gly at first he pleaded privilege. Some
time between the beginning of the prosecution and the trial, he
obtained an immense amount of unexpected evidence. He then justified
his libel and gave the names of the persons whom he intended to call
to prove his case. Where did he get this new knowledge?

I have spoken again and again in the course of this narrative of
Oscar's enemies, asserting that the English middle-class as puritans
detested his attitude and way of life, and if some fanatic or
representative of the nonconformist conscience had hunted up evidence
against Wilde and brought him to ruin there would have been nothing
extraordinary in a vengeance which might have been regarded as a duty.
Strange to say the effective hatred of Oscar Wilde was shown by a man
of the upper class who was anything but a puritan. It was Mr. Charles
Brookfield, I believe, who constituted himself private prosecutor in
this case and raked Piccadilly to find witnesses against Oscar Wilde.
Mr. Brookfield was afterwards appointed Censor of Plays on the
strength apparently of having himself written one of the "riskiest"
plays of the period. As I do not know Mr. Brookfield, I will not judge
him. But his appointment always seemed to me, even before I knew that
he had acted against Wilde, curiously characteristic of English life
and of the casual, contemptuous way Englishmen of the governing class
regard letters. In the same spirit Lord Salisbury as Prime Minister
made a journalist Poet Laureate simply because he had puffed him for
years in the columns of _The Standard_. Lord Salisbury probably
neither knew nor cared that Alfred Austin had never written a line
that could live. One thing Mr. Brookfield's witnesses established:
every offence alleged against Oscar Wilde dated from 1892 or
later--after his first meeting with Lord Alfred Douglas.

But at the time all such matters were lost for me in the questions:
would the authorities arrest Oscar? or would they allow him to escape?
Had the police asked for a warrant? Knowing English custom and the
desire of Englishmen to pass in silence over all unpleasant sexual
matters, I thought he would be given the hint to go abroad and allowed
to escape. That is the ordinary, the usual English procedure. Everyone
knows the case of a certain lord, notorious for similar practices, who
was warned by the police that a warrant had been issued against him:
taking the hint he has lived for many years past in leisure