s of
duty and generosity; but I have known no more charming, no more
quickening, no more delightful spirit.

This may be my shortcoming; it may be that I prize humour and
good-humour and eloquent or poetic speech, the artist qualities, more
than goodness or loyalty or manliness, and so over-estimate things
amiable. But the lovable and joyous things are to me the priceless
things, and the most charming man I have ever met was assuredly Oscar
Wilde. I do not believe that in all the realms of death there is a more
fascinating or delightful companion.

One last word on Oscar Wilde's place in English literature. In the
course of this narrative I have indicated sufficiently, I think, the
value and importance of his work; he will live with Congreve and with
Sheridan as the wittiest and most humorous of all our playwrights. "The
Importance of Being Earnest" has its own place among the best of English
comedies. But Oscar Wilde has done better work than Congreve or
Sheridan: he is a master not only of the smiles, but of the tears of
men. "The Ballad of Reading Gaol" is the best ballad in English; it is
more, it is the noblest utterance that has yet reached us from a modern
prison, the only high utterance indeed that has ever come from that
underworld of man's hatred and man's inhumanity. In it, and by the
spirit of Jesus which breathes through it, Oscar Wilde has done much,
not only to reform English prisons, but to abolish them altogether, for
they are as degrading to the intelligence as they are harmful to the
soul. What gaoler and what gaol could do anything but evil to the
author of such a verse as this:

This too I know--and wise it were
If each could know the same--
That every prison that men build
Is built with bricks of shame,
And bound with bars, lest Christ should see
How men their brothers maim.

Indeed, is it not clear that the man who, in his own wretchedness, wrote
that letter to the warder which I have reproduced, and was eager to
bring about the freeing of the little children at his own cost, is far
above the judge who condemned him or the society which sanctions such
punishments? "The Ballad of Reading Gaol," I repeat, and some pages of
"De Profundis," and, above all, the tragic fate of which these were the
outcome, render Oscar Wilde more interesting to men than any of his
peers.

He has been indeed well served by the malice and cruelty of his enemies;
in this sense his wor