sad and I think very poor. "Nobody will employ me now," he said.
"Your master is gone," I answered, "and you are like the spear in an old
Irish story that had to be kept dipped in poppy-juice that it might not go
about killing people on its own account." I wrote my first good lyrics and
tolerable essays for _The National Observer_, and as I always signed my
work could go my own road in some measure. Henley often revised my lyrics,
crossing out a line or a stanza and writing in one of his own, and I was
comforted by my belief that he also rewrote Kipling then in the first
flood of popularity. At first, indeed, I was ashamed of being rewritten
and thought that others were not, and only began investigation when the
editorial characteristics--epigrams, archaisms, and all--appeared in the
article upon Paris fashions and in that upon opium by an Egyptian Pasha. I
was not compelled to full conformity for verse is plainly stubborn; and in
prose, that I might avoid unacceptable opinions, I wrote nothing but ghost
or fairy stories, picked up from my mother or some pilot at Rosses Point
and Henley saw that I must needs mix a palette fitted to my subject
matter. But if he had changed every "has" into "hath" I would have let
him, for had not we sunned ourselves in his generosity? "My young men
outdo me and they write better than I," he wrote in some letter praising
Charles Whibley's work, and to another friend with a copy of my _Man Who
Dreamed of Fairyland_: "See what a fine thing has been written by one of
my lads."

VIII

My first meeting with Oscar Wilde was an astonishment. I never before
heard a man talking with perfect sentences, as if he had written them all
over night with labour and yet all spontaneous. There was present that
night at Henley's, by right of propinquity or of accident, a man full of
the secret spite of dulness, who interrupted from time to time, and always
to check or disorder thought; and I noticed with what mastery he was
foiled and thrown. I noticed, too, that the impression of artificiality
that I think all Wilde's listeners have recorded came from the perfect
rounding of the sentences and from the deliberation that made it possible.
That very impression helped him, as the effect of metre, or of the
antithetical prose of the seventeenth century, which is itself a true
metre, helped its writers, for he could pass without incongruity from some
unforeseen, swift stroke of wit to elaborate reverie. I heard