He wondered what sort of macabre being could possibly make such a horrendous noise.

There are episodes in Summerfor example the Fourth of July firework evening, or the wildly macabre scene of the night funeral on the mountainthat seem to me to come as near perfection in their telling as anything I am ever likely to read, and when you have enjoyed them for yourself I fancy you will be inclined to join me in very sincere gratitude for work of such rare quality.

[Illustration: Fig. 21.Costume of a Vilain or Peasant, Fifteenth Century, from a Miniature of "La Danse Macabre," Manuscript 7310 of the National Library of Paris.]

From a Woodout in the "Danse Macabre:" Guyot's edition, 1490.]

I knew what the French boys were like, with their stern faces, as well as I knew the English manner of going forward to the day's work, and the hilarious, macabre spirit of the French untried lads crossing the river to look on horrors as if it were a lark.

The slow and secret poison that Gibbon says was introduced by the long peace into the vitals of the Empire, was, perhaps, among the causes that turned the thoughts of Apuleius to scenes of violence and terrorto the "macabre," as Pater saidjust as it touched his style with the preciosity of decadence, and prompted him to occupy a page with rapture over the "swift lightnings" flashed against the sunlight from women's hair.

" Sylvia enjoyed this rather macabre fancy with all the zest of healthful youth, secure in the conviction of its own immortality.

Nothing but a weird morgue seemed the world, haunted with despondent madness; and exactly like that world about us were the minds of us two poor men, full of macabre, bleak, and funereal feelings.

The grotesqueness of this lurid descant on senility and death is marked by something rather Teutonic than Italian, a "Danse Macabre" intensity of loathing; and it winds up with the bitter reflections, peculiar to him in his latest years, upon the vanity of art.

11¾d.), we find all the glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome; the Olympian serenity of HOMER, the pity and terror of ÆSCHYLUS, the poignancy of CATULLUS, the saucy mirth of ARISTOPHANES, the sanity of SHAKSPEARE, the macabre gruesomeness of BAUDELAIRE, the sardonic rictus of HEINE and the geniality of TROLLOPE.

A Dance of Death, or a Dance Macabre, as it was called, is a succession of isolated pictures, all informed with the same motive, it is true, but each independent of the others, and consisting of a group, generally of but two figures, one of which is the representative of Death.

St. Macarius is frequently introduced in the pictures of this subject; and some antiquaries suppose that hence the Dance of Death derived the name, Dance Macabre, by which it used to be generally known.

That this Dance was performed, not only with the consent, but by the procurement of the clergy, is made certain by the discovery, in the archives of the Cathedral of Besançon, of the account of the payment of four measures of wine by the seneschal to those persons who performed the Dance Macabre on the 10th of July, 1453.

Portrait of a man with red hair, a romantic macabre.

Epidermal macabre.

Dark of the moon: poems of fantasy and the macabre.

Portrait of a man with red hair, a romantic macabre.

Epidermal macabre.

Dark of the moon: poems of fantasy and the macabre.

Moreover, he attempted humorous effects, not very successfully; because one of the interesting points about, John Inglesant is that there is hardly the slightest touch of humour from beginning to end, except perhaps in the fantastic mixture of tragedy and comedy in the carnival scene, presided over by the man who masquerades as a corpse; and even here the humour is almost entirely of a macabre type.

So he becomes the best critic, almost the discoverer, of Webster, a dramatist of genius so sombre, so heavily coloured, so macabre.

[Footnote 87: Macabre: very grim.]

Et tout est fixe, et pas un coursier ne se cabre Dans cette légion de la guerre macabre; Oh! ces hommes masqués sur ces chevaux voilés, Chose affreuse!

Then he examined his other series of etchings and aquatints, his Proverbs with their macabre horror, his war subjects with their wild rage, finally his plate of the Garot, of which he cherished a marvelous trial proof, printed on heavy water-marked paper, unmounted.

It was the last of his additions to Death's Jest Book, and the most macabre of all.