. Saltus fashioned his only play, _The Gates of Life_, which
he sent to Charles Frohman and which Mr. Frohman returned. The piece
has neither been produced nor published.

Last year (1917) the Brothers of the Book in Chicago published
privately an extremely limited edition (474 copies) of a book by Edgar
Saltus entitled, "Oscar Wilde: An Idler's Impression," which contains
only twenty-six pages, but those twenty-six pages are very beautiful.
They evoke a spirit from the dead. Indeed, I doubt if even Saltus has
done better than his description of a strange occurrence in a Regent
Street Restaurant on a certain night when he was supping with Wilde
and Wilde was reading _Salome_ to him: "apropos of nothing, or rather
with what to me at the time was curious irrelevance, Oscar, while
tossing off glass after glass of liquor, spoke of Pheme, a goddess
rare even in mythology, who after appearing twice in Homer, flashed
through a verse of Hesiod and vanished behind a page of Herodotus. In
telling of her, suddenly his eyes lifted, his mouth contracted, a
spasm of pain--or was it dread?--had gripped him. A moment only. His
face relaxed. It had gone.

"I have since wondered, could he have evoked the goddess then? For
Pheme typified what modern occultism terms the impact--the premonition
that surges and warns. It was Wilde's fate to die three times--to die
in the dock, to die in prison, to die all along the boulevards of
Paris. Often since I have wondered could the goddess have been
lifting, however slightly, some fringe of the crimson curtain, behind
which, in all its horror, his destiny crouched. If so, he braved it.

"I had looked away. I looked again. Before me was a fat pauper, florid
and over-dressed, who, in the voice of an immortal, was reading the
fantasies of the damned. In his hand was a manuscript, and we were
supping on _Salome_."

Edgar Saltus began with Balzac in 1884 and he has reached Oscar Wilde
in 1917. His other literary essays, on Gautier and Merimee in "Tales
Before Supper," on Barbey d'Aurevilly in "The Story Without a Name,"
and on Victor Hugo in "The Forum" (June, 1912,) all display the finest
qualities of his genius. Pervaded with his rare charm they are
clairvoyant and illuminating, more than that arresting. They should be
brought together in one volume, especially as they are at present
absolutely inaccessible, terrifyingly so, every one of them. And if
they are to be thus collected may we not hope for