day," Michael said thoughtfully. "A
monk he was, as a matter of fact--who told me a skit of things--you
know--about a bad life. It's funny, though I hate ugly things and common
things, he gave me a feeling that I'd like to go right away from
everything and live in one of those horrible streets that you pass in an
omnibus when the main road is up. Perhaps you don't understand what I
mean?"

Mr. Wilmot's eyes glittered through the haze of smoke.

"Why shouldn't I understand? Squalor is the Parthenope of the true
Romantic. You'll find it in all the poets you love best--if not in their
poetry, certainly in their lives. Even romantic critics are not without
temptation. One day you shall read of Hazlitt and Sainte-Beuve. And now,
dear boy, here is my library which holds as many secrets as the
Spintrian books of Elephantis, long ago lost and purified by the sea. I
am what the wise world would call about to corrupt your mind, and yet I
believe that for one who like you must some day make trial of the
uttermost corruption, I am prescribing more wisely than Chiron, that
pig-headed or rather horse-bodied old prototype of all schoolmasters,
who sent his hero pupils one after another into the world, proof against
nothing but a few spear-thrusts. I offer you better than fencing-bouts
and wrestling-matches. I offer you a good library. Read every day and
all night, and when you are a man full grown, you will smile at the
excesses of your contemporaries, at their divorces and disgraces. You
will stand aloof like a second Aurelius, coining austere aphorisms and
mocking the weakness of your unlearned fellows. Why are priests
generally so inept in the confessional? Because they learn their
knowledge of life from, a frowsy volume of Moral Theology that in the
most utterly barbarous Latin emits an abstract of humanity's
immeasurable vice. In the same way most young men encounter wickedness
in some sudden shock of depravity from which they retire blushing and
mumbling, 'Who'd have thought it!' ' Who'd have thought it!' they cry,
and are immediately empanelled on a jury.

"Not so you, O more subtle youth, with the large deep eyes and secret
sidelong smile.

"There on my shelves are all the ages. I have spoken to you of
Petronius, of Lucian and Apuleius. There is Suetonius, with his
incredibly improper tales that show how beastliness takes root and
flowers from the deposited muck of a gossip's mind. There is Tacitus,
ever willing to sacrif