accomplish, were all inspiring sources which were, however, singularly unfruitful. Walter Pater long before in his academic romance _Marius_, which they had all read eagerly, wrote charmingly of a field that would appeal to them when he said: ‘Life in modern London ... is stuff sufficient for the fresh imagination of a youth to build his “palace of art” of.’ But instead of taking the recommendation of this high priest they read _Dorian Gray_, which Wilde would never have written if Huysmans had not first written _A Rebours_. The young men of Henley, it must be confessed, did far finer work than Richard Le Gallienne’s watery Wildism in _The Quest of the Golden Girl_. George Moore wrote a masterpiece in _Evelyn Innes_, but Ernest Dowson and Arthur Moore in _A Comedy of Masks_ and _Adrian Rome_ did not retaliate. Leonard Merrick, who started publishing in the eighties, did not publish his best work till the nineties were dead and gone; while his best Bohemian Paris stories may owe as much to Du Maurier’s _Trilby_ (1894) as they do to Henri Murger. Henry Harland, as I have already said, only struck his vein of comedy fiction when the Boer War had finished the movement. George Gissing and Arthur Morrison belong, with Frank Harris, to the pugilistic school of Henley’s young men, while Richard Whiteing, who turned from journalism to write _No. 5 John Street_ (1899), was too old a man and too late with his book to belong to the nineties’ group. Arthur Machen, in those days, belonged to the short story writers with Hubert Crackanthorpe, who was the great imaginative prose writer of the group. The sailor, Joseph Conrad, the Australian Louis Becke, the Canadian, C. G. D. Roberts, were working out their own salvation, and had nothing to do with the Rhymers’ Club. The strong creative brain of Aubrey Beardsley, indeed, in his unfinished picaresque romance, _Under the Hill_, which I have already mentioned, produced something new, but it was not a novel; while it is John Davidson’s poetry that counts, not his novels, which remain unread nowadays on the shelf.