s of the
picture for being a whole month younger than I am, I must admit that I
delight in it. Perhaps you had better write to him. I don't want to see
him alone. He says things that annoy me. He gives me good advice."

Lord Henry smiled. "People are very fond of giving away what they need
most themselves. It is what I call the depth of generosity."

"Oh, Basil is the best of fellows, but he seems to me to be just a bit
of a Philistine. Since I have known you, Harry, I have discovered that."

"Basil, my dear boy, puts everything that is charming in him into his
work. The consequence is that he has nothing left for life but his
prejudices, his principles, and his common-sense. The only artists I
have ever known, who are personally delightful, are bad artists. Good
artists exist simply in what they make, and consequently are perfectly
uninteresting in what they are. A great poet, a really great poet, is
the most unpoetical of all creatures. But inferior poets are absolutely
fascinating. The worse their rhymes are, the more picturesque they look.
The mere fact of having published a book of second-rate sonnets makes a
man quite irresistible. He lives the poetry that he cannot write. The
others write the poetry that they dare not realise."

"I wonder is that really so, Harry?" said Dorian Gray, putting some
perfume on his handkerchief out of a large gold-topped bottle that stood
on the table. "It must be, if you say it. And now I am off. Imogen is
waiting for me. Don't forget about to-morrow. Good-bye."

As he left the room, Lord Henry's heavy eyelids drooped, and he began to
think. Certainly few people had ever interested him so much as Dorian
Gray, and yet the lad's mad adoration of some one else caused him not
the slightest pang of annoyance or jealousy. He was pleased by it. It
made him a more interesting study. He had been always enthralled by the
methods of natural science, but the ordinary subject-matter of that
science had seemed to him trivial and of no import. And so he had begun
by vivisecting himself, as he had ended by vivisecting others. Human
life--that appeared to him the one thing worth investigating. Compared
to it there was nothing else of any value. It was true that as one
watched life in its curious crucible of pain and pleasure, one could not
wear over one's face a mask of glass, nor keep the sulphurous fumes from
troubling the brain, and making the imagination turbid with monstrous
fancies and miss