especial property of Serena and his imitators; for that imitators came soon goes perhaps without saying, seeing that imitation is so easy. ‘Reveries’ on canvas became the rage; to be non-natural was the fashion. Artists who had once in their innocence strained every nerve to study great models and to copy nature, now tortured ingenuity to represent ‘evanescent cosmic moods’--out of colour, out of drawing, and out of all harmony with anything but the diseased invention of bad painters and the bad critics who urged them on. Serena, as we have said, was a good fellow, and took his success sensibly. Only to one man in the world did he secretly confess the facts of the case. ‘I know I am a humbug,’ he said to Forster, ‘and that those who praise me are humbugs. I know that I paint worse than I did at twenty, and that, when I die, and my school dies with me, posterity will find me out. This is why, now and then, I follow the true lights of my soul, and paint a true picture; just to keep my work from utterly perishing in Limbo, just to enable some poor soul in the far future to say, “After all, Blanco Serena might, had he chosen, have escaped from being the æsthetic Prig of his period.” But what I am the scribblers and the public have made me. If another man painted a bony woman in yellow gauze, with red hair and pale green eyes, and impossible arms and legs, he would be found out directly: but only let me paint such a figure, and call it “Persephone musing by the waters of Lethe,” or “Memory kneeling by the grave of Hope,” or “Fading away: a Sonata in Sunset tints,” and I am sure at least of Ponto’s praise and the public approval. Well, of all humbugs Art humbug is the worst, though, after all, worse saints have been canonised than Blanco Serena.’ To the studio of Serena, a few days after Madeline’s visit, came Ponto, the art critic, bringing with him a thin, middle-aged. Frenchman, with a coarse mouth and a sinister expression of countenance. The painter, with deft and careless hand, was adding a few touches to the picture of Ophelia. ‘Serena,’ cried Ponto, ‘let me introduce you to M. Auguste de Gavrolles, from Paris--the friend and pupil of the supreme and impeccable Gautier. He is a poet, an ardent worshipper of your genius, and in all matters of art completely sane a cosmic.’ Serena smiled and held out his hand, which the Frenchman took rapturously, and raised it to his lips. ‘Ah, Monsieur,’ he exclaimed, ‘this is the proudest moment of my life!’ Ponto threw himself into a chair, and looked around him with a smile of feline insipidity. ‘What’s that you have there, my dear Serena?’ he asked, blinking at the picture. ‘Ah, I see, another superbly musical meditation in the minor key of flake white!’ ‘It is a portrait,’ said Serena, quietly. ‘An ideal portrait--quite so. How wonderfully in that floating drapery you have conveyed the serene insouciance of trances of languor crescending into aberration of supersensual dream!’