There is no doubt but that Davidson, though he was outside the coteries of the nineties, was still of them. First of all he was a Scotchman of evangelical extraction, and secondly he was not an Oxford man. All this made him outside the group. On the other count, he was of the Rhymers’ Club, though he did not contribute to the books. He was strongly influenced by Nietzsche, though the French influence in him was rather negative. His books came from the Bodley Head and were well recognised by its other members. Beardsley even decorated some of them, and Rothenstein did his portrait for _The Yellow Book_. In fact, Davidson himself wrote for that periodical. All this made him of the group. It would be thus impossible to pass over such a poet in connection with this movement, for Davidson has written some magnificent lyrics, if he has made his testaments too often and too turgidly. The Davidson, indeed, of the nineties will be discovered to be, by any one examining his works, the Davidson that will most probably survive. He was born in 1857, but as Mr. Holbrook Jackson admirably puts it, ‘John Davidson did not show any distinctive _fin de siècle_ characteristics until he produced his novel _Perfervid_[16] in 1890.’ His next work, a volume of poetry, which was the first to attract attention, _In a Music Hall and other Poems_ (1891), accentuates these distinctive characteristics, and fairly launches him on the tide of the movement. Before that time he had been school-mastering and clerking in Scotland, while his leisure had begotten three rather ill-conceived works. Davidson discovered himself when he came to London to write. The movement of the nineties stimulated him towards artistic production, and when that movement was killed by the fall of Wilde, and buried by the Boer War, Davidson again lost himself in the philosophic propaganda of his last years before he was driven to suicide. Philosophy, indeed, with John Davidson, was to eat one’s heart with resultant mental indigestion that completely unbalanced the artist in him. Therefore, so far as this appreciation is concerned, we only have to deal with the happy Davidson of the _Ballads_ and _Fleet Street Eclogues_ fame; the gay writer of _A Random Itinerary_ (1894); the rather hopeless novelist of _Baptist Lake_ (1894), and _The Wonderful Mission of Earl Lavender_ (1895). The last tedious phase before he gave himself to the Cornish sea is no affair of ours. In his _Testament_ he says ‘none should outlive his power,’ and realising probably that he had made this mistake, he wished to end it all. [16] _The Eighteen Nineties_, by Holbrook Jackson, p. 215 1913. But in the nineties he was like his own birds, full of ‘oboe’ song and ‘broken music.’ Seldom has the English river, the Thames, been more sweetly chaunted than by him. While if we are looking for his kinship with his time there is no doubt about it in _The Ballad of a Nun_, who remarks: