Patrick Kurp says he couldn’t have read Max Beerbohm at a young age, because he requires a personal depth or history to draw upon while reading. He notes, “In another small masterpiece from And Even Now, ‘The Golden Drugget,’ Beerbohm describes a rather drab, undistinguished inn near his home in Rapallo, overlooking the Gulf of Genoa, in Italy:

“By moonlight, too, it is negligible. Stars are rather unbecoming to it. But on a thoroughly dark night, when it is manifest as nothing but a strip of yellow light cast across the road from an ever-open door, great always is its magic for me. Is? I mean was. But then, I mean also will be. And so I cleave to the present tense–the nostalgic present, as grammarians might call it.”