s mouth was vowed always to
pure beauty.

The Trinity Don whom I have already quoted about Oscar's school-days
sends me a rather severe critical judgment of him as a student. There
is some truth in it, however, for in part at least it was borne out
and corroborated by Oscar's later achievement. It must be borne in
mind that the Don was one of his competitors at Trinity, and a
successful one; Oscar's mind could not limit itself to college tasks
and prescribed books.

"When Oscar came to college he did excellently during the first year;
he was top of his class in classics; but he did not do so well in the
long examinations for a classical scholarship in his second year. He
was placed fifth, which was considered very good, but he was plainly
not, the man for the [Greek: dolichos] (or long struggle), though
first-rate for a short examination."

Oscar himself only completed these spirit-photographs by what he told
me of his life at Trinity.

"It was the fascination of Greek letters, and the delight I took in
Greek life and thought," he said to me once, "which made me a scholar.
I got my love of the Greek ideal and my intimate knowledge of the
language at Trinity from Mahaffy and Tyrrell; they were Trinity to me;
Mahaffy was especially valuable to me at that time. Though not so good
a scholar as Tyrrell, he had been in Greece, had lived there and
saturated himself with Greek thought and Greek feeling. Besides he
took deliberately the artistic standpoint towards everything, which
was coming more and more to be my standpoint. He was a delightful
talker, too, a really great talker in a certain way--an artist in
vivid words and eloquent pauses. Tyrrell, too, was very kind to
me--intensely sympathetic and crammed with knowledge. If he had known
less he would have been a poet. Learning is a sad handicap, Frank, an
appalling handicap," and he laughed irresistibly.

"What were the students like in Dublin?" I asked. "Did you make
friends with any of them?"

"They were worse even than the boys at Portora," he replied; "they
thought of nothing but cricket and football, running and jumping; and
they varied these intellectual exercises with bouts of fighting and
drinking. If they had any souls they diverted them with coarse
_amours_ among barmaids and the women of the streets; they were simply
awful. Sexual vice is even coarser and more loathsome in Ireland than
it is in England:--

"'Lilies that fester smell far worse than