t to know, rickety, unwholesome geniuses,
whose genius (such as it was) had allied itself to madness; and who
were just as conceited about the madness as about the genius, and
took more pains to cultivate it. It brought them a quicker kudos,
and was so much more visible to the naked eye.

At first Barty was fascinated by the madness, and took the genius on
trust, I suppose. They made much of him, painted him, wrote music
and verses about him, raved about his Greekness, his beauty, his
yellow hair, and his voice and what not, as if he had been a woman.
He even stood that, he admired them so! or rather, this genius of
theirs.

He introduced me to this little clique, who called themselves a
school, and each other "master": "the neo-priapists," or something
of that sort, and they worshipped the tuberose.

They disliked me at sight, and I them, and we did not dissemble!

Like Barty, I am fond of men's society; but at least I like them to
be unmistakably men of my own sex, manly men, and clean; not little
misshapen troglodytes with foul minds and perverted passions, or
self-advertising little mountebanks with enlarged and diseased
vanities; creatures who would stand in a pillory sooner than not be
stared at or talked about at all.

Whatever their genius might be, it almost made me sick--it almost
made me kick, to see the humorous and masculine Barty prostrate in
admiration before these inspired epicenes, these gifted epileptoids,
these anaemic little self-satisfied nincompoops, whose proper place,
it seemed to me, was either Earlswood, or Colney Hatch, or
Broadmoor. That is, if their madness was genuine, which I doubt. He
and I had many a quarrel about them, till he found them out and cut
them for good and all--a great relief to me; for one got a bad name
by being friends with such nondescripts.

"Dis-moi qui tu hantes, je te dirai ce que tu es!"

Need I say they all died long ago, without leaving the ghost of a
name?--and nobody cared. Poetical justice again! How encouraging it
is to think there are no such people now, and that the breed has
been thoroughly stamped out![1]

[Footnote 1: Editor.]

Barty never succeeded as an illustrator on wood. He got into a way
of doing very slight sketches of pretty people in fancy dress and
coloring them lightly, and sold them at a shop in the Strand, now no
more. Then he made up little stories, which he illustrated himself,
something like the picture-books of the later Caldec