And then towards evening, when the labours of the day were ended, we would sit together round a bottle of a villainous brand of _Laubenheimer_ and discuss the merits of Tchecov and de Maupassant. Long contests were waged there on the vexed problems of æsthetics; the limits of dramatic art, _vers libre_, the function of criticism. All these in their turn passed through the sieve of dialectic. At times even captivity seemed a pleasant business, so full of leisure was it, after the bustle of the months that had preceded it. And no doubt years hence, when the rough outlines have become gently blurred against a harmonious background, we shall cast a glamour over those lazy days, and see in them a realisation of Bohemian dreams, of a Paris café and Verlaine leaning over a white table-cloth declaiming his lovely valedictory lines. And perhaps Time, that great alchemist, may even go so far as to transmute that foul white wine into the purest absinthe. We shall think of Dowson and the Cheshire Cheese, of the Rhymers’ Club and the delightful artifice of the nineties, and we shall claim companionship with those brave innovators to whom a finished work of art was a sufficient recompense for their weariness. But within it was not really like that; and as Pater has said, no doubt that ideal period of artistic endeavour has never had any existence outside the imagination of the dreamer, sick with a sort of far-away nostalgia, a vague longing for wider prospects and less narrowing horizons. Every generation has flung its eyes backwards over the past, and thought “if it had only been then that we had lived--then, when the values of life were still clear and simple,” and round certain names and ages there has been woven in consequence the thin gossamer of Romance, and the artist has found comfort in his conception of a world that has been passed by. From these backward glances and averted faces has emerged much that will never pass--Thais and Salambo, Henry Esmond and Marius the Epicurean. During the last three years I have often wished that I had been born thirty years earlier, at a time when the influence of French literature was making itself so keenly felt, and when Verlaine was the light about the young men’s feet. It is a glamorous world that we catch glimpses of through the opening doors of Mr. George Moore’s confessions. But I suppose that really it would not have been so very wonderful after all, and that those delicate creatures whose feet moved through Symons’s verse to a continual rustle of silk and cambric, were probably the most tawdry of _grisettes_, and those Paris cafés and the many-coloured glasses of liqueur, they were very much like the Alcove, I expect; and the Alcove is a place where no one would wish to sojourn indefinitely.