, and which has, to all appearance,
revelled in deepest draughts from that sparkling and alluring fountain.
But what a spiritual lesson has he drawn therefrom--a lesson graphically
and powerfully set forth in the fascinating pages which present to us
the life of Dorian Gray. A modern Narcissus, enamoured of his own
beauty, which proves a lure to draw him down into the deepest hells of
sensual indulgence, from whence he sinks into a still deeper abyss of
crime.

Introduced as an innocent, rather effeminate youth of extraordinary and
fascinating beauty, Dorian Gray has his eyes opened to the fact that he
possesses beauty, and his slumbering vanity and egotism, awakened by the
insidious flatteries of a hardened cynic, spring at once into activity,
and from that moment begins the downward course. Skilfully the author
depicts the budding and gradual unfolding of this baleful life-blossom
of the animal soul, seeking only the selfish gratification of the
senses, refined indeed by education and artistic culture, but,
notwithstanding, purely animal--nay, at times, bestial. By degrees, the
still, small voice--the voice of the higher self which spiritually
overshadows the unsophisticated youth--is deadened in the soul. All the
humane, merciful, spiritually beautiful sentiments and emotions of the
better nature, are strangled in their infancy, for Dorian Gray drinks so
deeply of the intoxicating cup of sensuous gratification, that his
nature becomes transformed to that of a demon--beautiful outwardly, but
within hideous. All this is depicted with a master hand; the underlying
lesson, for those who can find it, being the danger to the soul which
lies in an egotistic love and idolatrous cherishing of one's own
personal beauty--for male or female equally perilous. But the author by
an ingenious device presents to us an objective image of the subjective
transformation gradually going on in Dorian Gray's soul, which, for
startling vividness and horror, surpasses the effects usually produced
by the novelist's art.

Dorian Gray, whilst retaining the youthfulness, vigorous health, and
unimpaired beauty of his external form, at the same time witnesses the
objective presentment of his soul's growing, loathsome hideousness; and
its falling into diseased decrepitude, into an ugliness beyond
conception. At first horrified by this, he becomes at length accustomed
to it, and at certain stages of his downward course, after the
commission of new