"The facts in the Curious Case of H. Hyrtl, esq."[20] is a slight yarn in the mellow Stevenson manner, with a kindly old gentleman as the messenger of the supernatural who provides the wherewithal for a marriage between an impoverished artist, who is painting Heliogabolus's feast of roses, and his sweet young thing. Quite a departure this from the usual Saltus manner; nevertheless there are two deaths, one by shock, the other in a railway accident. The plot depends on as many impossible entrances and exits as a Palais Royal farce and the reader is asked to believe in many coincidences. The book is dedicated to Lorillard Ronalds who, the author explains in a few French phrases, asked him to write something "_de tres pure et de tres chaste, pour une jeunesse, sans doute_." He adds that the story is a rewriting of a tale which had appeared twenty years earlier. "Imperial Purple"[21] marks the high-tide of Saltus's peculiar genius. The emperors of imperial decadent Rome are led by the chains of art behind the chariot wheels of the poet: Julius Caesar, whom Cato called "that woman," Augustus, Tiberius, Caligula, the wicked Agrippina, for whom Agnes Repplier named her cat, Claudius, Nero, Hadrian, Vespasian, down to the incredible Heliogabolus. Saltus, who has given us many vivid details concerning the lives of his predecessors, seemingly falters at this dread name, but only seemingly. More can be found about this extraordinary and perverse emperor in Lombard's "L'Agonie" and in Franz Blei's "The Powder Puff," but, although Saltus is brief, he evokes an atmosphere and a picture in a few short paragraphs. The sheer lyric quality of this book has remained unsurpassed by this author. Indeed it is rare in all literature. Page after page that Walter Pater, Oscar Wilde, or J. K. Huysmans might have been glad to sign might be set before you. The man writes with invention, with sap, with urge. Our eyes are not clogged with foot-notes and references. It is plain that our author has delved in the "Scriptores Historiae Augustae," that he has read Lampridius, Suetonius, and the others, but he does not strive to make us aware of it. The historical form has at last found a poet to render it supportable. Blood runs across the pages; gore and booty are the principal themes; and yet Beauty struts supreme through the horror. The author's sympathy is his password, a sympathy which he occasionally exposes, for he is not above pinning his heart to his sleeve, as, for example, when he says, "In spite of Augustus's boast, the city was not by any means of marble. It was filled with crooked little streets, with the atrocities of the Tarquins, with houses unsightly and perilous, with the moss and dust of ages; it compared with Alexandria as London compares with Paris; it had a splendour of its own, but a splendour that could be heightened." Here is a picture of squalid Rome: "In the subura, where at night women sat in high chairs, ogling the passer with painted eyes, there