loved to stroll through the gaunt cold picture-gallery of his country
house and look at the various portraits of those whose blood flowed in
his veins. Here was Philip Herbert, described by Francis Osborne, in his
Memoires on the Reigns of Queen Elizabeth and King James, as one who was
"caressed by the Court for his handsome face, which kept him not long
company." Was it young Herbert's life that he sometimes led? Had some
strange poisonous germ crept from body to body till it had reached his
own? Was it some dim sense of that ruined grace that had made him so
suddenly, and almost without cause, give utterance, in Basil Hallward's
studio, to the mad prayer that had so changed his life? Here, in
gold-embroidered red doublet, jewelled surcoat, and gilt-edged ruff and
wristbands, stood Sir Anthony Sherard, with his silver-and-black armour
piled at his feet. What had this man's legacy been? Had the lover of
Giovanna of Naples bequeathed him some inheritance of sin and shame?
Were his own actions merely the dreams that the dead man had not dared
to realize? Here, from the fading canvas, smiled Lady Elizabeth
Devereux, in her gauze hood, pearl stomacher, and pink slashed sleeves.
A flower was in her right hand, and her left clasped an enamelled collar
of white and damask roses. On a table by her side lay a mandolin and an
apple. There were large green rosettes upon her little pointed shoes. He
knew her life, and the strange stories that were told about her lovers.
Had he something of her temperament in him? These oval, heavy-lidded
eyes seemed to look curiously at him. What of George Willoughby, with
his powdered hair and fantastic patches? How evil he looked! The face
was saturnine and swarthy, and the sensual lips seemed to be twisted
with disdain. Delicate lace ruffles fell over the lean yellow hands that
were so overladen with rings. He had been a macaroni of the eighteenth
century, and the friend, in his youth, of Lord Ferrars. What of the
second Lord Beckenham, the companion of the Prince Regent in his wildest
days, and one of the witnesses at the secret marriage with Mrs.
Fitzherbert? How proud and handsome he was, with his chestnut curls and
insolent pose! What passions had he bequeathed? The world had looked
upon him as infamous. He had led the orgies at Carlton House. The star
of the Garter glittered upon his breast. Beside him hung the portrait of
his wife, a pallid, thin-lipped woman in black. Her blood, also, stirred
within him. How curious it all seemed! And his mother with her Lady
Hamilton face and her moist, wine-dashed lips--he knew what he had got
from her. He had got from her his beauty, and his passion for the beauty
of others. She laughed at him in her loose Bacchante dress. There were
vine leaves in her hair. The purple spilled from the cup she was
holding. The carnations of the painting had withered, but the eyes were
still wonderful in their depth and brilliancy of colour. They seemed to
follow him wherever he went.

Yet one had ancestors in literature as well as in one's own race, nearer
perhaps in type and temperament, many of them, and certainly with an
influence of which one was more absolutely conscious. There were times
when it appeared to Dorian Gray that the whole of history was merely the
record of his own life, not as he had lived it in act and circumstance,
but as his imagination had created it for him, as it had been in his
brain and in his passions. He felt that he had known them all, those
strange terrible figures that had passed across the stage of the world
and made sin so marvellous and evil so full of subtlety. It seemed to
him that in some mysterious way their lives had been his own.

The hero of the wonderful novel that had so influenced his life had
himself known this curious fancy. In the seventh chapter he tells how,
crowned with laurel, lest lightning might strike him, he had sat, as
Tiberius, in a garden at Capri, reading the shameful books of
Elephantis, while dwarfs and peacocks strutted round him and the
flute-player mocked the swinger of the censer; and, as Caligula, had
caroused with the green-shirted jockeys in their stables and supped in
an ivory manger with a jewel-frontleted horse; and, as Domitian, had
wandered through a corridor lined with marble mirrors, looking round
with haggard eyes for the reflection of the dagger that was to end his
days, and sick with that ennui, that terrible taedium vitae, that comes
on those to whom life denies nothing; and had peered through a clear
emerald at the red shambles of the circus and then, in a litter of pearl
and purple drawn by silver-shod mules, been carried through the Street
of Pomegranates to a House of Gold and heard men cry on Nero Caesar as
he passed by; and, as Elagabalus, had painted his face with colours, and
plied the distaff among the women, and brought the Moon from Carthage
and given her in mystic marriage to the Sun.

Over and over again Dorian used to read this fantastic chapter, and the
two chapters immediately following, in which, as in some curious
tapestries or cunningly wrought enamels, were pictured the awful and
beautiful forms of those whom vice and blood and weariness had made
monstrous or mad: Filippo, Duke of Milan, who slew his wife and painted
her lips with a scarlet poison that her lover might suck death from the
dead thing he fondled; Pietro Barbi, the Venetian, known as Paul the
Second, who sought in his vanity to assume the title of Formosus, and
whose tiara, valued at two hundred thousand florins, was bought at the
price of a terrible sin; Gian Maria Visconti, who used hounds to chase
living men and whose murdered body was covered with roses by a harlot
who had loved him; the Borgia on his white horse, with Fratricide riding
beside him and his mantle stained with the blood of Perotto; Pietro
Riario, the young Cardinal Archbishop of Florence, child and minion of
Sixtus IV, whose beauty was equalled only by his debauchery, and who
received Leonora of Aragon in a pavilion of white and crimson silk,
filled with nymphs and centaurs, and gilded a boy that he might serve at
the feast as Ganymede or Hylas; Ezzelin, whose melancholy could be cured
only by the spectacle of death, and who had a passion for red blood, as
other men have for red wine--the son of the Fiend, as was reported, and
one who had cheated his father at dice when gambling with him for his
own soul; Giambattista Cibo, who in mockery took the name of Innocent
and into whose torpid veins the blood of three lads was infused by a
Jewish doctor; Sigismondo Malatesta, the lover of Isotta and the lord of
Rimini, whose effigy was burned at Rome as the enemy of God and man, who
strangled Polyssena with a napkin, and gave poison to Ginevra d'Este in


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