Surely this poem has the proud note of Henley! There is another trait in his verse, which, in view of his essays, it is as well not to pass over. Like William Watson, his literary poems are pregnant with phrases of rich criticism. He calls back the immortals in a true bookman’s invocation hailing ‘opulent Pindar,’ ‘the pure and perfect voice of Gray,’ ‘pleasant and elegant and garrulous Pliny’: Herodotus, all simple and all wise; Demosthenes, a lightning flame of scorn: The surge of Cicero, that never dies; And Homer, grand against the ancient morn. But we are here chiefly concerned with his prose writings. If it is the duty of the essayist to mirror the intellectuality of his age, Lionel Johnson was a mirror for the Oxford standpoint of the nineties. There still remain many of his papers uncollected in various old newspaper files. But certainly the best of his work has been lovingly collected by friendly hands, and worthily housed in _Post Liminium_. Take, for instance, this passage from an essay on books published originally in _The Academy_ (December 8th, 1900): The glowing of my companionable fire upon the backs of my companionable books, and then the familiar difficulty of choice. Compassed about by old friends, whose virtues and vices I know better than my own, I will be loyal to loves that are not of yesterday. New poems, new essays, new stories, new lives, are not my company at Christmastide, but the never-ageing old. ‘My days among the dead are passed.’ Veracious Southey, how cruel a lie! My sole days among the dead are the days passed among the still-born or moribund moderns, not the white days and shining nights free for the strong voices of the ancients in fame. A classic has a permanence of pleasurability; that is the meaning of his estate and title. Or again, Johnson in his paper on _The Work of Mr. Pater_, sets forth perhaps the best appreciation of his master that has yet appeared: ‘Magica sympathiæ!’ words borne upon the shield of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, are inscribed upon the writings of Mr. Pater, who found his way straight from the first to those matters proper to his genius, nor did he, as Fuseli says of Leonardo, ‘waste life, insatiate in experiment.’... ‘Nemo perfectus est,’ says St. Bernard, ‘qui perfectior esse appetit’: it is as true in art as in religion. In art also ‘the way to perfection is through a series of disgusts’ ... and truly, as Joubert said, we should hesitate before we differ in religion from the saints, in poetry from the poets.... There is no languorous toying with things of beauty, in a kind of opiate dream, to be found here.