artistic symbols, our clothes even won meaning and significance. It
was at Oxford I first dressed in knee breeches and silk stockings. I
almost reformed fashion and made modern dress aesthetically beautiful;
a second and greater reformation, Frank. What a pity it is that Luther
knew nothing of dress, had no sense of the becoming. He had courage
but no fineness of perception. I'm afraid his neckties would always
have been quite shocking!" and he laughed charmingly.

"What about the inside of the platter, Oscar?"

"Ah, Frank, don't ask me, I don't know; there was no grossness, no
coarseness; but all delicate delights!

"'Fair passions and bountiful pities and loves without pain,'"[4]

and he laughed mischievously at the misquotation.

"Loves?" I questioned, and he nodded his head smiling; but would not
be drawn.

"All romantic and ideal affections. Every successive wave of youths
from the public schools brought some chosen spirits, perfectly
wonderful persons, the most graceful and fascinating disciples that a
poet could desire, and I preached the old-ever-new gospel of
individual revolt and individual perfection. I showed them that sin
with its curiosities widened the horizons of life. Prejudices and
prohibitions are mere walls to imprison the soul. Indulgence may hurt
the body, Frank, but nothing except suffering hurts the spirit; it is
self-denial and abstinence that maim and deform the soul."

"Then they knew you as a great talker even at Oxford?" I asked in some
surprise.

"Frank," he cried reprovingly, laughing at the same time delightfully,
"I was a great talker at school. I did nothing at Trinity but talk, my
reading was done at odd hours. I was the best talker ever seen in
Oxford."

"And did you find any teacher there like Mahaffy?" I asked, "any
professor with a touch of the poet?"

He came to seriousness at once.

"There were two or three teachers, Frank," he replied, "greater than
Mahaffy; teachers of the world as well as of Oxford. There was Ruskin
for instance, who appealed to me intensely--a wonderful man and a most
wonderful writer. A sort of exquisite romantic flower; like a violet
filling the whole air with the ineffable perfume of belief. Ruskin has
always seemed to me the Plato of England--a Prophet of the Good and
True and Beautiful, who saw as Plato saw that the three are one
perfect flower. But it was his prose I loved, and not his piety. His
sympathy with the poor bored me: the ro