“The lunatic with the scarf round his neck? That’s a minor poet. I don’t suppose you have ever come across his works. He publishes two volumes every year, at his own expense, of course, with about twenty poems in each. No one ever reads them, except the provincial reviewers. He has got an album filled with cuttings from papers like the _Pembrokeshire News_ and the _Berwick-on-Tweed Gazette_. ‘A volume of verse from the graceful pen of Mr. Egerton Vane’--that’s the kind of incense he feeds on. Once he got a puff in a paper called the _Librarian_, and carried it about with him for months. He said to me with tears in his eyes: ‘This is recognition!’” Everyone in the room seemed to have some literary or artistic vocation, except Mendes himself. The motive which brought the South American there remained unguessed by Trent, but it was clear that he extracted some amusement from his strange associates. “That other young fool over there is his brother, Wickham Vane,” the millionaire continued, indicating a boy of eighteen or thereabouts, at the other end of the table. “Does he write poetry, too?” “No, he doesn’t do anything so material as write. He thinks beautifully about old tapestry.” Wickham Vane might have been pursuing his peculiar vocation at that moment from his absorbed expression. But he roused himself from his abstraction to pay the homage of attention to his elder brother. Egerton Vane held a large sheet of paper in his hand, but before reading from it he prepared his hearers’ minds by a short allocution. “The poem I am about to read you strikes an entirely new note in literature, the note of the unreal. It is a ‘Sonnet to a Drawer in a Japanese Cabinet.’ I have come to the conclusion that all the poets who have preceded me have been mistaken in thinking that Nature was poetical. The artificial only is poetical, because only Art can be artistic. Nature is incapable of symbolism, and the symbol alone is truly beautiful. All the glorious sins which reveal themselves crudely and grossly in mere human beings are latent in exquisite suggestion in the divinely precious works of Art. Even the handicrafts of the East are steeped in the splendid sensuality of its peoples. In this poem I have attempted to do justice to the subtle and elusive vice which clings like the aroma of putrefying rose-leaves to the workmanship of a Japanese cabinet in my possession.” The poet proceeded to read: SONNET TO A DRAWER IN A JAPANESE CABINET What shadow of dead secrets, lemon-eyed, Lurks in thy black recesses, frightful drawer, Crowned with the Pagan scent of delicate gore Fresh from the veins of some green suicide? Behold thy lacquered sins are glorified In frantic fowls that round thy handle soar, Mad with obscure desires, like those that tore Unclean blue Mænads by the Phrygian tide! And horrors like vermilion rats awake And crawl about thee, crooning in my ears Dim, vampire songs of shrivelled souls that ache