The want of logic caused, however, other instances, a good silke, Mr, Burdett, had hho chosen to do "so, might "have quoted what W. D. Howells thought, of "Yellow Book" fection, "where (fete Philistinism, conscious of the dry-rot of its conventionality, is feasting about for cure in anything lat is wild and strange and unlike itself." To this the ghost of Henry Harland would reply that American conventionality was closer to the cliff-edge of its own downfall than the author of Lapham" imed. With all its imperfection, d even absurdity, the effort of the metics was not without intelligence aad dignity. The cultivation of the Yark Angel in prose and verse has always been more stimulating to the imagination than a too humble worship of goodness, and Byron is still extremely interesting to a gen-Jeration which has forgotten almost the very name of Kirke White, Lionel Johnson in a striking pivee, addressed the spirit of evil, he eopeeived its attraction, He Through thee the gracious muses turn To furies, O mine enemy!
And all the things of beauty burn With flames of evil ecstasy.
Even Mr. A. E. Housman, who is by far the "most powerful and suthentie poet of the group to which nothing but the accident of birth attaches him, even he, in his admire able "Shroy tendency to sympathize, against the verdict of Society, with the victims of sinful human appetite. Sin, indeed, by a sort of topsyturvy Puritan reaction, obsessed the temper of the generation. would be a mistake, however, to represent Mr. Burdett, although he is a moralist in grain, as neglect-tug other aspects of his Beardsley Period. He dwells on its scholarship, which in several cases—partily in that of Lionel Johnson considerable, and on the ical faculty which reached its He regards the Symons, (about with deféerate acumen, 2s the touchstone of the period." He does not, I think, jen: phasize quite sufficiently the effect upon them all, poets and painters as well as critics, of the attitude and style of Pater, who seems to me to have been—even in the mat-[fet of the Dark Angel—their foun-tai inflaence on the subject touched upon, ideed, by Mr. Burdett, but not quite emphatically enough, Nor does he say 20 much as T should ex-ect about' the impact on them of lessen and Verlaine, electrifying them from different angles in early youth. But it is hypercriticism to suggest such omissions in a book of Teal excellence and independence, a book which amuses and' stimulates thought, and is illuminated ty a pleasing kind of indulgent irony.
Burdett, indeed, is. habitually
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.