Wilde himself, in fact, was artistically an influence for evil on his weaker juniors. His social success, his keen persiflage, his indolent pose of greatness, blinded them as much as it did the οἱ πολλοί to his real artistic industry and merit. His worst works were, in fact, with one exception, his disciples. Richard Le Gallienne in his _Quest of the Golden Girl_ and _Prose Fancies_ was watered-down Wilde, and very thin at that. Even John Davidson, in _Baptist Lake_ and _Earl Lavender_, strove in vain to overtake the masterly ease with which Wilde’s ordered prose periods advance like cohorts of centurions to the sound of a full orchestra. Wilde’s best work--his _Prose Poems_, his poem _The Harlot’s House_, his one-acter _Salomé_, and one or two of the stories in the _House of Pomegranates_--will, however, remain as some of the finest flowers of the age’s art. Yet Wilde, in reality, was senior to the nineties proper, and was much too good an artist to approve of much of the work that was done in imitation of himself during the period by the mere hangers-on of the nineties. He was with the men of the nineties, but not of them. Beardsley, indeed, the age’s real king, took the liberty of mocking at Wilde in the very illustrations, or rather decorations, intended for Wilde’s most elaborate production. Wilde, in his turn, never wrote for _The Yellow Book_, which he disliked intensely. Again, we know what Symons’s opinion of Wilde was from his essay on him as a poseur. In fact, Wilde was a writer apart from the others, though undoubtedly his presence among them up to the time of his débâcle was a profound direct influence. On the other hand, George Moore, as a reactionary influence against Victorianism,[1] as a senior who had lived and written in Paris, was more of an indirect factor for the younger men. For a time he lived in the Temple, where many of them had come to live. By his works he helped to disseminate the influences of the great French writers and painters that had come into his own life. His own writings came to others surcharged with ‘The poisonous honey of France.’ In his _Modern Painting_, in his novel, _Evelyn Innes_, in his era of servitude to Flaubert’s majesty, he is of the nineties. But the nineties with George Moore were merely a phase out of which he grew, as out of many others. But when the nineties began Moore contrived to assist at their birth in the same way as he did later at that of the Celtic renaissance. Indeed, it is said, in Moore’s novel, _Mike Fletcher_ (1889), one can obtain a glimpse of the manner in which the period was to burgeon. [1] See his _Literature at Nurse_, 1885.