About that time George Augustus became really intolerable. A man he had known as a law-student returned to Sheffield, bought a practice, and did rather well. Henry Bulburry came it over George Augustus pretty thick. He had spent three years in a London solicitor’s office, and to hear him talk you would have thought Mr. Bulburry was the Lord Chancellor, the Beau Brummell and the Count d’Orsay of the year 1891. Bulburry patronized George Augustus, and George Augustus lapped his patronage up gratefully. Bulburry knew all the latest plays, all the latest actresses, all the latest books. He roared with laughter at George Augustus’s Dickens and “Lorna Doone” and introduced him to Morris, Swinburne, Rossetti, Ruskin, Hardy, Mr. Moore and young Mr. Wilde. George Augustus got fearfully excited, and became an æsthetic. Once when Pater came to lecture at Sheffield he was so much moved at the spectacle of those wonderful moustaches that he fainted, and had to be taken home in a four-wheeler. George Augustus at last found his _métier_. He realized that he was a dreamer of dreams born out of his due time, that he should have floated Antinous-like with the Emperor Hadrian to the music of flutes and viols on the subtly-drifting waters of the immemorial Nile. Under a canopy of perfumed silk he should have sat enthroned with Zenobia while trains of naked thewed Ethiopian slaves, glistening with oil and nard, laid at his feet jewels of the opulent East. He was older than the rocks among which he sat. He was subtler than delicate music; and there was no change of light, no shifting of the shadows, no change in the tumultuous outlines of wind-swept clouds but had a meaning for him. Babylon and Tyre were in him, and he too had wept for beautiful Bion. In Athens he had reclined, violet-crowned, at the banquet where Socrates reasoned of love with Alcibiades. But above all he felt a stupendous passion for mediæval and Renaissance Florence. He had never been to Italy, but he was wont to boast that he had studied the plan of the city so carefully and so frequently that he could find his way about Florence blindfold. He knew not one word of Italian, but he spoke ecstatically of Dante and “His Circle,” criticized the accuracy of Guicciardini, refuted Machiavelli, and was an authority—after Roscoe—on the life and times of Lorenzo and Leo X. One day George Augustus announced to the family that he should abandon his Profession and WRITE. * * * * *