two boys of rare beauty followed, one carrying a flagon of Chian wine diluted with snow water, the other a platter richly chased in gold covered with cyathi, or drinking cups, some of plain chrystal, some of that unknown myrrhine fabric, which is believed by many scholars to have been highly vitrified and half-transparent porcelain.
He is the only one of the legitimate brothers that appears to have had children; as the altar shows, and the pillar placed in the Athenian Acropolis, commemorating the crime of the tyrants, which mentions no child of Thessalus or of Hipparchus, but five of Hippias, which he had by Myrrhine, daughter of Callias, son of Hyperechides; and naturally the eldest would have married first.
Farrar says: "A whole population might be trembling lest they should be starved by the delay of an Alexandrian corn ship, while the upper classes were squandering a fortune at a single banquet, drinking out of myrrhine and jeweled vases worth hundreds of pounds, and feasting on the brains of peacocks and the tongues of nightingales."
He sniffed and smiled approval, saying, "The savory odor of thy well seasoned meat bringeth to mind the meat and wine of the banquet at which the Roman noblewoman wore the blazing peacock." Again Martha showed keen interest. "In myrrhine and jeweled vases were the wines served and the nightingales' tongues on platters of pure gold," and he watched for the effect of his words.
Still I have ascertained that the essential principle of the art was known to the ancients, although like the art of painting upon glass, of making the myrrhine cups, &c., it was lost in the dark ages for want of encouragement. In the famous collection of Greek epigrams made by Planudes is one upon a very charming little case of Burkism: it is a perfect little gem of art.
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