At the date of the appearance of these young men amid a mass of lucubrators, there was actually a band of genuine young writers (besides the big Victorians like Meredith and Hardy), who were turning out good work, and who were under the sway of that old Pan of poetry, Henley of _The National Observer_. These young men of Henley must not be therefore confused with the _Yellow Book_ group. They were often deliberately coarse, not because they liked it, but because it was part of their artistic gospel. And when one considers the methods of the feeblest of them, one sees more ruffianly sturdy British horseplay than art, more braying and snarling than sounding on the lute. But among the best of them, Stevenson, Kipling, and Steevens, was a fine loyalty to the traditions of the leading spirit of the _Observer_ Henley--Pan playing on his reed with his crippled hoofs hiding amid the water-lilies of the purling stream. All these last writers and artists were men of the Anglo-Saxon tradition; while, on the other hand, the young men who had, so to speak, just come to town, were full of the Latin tradition. The main thing in the lives of these last was French literature and art, and out of this influence came not only the art, but the eccentricities, of the coterie, which is so often called the nineties. Theirs was a new spirit. They were of the order of the delectable ‘Les Jeunes.’ Epigram opened a new career with Oscar Wilde; Beardsley dreamed of a strange world; Ernest Dowson used to drink hashish and make love in Soho in the French manner of Henri Murger’s Latin Quarter--for a time, indeed, hair was worn long, and the ties of the petty homunculi of the Wilde crowd were of lace; but, fortunately, artists like Beardsley and the other men worth while did not cultivate foolishness except as a protection against the bourgeois. But enough of these affectations; the point I wish to bring out here is that the men who drew and wrote for _The Savoy_ wrote their art with a difference to that of those others who were their contemporaries but appeared in the first instance as a virile imperialistic movement in _The Scots Observer_ and _The National Observer_. The artists of the nineties were more, as we say rather badly in English, of the ‘kid-glove school.’ A note of refinement, a distinction of utterance, an obsession in Art marked all their best as well as their worst work. But this by no means prevented the two schools having a very salutary influence on each other. Indeed, we find a man like Mr. W. B. Yeats, who really belonged to a third movement, his own Celtic renaissance, publishing first of all lyrics like ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ under the banner of Henley, and attending a year or two later the Rhymers’ Club meetings before he found his own demesne. But to his former comrades of the Cheshire Cheese, the men who concern us here, Yeats has found occasion to render befitting praise in the well-known lines: