everything upside down and inside
out!"

Vanessa cried "Hear, hear!" and the baronet laughed uproariously.

"'Ow can people read the stuff?" he pursued.

"I can't read it," said Stephen, "because it entirely fails to interest
me."

"I can't read it," Agatha declared, "because it all seems to me mere
beautiful words."

"Chiefly archaic!" added Stephen.

"I never read it," Vanessa observed, "because you have to wade through
such quantities of stuff before you can find anything worth
remembering."

Miss Mallowcoid, Leonetta, Guy, and Denis laughed.

"I tell them there's something lacking in them," snapped Miss
Mallowcoid, looking as unlike a poetical muse as it was possible to be.

Lord Henry turned to Denis. "You hear what they have said?" he enquired.

"Yes, they've been repeating that the whole morning," Denis rejoined.

"Their voices are at least those of sincerity," said Lord Henry.
"Neither can you say they are exceptionally ill-favoured human beings.
Without wishing to cast any aspersions on you, Miss Mallowcoid,
Leonetta, and Guy, I think an impartial judge might be excused if he
regarded your opponents as at least as intelligent as yourselves."

"Unquestionably," Denis admitted.

"Of course!" cried Guy.

Miss Mallowcoid and Leonetta, however, who were not at all persuaded
that they could excuse such a judge, looked stonily unconvinced.

"Well, then," said Lord Henry, "that shows we must seek the cause of
this modern indifference to poetry elsewhere than in the inferiority of
those who refuse to read it."

"Good!" cried the baronet, and Agatha, Vanessa, and Stephen cheered.

"The question is," Lord Henry continued, "why is poetry not read
to-day?"

"What is poetry, to begin with?" Vanessa demanded.

Everybody agreed that this was obviously the first thing to decide, and
various definitions were given, none of which proved satisfactory. Denis
Malster's definition which was: "Fine thoughts expressed in rhythmic
order, and sometimes rhymed," was rejected by Lord Henry.

"You must get out of your mind altogether, the idea that poetry is all
exalted vapourings, and high-browed sublime blue steam!" he said. "Its
most important characteristic is that it adopts a mnemonic form,--that
is to say, the form you would instinctively cast words into if you
wished to remember them."

This was generally agreed to.

"But what is it that can justly claim the right of a mnemonic form?"
Lord Henry exclaimed