You had to face your ends when young-- ’Twas wine or women, or some curse-- But never made a poorer song That you might have a heavier purse; Nor gave loud service to a cause That you might have a troop of friends: You kept the Muses’ sterner laws And unrepenting faced your ends. In fact, since influences and counter-influences in all ages of literature are such subtle vermin to ferret out, I propose to avoid as far as possible any generalities in that connection, and to interpret broadly and briefly a somewhat vague period that reviewers have acquired the habit of calling ‘the nineties.’ What then was this period? It was a portion of the last decade of the last century which began about 1890, and passing through the Rhymers’ Club, blossomed out into _The Yellow Book_ and _The Savoy_ periodicals, and produced works like Beardsley’s drawings, Conder’s fans, Dowson’s poetry, and Hubert Crackanthorpe’s short stories. The men who composed the group are too numerous to recall in their entirety, even if a satisfactory list of such a nature could be produced. So all I intend to attempt here is a summary of the activities of certain typical examples of the group as will serve to furnish an appreciation of their general work. And the way I propose to obtain this view is to begin by considering Beardsley as the central figure of the period; to deal next with the two most vital manifestoes of the movement and their respective literary editors, _The Yellow Book_ and Henry Harland, _The Savoy_ and Mr. Arthur Symons, passing on in turn to the writers of fiction, the poets, the essayists and dramatists not of the whole decade, but only to those with whom this particular movement is concerned; it will then be time to make a few deductions on the spirit of the whole of this tendency. By rigidly adhering to only those men who were actually of the nineties group I am only too conscious these pages will be considered often to be lacking in the great literary events and figures of the age, such as Hardy’s _Jude the Obscure_, the rise of the Kipling star, the tragedy of Wilde, the coming of Conrad, etc. etc. Yet the sole object of this scant summary would be defeated if I began to prattle of these and others like Bernard Shaw. In fact its _raison d’être_ constrains a method of treatment which must not be broken. I