On a certain Monday morning in the following November, Lucian’s great epic was published to the trade and the world, and the leading newspapers devoted a good deal of their space to remarking upon its merits, its demerits, and its exact relation to literature. Lucian found a pile of the London morning dailies of the superior sort awaiting his attention when he descended to his breakfast-room, and he went through them systematically. When he had made an end of them he looked across the table at Haidee, and he smiled in what she thought a rather queer way. ‘I say, Haidee!’ he exclaimed, ‘these reviews are--well, they’re not very flattering. There are six mighty voices of the press here,--_Times_, _Telegraph_, _Post_, _News_, _Chronicle_, and _Standard_--and there appears to be a strange unanimity of opinion in their pronunciations. The epic poem seems to be at something of a discount.’ The reviews, in fact, were not couched in an enthusiastic vein--taking them as a whole they were cold. There was a ring of disappointment in them. One reviewer, daring to be bold, plain, and somewhat brutal, said there was more genuine poetry in any one page of any of Mr. Damerel’s previous volumes than in the whole four hundred of his new one. Another openly declared his belief that the poem was the result of long years of careful, scholarly labour, of constant polishing, resetting, and rewriting; it smelled strongly of the lamp, but the smell of the lamp was not in evidence in the fresh, free, passionate work which they had previously had from the same pen. Mr. Damerel’s history, said a third, was as accurate as his lines were polished; one learned almost as much of the Norman Conquest from his poem as from the pages of Freeman, but the spontaneity of his earliest work appeared to be wanting in his latest. Each of the six reviewers seemed to be indulging a sentimental sorrow for the Mr. Damerel of the earlier days; their criticisms had an undercurrent of regret that Lucian had chosen to explore another path than that which he had hitherto trodden in triumph. The consensus of opinion, as represented by the critics of the six morning newspapers lying on Lucian’s breakfast-table, amounted to this: that Mr. Damerel’s new work, unmistakably the production of a true poet though it was, did not possess the qualities of power and charm which had distinguished his previous volumes. And to show his exact meaning and make out a good case for himself, each critic hit upon the exasperating trick of reprinting those of Lucian’s earlier lines which made perpetual music in their own particular souls, pointing to them with a proud finger as something great and glorious, and hinting that they were samples of goods which they would have wished Mr. Damerel to supply for ever.