But if Lucian had heard some of the things that were said of him and his beloved epic in those holes and corners of literary life wherein one may hear much trenchant criticism plainly voiced, he would have felt less cock-sure about it and himself. It was the general opinion amongst a certain class of critics, who exercised a certain influence upon public thought, that there was too much of the workshop in his _magnum opus_. It was a magnificent block of marble that he had handled, but he had handled it too much, and the result would have been greater if he had not perpetually hovered about it with a hungry chisel and an itching mallet. It was perfect in form and language and proportion, but it wanted life and fire and rude strength. ‘It reminds me,’ said one man, discussing it in a club corner where coffee cups, liqueur glasses, and cigarettes were greatly in evidence, ‘of the statue of Galatea, flawless, immaculate, but neuter,--yes, neuter--as it appeared at the very moment ere Pygmalion’s love breathed into it the very flush, the palpitating, forceful tremor of life.’ This man was young and newly come to town--the others looked at him with shy eyes and tender sympathy, for they knew what it was that he meant to say, and they also knew, being older, how difficult it is to express oneself in words. ‘How very differently one sees things!’ sighed one of them. ‘Damerel’s new poem, now, reminds me of a copy of the _Pink ’Un_, carefully edited by a committee of old maids for the use of mixed classes in infant schools.’ The young man who used mellifluous words manifested signs of astonishment. He looked at the last speaker with inquiring eyes. ‘You mean----’ he began. ‘Ssh!’ whispered a voice at his elbow, ‘don’t ask _him_ what he means at any time. He means that the thing’s lacking in virility.’ It may have been the man who likened Lucian’s epic to an emasculated and expurgated _Pink ’Un_ to whom was due a subsequent article in the _Porthole_, wherein, under the heading _Lucian the Ladylike_, much sympathy was expressed with William the Conqueror at his sad fate in being sung by a nineteenth-century bard. There was much good-humoured satire in that article, but a good many of its points were sharply barbed, and Lucian winced under them. He was beginning to find by that time that his epic was not being greeted with the enthusiasm which he had anticipated for it; the great literary papers, the influential journals of the provinces, and the critics who wrote of it in two or three of the monthly reviews, all concurred that it was very fine as a literary exercise, but each deplored the absence of a certain something which had been very conspicuous indeed in his earlier volumes.