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For years, Dorian Gray could not free himself from the influence

of this book. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that he

never sought to free himself from it. He procured from Paris no

less than nine large-paper copies of the first edition, and had

them bound in different colours, so that they might suit his

various moods and the changing fancies of a nature over which he

seemed, at times, to have almost entirely lost control. The hero,

the wonderful young Parisian in whom the romantic and the

scientific temperaments were so strangely blended, became to him

a kind of prefiguring type of himself. And, indeed, the whole

book seemed to him to contain the story of his own life, written

before he had lived it.