courtesan in the splendors of purple and gold and perfumed her with many quaint, dangerous essences more exciting than her later career as penitent; in Imperial Purple he undertook a chronicle of the Roman emperors from Julius Caesar to Heliogabolus, exhibiting them in the most splendid of all their extravagances and sins; in Historia Amoris he followed the maddening trail of love and in The Lords of the Ghostland the saddening trail of faith through the annals of mankind.

He wrote novels, too, of contemporary life, but they are his least notable achievements.  His personages in none of these novels manage to convince; his plots are melodrama; his worldly wisdom has smirks and postures in it; his style, now sharp now sagging, is unequal.  Saltus could not, it seems, dispense with antiquity and remoteness in his books.  Only when buried in the deep world of ancient story or when ranging through the widest field of time did he become most himself.  Then he invited no comparisons with familiar actualities and could assemble the most magnificent glories according to his whims and could drape them in the most gorgeous stuffs.  What especially touched his imagination was the spectacle of imperial Rome as interpreted to him by French decadence:  that lust for power and sensation, those incredible temples, palaces, feasts, revelries, blasphemies, butcheries.  Commencing with a beauty which knew no bounds, he moved on to lust or satiety or impotence for his theme; in the end he brought little but a glittering ferocity to that cold chronicle of the czars from Ivan to Catherine, The Imperial Orgy.  His phrases never failed him, flashing like gems or snakes and clasping his exuberant materials in almost the only discipline they ever had.  Wit withheld him from utter lusciousness.  Though he employed Corinthian cadences and diction, he kept continually checking them with the cynic twist of some deft colloquialism.  To venture into his microcosm is to bid farewell to all that is simple and kindly; it is, however, to discover the terrible beauty that lurks behind corruption, malevolent though delirious.

Romance of the traditionary sort, it is plain, has lately lost its vogue in the United States and is being neglected as at almost no other period since Fenimore Cooper established its principal native modes.  The ancient romantic matters of the Settlement and the Revolution flourish almost solely in tales for boys.  There is of course still a matter of the Frontier, but it is another frontier:  the Canadian North and Northwest, Alaska, the islands of the South Seas, latterly the battle fields of France, and always the trails of American exploration wherever they may chance to lead.  The performers upon such themes—­the Rex Beaches, the Emerson Houghs, the Randall Parrishes, the Zane Greys, the James Oliver Curwoods—­march ordinarily under the noisy banner of “red blood” and derive from Stephen Crane, Frank Norris, Jack London,