Two years later the Club’s second book appeared, and Dowson has again half a dozen poems in it, including the lovely _Extreme Unction_, and that rather doubtfully praised lyric ‘_non sum qualis eram bonae sub regno Cynarae_.’ Then in the same year as _The Savoy_ (1896) appeared his _Verses_, printed on Japanese vellum and bound in parchment, with a cover design in gold by Aubrey Beardsley--a typical Smithers book. This volume contains the best of Dowson, the handsel (if it is not too big a phrase to use of such a delicate and delightful artist), the handsel of his immortality. For there is something about Dowson’s best work, though so fragile in its texture, that has the classic permanence of a latter-day Propertius. He has a Latin brevity and clarity, and he is at his best in this volume. Something has vanished from the enchantment of the singer in _Decorations_ (1899). It is like the flowers of the night before. One feels that so many of these later verses had been done perforce, as Victor Plarr says, rather to keep on in the movement lest one was forgotten. But in 1899 the movement was moribund, and the winter of discontent for the Pierrots of the nineties was fast closing down. Remembering these things, one murmurs the sad beauty of those perfect lines of this true poet in his first volume: When this, our rose, is faded, And these, our days, are done, In lands profoundly shaded From tempest and from sun: Ah, once more come together, Shall we forgive the past, And safe from worldly weather Possess our souls at last. Not without reason one feels he has been called the ‘rosa rosarum of All the Nineties,’ in so far as poetry is concerned; but, personally, I would prefer to call him, if one has to call such a true poet anything, the poets’ poet of the nineties. The best of his short stories rank high in the great mass of the literature of those days, and are dealt with (together with his partnership in two novels) in another section. As for his little one-act play, _The Pierrot of the Minute_, one is apt to feel perhaps that Beardsley was not over unjust to it, when he described it as a tiresome playlet he had to illustrate. At any rate, it was the cause of Beardsley’s doing one or two admirable decorations, even if the actual play, in which the young American poet of the nineties, Theodore Peters (of whom more anon), and Beardsley’s own sister acted, was not effective as a stage production.