PREFACE - THIS is no Chronicle of Saints. Nor yet is it a History of Devils. It is a record of certain very human, strenuous men in a very human, strenuous age a lustful, flamboyant age an age red with blood and pale with passion at white-heat an age of steel and velvet, of vivid colour, dazzling light and impenetrable shadow an age of swift movement, pitiless violence and high endeavour, of sharp antitheses and amazing contrasts. To judge it from the standpoint of this calm, deliberate, and correct century as we conceive our own to be is for sedate middle-age to judge from its own standpoint the reckless,hot,passionate, lustful humours of youth, of youth that errs grievausly and achieves greatly. So to judge that epoch collectively is manifestly wrong, a hopeless procedure if it be our aim to understand it and to be in sympathy with it, as it becomes broad-minded age to be tolerantly in sympathy with the youth whose follies it perceives. Life is an ephemeral business, and we waste...