d mocked at in the world of the living. He was a certain
Figgins, and he had been honestly apprenticed to a photographer; but,
being a weak and vain young fellow, he had picked up modern notions about
art, the nude, plasticity, and the like, in the photographer's workroom,
whereby he became a weariness to the photographer and to them that sat
unto him. Being dismissed from his honest employment, this chitterling
must needs become a model to some painters that were near as ignorant as
himself. They talked to him about the Greeks, about the antique, about
Paganism, about the Renaissance, till they made him as much the child of
folly as themselves. And they painted him as Antinous, as Eros, as
Sleep, and I know not what, but whatever name they called him he was
always the same lank-haired, dowdy, effeminate, pasty-faced
photographer's young man. Then he must needs take to writing poems all
about Greece, and the free ways of the old Greeks, and Lais, and Phryne,
and therein he made "Aeolus" rhyme to "control us." For of Greek this
fellow knew not a word, and any Greek that met him had called him a
[Greek text], and bidden him begone to the crows for a cursed fellow, and
one that made false quantities in every Greek name he uttered. But his
little poems were much liked by young men of his own sort, and by some of
the young women. Now death had come to Figgins, and here he was in the
Fortunate Islands, the very paradise of those Greeks about whom he had
always been prating while he was alive. And yet he was not happy. A
little lyre lay beside him in the grass, and now and again he twanged on
it dolorously, and he tried to weave himself garlands from the flowers
that grew around him; but he knew not the art, and ever and anon he felt
for his button-hole, wherein to stick a lily or the like. But he had no
button-hole. Then he would look at himself in the well, and yawn and
wish himself back in his friends' studios in London. I almost pitied the
wretch, and, going up to him, I asked him how he did. He said he had
never been more wretched. "Why," I asked, "was your mouth not always
full of the 'Greek spirit,' and did you not mock the Christians and their
religion? And, as to their heaven, did you not say that it was a tedious
place, full of pious old ladies and Philistines? And are you not got to
the paradise of the Greeks? What, then, ails you with your lot?" "Sir,"
said he, "to be plain with you, I do not unders