Each passing year will show,
And retrospective beauties
Appear in Long Ago.
Amongst the pictures which have, within my memory, been exhibited in Dublin, one painted by Paul Delaroche was regarded by me with surpassing admiration, in which feeling I was certainly not singular, for I found it equally appreciated by many others who viewed it at Le Sage's in Sackville Street. It was said to have originated in an extraordinary reverie of the artist, who, whilst suffering from fever, imagined that he beheld the corpse of a young and beautiful female, whose hands and feet had been tightly bound, drifting along a deep and rapid river. On recovering from his malady, Delaroche delineated this vision, and then considered what title he should give the production. On searching the records of martyrdom he could not discover the name of any sainted victim of persecution who had perished in the manner indicated; but finding that the Emperor Diocletian had, about the year of our Lord 300, caused some hundreds of his Christian subjects to be drowned in the Tiber for refusing to abjure their faith, he named the picture "La Martyre Chretienne." It has been engraved, lithographed, and photographed so much, as to evince a general admiration of the conception and artistic power of the painter. I have written some lines on this subject, and have endeavoured to adopt the metre of Ariosto, which I consider not unsuitable to an incident connected with Italy and the ancient days of the Eternal City. The concluding stanza alludes to the lambent circle which, in the painting, appears above the head of—
THE CHRISTIAN MARTYR.
The sedgy margin of his yellow stream
Beholds old Tiber rolling to the main,
In eddies silver'd by the struggling beam,
Wooing the ripples which it can't retain.