Sir Max Beerbohm 44 min read

None who revelled with the Regent, it is said, was half so wicked as Lord George Hell, until, to win a good woman, he dons a mask with the face of a saint, and must live behind it.

Max Beerbohm's 1897 fairy tale is a witty, elegant fable of virtue assumed. Charming, ironic, gracefully told. Read it for a jewel of the fin de siècle, a dissolute lord who masks himself as a saint to woo a pure girl, and discovers, delightfully, that the mask may become the man.

In its time

Published in 1897, during the 1890s, wells arrives.

Reading it

44 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).