Those were the days, already ancient now! of Noël Loumo and Marius Tapera, when the inexpressible Adoré Floupette published _Les Déliquescences_. Where are the deliquescents of yesteryear? Where is the once celebrated scene in the "boudoir oblong aux cycloïdes bigarrures" which enlivened _Le Thé chez Miranda_ of M. Jean Moréas? These added to the gaiety of nations, and have been forgotten; brief life was here their portion. Fresh oddities come forward, poets in shoals and schools, Evolutivo-instrumentists, Cataclysmists, Trombonists--even while we speak, have they not faded away? But amidst all this world of phantasmagoria, among these fugitive apparitions and futile individualities, dancing once across the stereopticon and seen no more--one figure of a genuine man of letters remains, that of M. Stéphane Mallarmé, the solitary name among those of the so-called Décadents which has hitherto proved its right to serious consideration. If the dictionaries are to be trusted, M. Mallarmé was born in 1842. His career seems to have been the most uneventful on record. He has always been, and I think still is, professor of English at the Lycée Fontanes in Paris. About twenty years ago he paid a short visit to London, carrying with him, as I well remember, the vast portfolio of his translation of Poe's _Raven_, with Manet's singular illustrations. His life has been spent in a Buddhistic calm, in meditation. He has scarcely published anything, disliking, so it is said, the "exhibitionnisme" involved in bringing out a book, the banality of types and proofs and revises. His revolutionary ideas with regard to style were formulated about 1875, when the _Parnasse Contemporain_, edited by the friends and co-evals of M. Mallarmé, rejected his first important poem, _L'Après-Midi d'un Faune_, which appeared at length in 1876, as a quarto pamphlet, illustrated by Manet. In the same year he gave his earliest example of the new prose in the shape of an essay prefixed to a beautiful reprint of Beckford's _Vathek_, a volume bound in vellum, tied with black and crimson silk, and produced in a very small edition. Ridicule was the only welcome vouchsafed to these two couriers of the Décadance. Perhaps M. Mallarmé was somewhat discouraged, although absolutely unsubdued.