Outside this medium of the essay, with the exception of the caricatures, Max is no longer the incomparable, for his short story, _The Happy Hypocrite_, is not a short story at all, but a spoilt essay;[19] while his novel is not merely a failure, but a veritable disaster. With his first paper in _The Yellow Book_ he fell in with the step of the men of the nineties, and he too became a part of their efflorescence. Sufficient unto that time is his work, and with a final quotation from this early paper so redolent of the movement that there is no mistaking it, we must leave him and his future on the knees of the gods: ‘Was it not at Capua that they had a whole street where nothing was sold but dyes and unguents? We must have such a street, and, to fill our new Seplosia, our Arcade of Unguents, all herbs and minerals and live creatures shall give of their substance. The white cliffs of Albion shall be ground to powder for Loveliness, and perfumed by the ghost of many a little violet. The fluffy eider-ducks, that are swimming round the pond, shall lose their feathers, that the powder-puff may be moonlike as it passes over Loveliness’ lovely face.’ [19] His Children’s Tale, _The Small Boy and the Barley Sugar_ (_The Parade_, 1897), should also be mentioned as another case of shipwrecked ingenuity. VI Here I propose to go through a litany of some of my omissions. In essaying to depict the aspects of an age there is always this pitfall, omission, which ambuscades the adventurous spirit. For we who know so little even about ourselves--how can we, without grave impertinence, boldly say I wish to bring back to the mind of others an age dead and gone? Everything is so interwoven in life that it is, for example, an unwarranted arbitrariness to discuss the literature of this period without brooding on the black and white art of the time, or the canvases of its painters. I have worried for some space over Aubrey Beardsley, but I have not spoken of men like Mr. S. H. Sime, whose work Beardsley so delighted in. Probably Sidney H. Sime’s work in _The Butterfly_, _The Idler_, _Pick-me-Up_, _Eureka_, etc., besides his book illustrations, is in some ways the most powerfully imaginative of the period. There has been a Beardsley craze, and most assuredly there will be one day a Sime craze, when collectors have focussed properly the marvellous suggestive power of this artist’s work. Unfortunately, scattered up and down old magazines, much of this work is, as it were, lost for the moment like Toulouse Lautrec’s drawings in papers like _Le Rire_. But when it is garnered up in a worthy book of drawings like the Beardsley books, the power of Sime’s work will be undoubted. Fortunately Sime is still amongst us, and occasionally a Dunsany book brings us fresh evidence of his genius.