living mother. The rarefied air of the academy and the arena produce the sixshilling novel, the musichall song, France produces the finest flower of corruption in Mallarmé but the desirable life is revealed only to the poor of heart, the life of Homer’s Phæacians.
From these words Mr Best turned an unoffending face to Stephen.
―Mallarmé, don’t you know, he said, has written those wonderful prose poems Stephen MacKenna used to read to me in Paris. The one about Hamlet . He says: il se promène, lisant au livre de lui-même , don’t you know, reading the book of himself. He describes Hamlet given in a French town, don’t you know,