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Dark brown wrappers, printed paper label; title-page printed in purple and black. Edition limited to 100 numbered copies; essay first printed in The Novel Review, April 1892. "He began as a critical poet in verse, and he ends as a symbolic poet in prose. He is the first poet-novelist of England. Fielding, Dickens, Thackeray were novelists, but not poets. Shelley wrote some novels when he was very young, but left prose for poetry. The poetry of Scott is better seen in his poems than in his novels. In France it is otherwise. Hugo, Flaubert, Gautier were poets of prose. The creator of Gilliatt's heroic love and Jean Valjean's holy sufferings was a poet; he who saw the snake-skin slippers of Salammbô by the marble bath-tank in her scarlet room, and waded through the massacre of the Valley of the Battle-Axe, and beheld lions crucified, was a poet; he who loved a woman he had never seen, gave to her the hands of Magdalen, the body of sleeping Antiope, the raiment of an Eastern queen, and who found her in the flesh in strange disguise, and made her his own for but a single night, was a poet; and he who has clothed the mystery of the Phoenix in the Picture of Dorian Gray is a prince of poets." John Evelyn Barlas (alias Evelyn Douglas, 1860-1914), poet and anarchist, was arrested in 1891 for firing a revolver outside the House of Commons; Oscar Wilde stood surety for him during the subsequent court proceedings. He spent the last 20 years of his short life in the Gartnavel Royal Lunatic Asylum, Glasgow. Seller Inventory # E100182
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