is in it--and it is the strength of the
piece. The play gave me the sense of the passage of a dimly connected
procession of dream-pictures. The scene of it is Palmyra in Roman times.
It covers a wide stretch of time--I don't know how many years--and in
the course of it the chief actress is reincarnated several times: four
times she is a more or less young woman, and once she is a lad. In
the first act she is Zoe--a Christian girl who has wandered across the
desert from Damascus to try to Christianise the Zeus-worshipping pagans
of Palmyra. In this character she is wholly spiritual, a religious
enthusiast, a devotee who covets martyrdom--and gets it.

After many years she appears in the second act as Phoebe, a graceful and
beautiful young light-o'-love from Rome, whose soul is all for the
shows and luxuries and delights of this life--a dainty and capricious
feather-head, a creature of shower and sunshine, a spoiled child, but
a charming one. In the third act, after an interval of many years, she
reappears as Persida, mother of a daughter who is in the fresh bloom of
youth. She is now a sort of combination of her two earlier selves: in
religious loyalty and subjection she is Zoe: in triviality of character
and shallowness of judgement--together with a touch of vanity in
dress--she is Phoebe.

After a lapse of years she appears in the fourth act as Nymphas,
a beautiful boy, in whose character the previous incarnations are
engagingly mixed.

And after another stretch of years all these heredities are joined in
the Zenobia of the fifth act--a person of gravity, dignity, sweetness,
with a heart filled with compassion for all who suffer, and a hand
prompt to put into practical form the heart's benignant impulses.

There are a number of curious and interesting features in this piece.
For instance, its hero, Appelles, young, handsome, vigorous, in the
first act, remains so all through the long flight of years covered by
the five acts. Other men, young in the firs act, are touched with gray
in the second, are old and racked with infirmities in the third; in the
fourth, all but one are gone to their long home, and this one is a blind
and helpless hulk of ninety or a hundred years. It indicates that the
stretch of time covered by the piece is seventy years or more. The
scenery undergoes decay, too--the decay of age assisted and perfected by
a conflagration. The fine new temples and palaces of the second act
are by-and-by a wrec