excesses, he repairs to this silent recorder of his
deeds, and unveiling it, seeks for fresh indication of the gradual decay
and corruption which are unfailingly represented on this physical side
of his being. As time went on--

"He grew more and more enamoured of his own beauty, more and more
interested in the corruption of his own soul. He would examine with
minute care, and often with a monstrous and terrible delight, the
hideous lines that seared the wrinkling forehead, or crawled around
the heavy sensual mouth, wondering sometimes which were the more
horrible, the signs of sins or the signs of age. He would place his
white hands beside the coarse bloated hands of the picture, and
smile. He mocked the misshapen body and the failing limbs."[22]

Never does he feel a moment of repentance. The disgusting image,
however, haunts him with a terror of discovery, drawing him back from
distant places to assure himself of its hidden security, and to
contemplate it with a hideous fascination. The loathsome horror never
departs from his consciousness. From its veiled seclusion it exerts over
him a spell of diabolical enchantment, and he knows that it is he
himself; but his mirror presents to his gaze the personal beauty he
cherishes, and the world continues to be fascinated by his charm. Many
become fascinated to their serious moral and spiritual injury. His
victims are numerous; innocent women and upright young men, who, but for
him, would have led virtuous, useful lives. With his beautiful
body--cared for as one would care for some rare exotic blossom--going
about the world with a charming appearance of harmlessness and even
innocence, he murdered souls in secret, as completely as if with his
slender, white, taper fingers he might have clutched their throats and
strangled the life out of their bodies.

And all this rottenness, all this corruption, had been proximately
caused by a seed dropped into a soil prepared for it--the soul left
doubtless from the Karma of some previous life. A seed dropped from the
flattering tongue of Lord Henry Wotton, tended and skilfully fostered
into a surprising precociousness by his insidious, worthless cynicisms,
and oracular sophistries. A man out of whose life had departed every
wholesome savour, who poisoned the lives of others, and led them to sin,
whilst, apparently, he sinned not himself. As a friend once said to him,
"You never say a moral thing,