cently engaged at the Royal Theatre,
Holborn. A verdict of death by misadventure was returned.
Considerable sympathy was expressed for the mother of the deceased, who
was greatly affected during the giving of her own evidence, and that of
Dr. Birrell, who had made the post-mortem examination of the deceased.

He frowned, and tearing the paper in two, went across the room and
flung the pieces away. How ugly it all was! And how horribly real
ugliness made things! He felt a little annoyed with Lord Henry for
having sent him the report. And it was certainly stupid of him to have
marked it with red pencil. Victor might have read it. The man knew
more than enough English for that.

Perhaps he had read it and had begun to suspect something. And, yet,
what did it matter? What had Dorian Gray to do with Sibyl Vane's
death? There was nothing to fear. Dorian Gray had not killed her.

His eye fell on the yellow book that Lord Henry had sent him. What was
it, he wondered. He went towards the little, pearl-coloured octagonal
stand that had always looked to him like the work of some strange
Egyptian bees that wrought in silver, and taking up the volume, flung
himself into an arm-chair and began to turn over the leaves. After a
few minutes he became absorbed. It was the strangest book that he had
ever read. It seemed to him that in exquisite raiment, and to the
delicate sound of flutes, the sins of the world were passing in dumb
show before him. Things that he had dimly dreamed of were suddenly
made real to him. Things of which he had never dreamed were gradually
revealed.

It was a novel without a plot and with only one character, being,
indeed, simply a psychological study of a certain young Parisian who
spent his life trying to realize in the nineteenth century all the
passions and modes of thought that belonged to every century except his
own, and to sum up, as it were, in himself the various moods through
which the world-spirit had ever passed, loving for their mere
artificiality those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue,
as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin. The
style in which it was written was that curious jewelled style, vivid
and obscure at once, full of argot and of archaisms, of technical
expressions and of elaborate paraphrases, that characterizes the work
of some of the finest artists of the French school of Symbolistes.
There were in it metaphors as mons