rix virginum Regina nostri
miserere,"_ and greeted me with a pitiless simper. The unidentified
martyr on the left stared straight in front of him with callous
indifference, and St. Roch looked aggravatingly plump for all his
ostentatious plague-spot. The picture was worse than meaningless. It was
insulting. It drove me out of the Public Gallery. Outside a grey mist
veiled the hills and a fine penetrating rain was falling. I crept home,
and for the fiftieth time since I have been here, opened my "History of
Renaissance Morals." I threw it, with a final curse, into the corner.

I loathe it. I care not a fig for the Renaissance or its morals. I count
its people but a pestilent herd of daubers, rhymers, cutthroats, and
courtesans. Their _hubris_ has lost its glamour of beauty and has
coarsened into vulgar insolence. They offend me by their riotous
swagger, their insistence on the animal joy of living; chiefly by their
perpetual reminiscence of Pasquale.

Yet once they interested me greatly, filling with music and with colour
the grey void of my life. Whence has come the change?

In myself. To myself I have become a subject of excruciating interest.
To myself I am a vastly more picturesque personage than any debonair
hooligan of quattro-cento Verona. He has faded into the dullest (and
most offensive) dog of a ghost. I only exist. This sounds like the
colossal vanity of Bedlam. Heaven knows it is not. If you are racked
with toothache from ear to ear, from crown to chin, and from eyeball
to cerebellum, is not the whole universe concentrated in that head of
yours? Are you not to yourself in that hour of torture the most vitally
important of created beings? And no one blames you for it. Let me
therefore be without blame in my hour of moral toothache.

In the days gone by I was the victim of a singular hallucination. I
flattered myself on being the one individual in the world not summoned
to play his part in the comedy of Life. I sat alone in the great
auditorium like the mad king of Bavaria, watching with little zest what
seemed but a sorry spectacle. I thought myself secure in my solitary
stall. But I had not counted on the high gods who crowd shadowy into the
silent seats and are jealous of a mortal in their midst. Without warning
was I wrested from my place, hurled onto the stage, and before my
dazzled eyes could accustom themselves to the footlights, I found
myself enmeshed in intolerable drama. I was unprepared. I knew m