such a forecast proved true. Wilde, though
under no illusion as to the folly of the quite unselfish suit-at-law
he had been persuaded to begin, nevertheless so miscalculated the
force of the social vengeance he was unloosing on himself that he
fancied it could be stayed by putting up the editor of The Saturday
Review (as Mr Harris then was) to declare that he considered Dorian
Grey a highly moral book, which it certainly is. When Harris foretold
him the truth, Wilde denounced him as a fainthearted friend who was
failing him in his hour of need, and left the room in anger. Harris's
idiosyncratic power of pity saved him from feeling or shewing the
smallest resentment; and events presently proved to Wilde how insanely
he had been advised in taking the action, and how accurately Harris
had gauged the situation.

The same capacity for pity governs Harris's study of Shakespear, whom,
as I have said, he pities too much; but that he is not insensible to
humor is shewn not only by his appreciation of Wilde, but by the fact
that the group of contributors who made his editorship of The Saturday
Review so remarkable, and of whom I speak none the less highly because
I happened to be one of them myself, were all, in their various ways,
humorists.

"Sidney's Sister: Pembroke's Mother"

And now to return to Shakespear. Though Mr Harris followed Tyler in
identifying Mary Fitton as the Dark Lady, and the Earl of Pembroke as
the addressee of the other sonnets and the man who made love
successfully to Shakespear's mistress, he very characteristically
refuses to follow Tyler on one point, though for the life of me I
cannot remember whether it was one of the surmises which Tyler
published, or only one which he submitted to me to see what I would
say about it, just as he used to submit difficult lines from the
sonnets.

This surmise was that "Sidney's sister: Pembroke's mother" set
Shakespear on to persuade Pembroke to marry, and that this was the
explanation of those earlier sonnets which so persistently and
unnaturally urged matrimony on Mr W. H. I take this to be one of the
brightest of Tyler's ideas, because the persuasions in the sonnets are
unaccountable and out of character unless they were offered to please
somebody whom Shakespear desired to please, and who took a motherly
interest in Pembroke. There is a further temptation in the theory for
me. The most charming of all Shakespear's old women, indeed the most
cha