ad and quoted outside the British Museum reading room.

"As to the 'Ballad' and 'De Profundis,' I think it is greatly to
Oscar's credit that, whilst he was sincere and deeply moved when he
was protesting against the cruelty of our present system to children
and to prisoners generally, he could not write about his own
individual share in that suffering with any conviction or
sympathy.[11] Except for the passage where he describes his exposure
at Clapham Junction, there is hardly a line in 'De Profundis' that he
might not have written as a literary feat five years earlier. But in
the 'Ballad,' even in borrowing form and melody from Coleridge, he
shews that he could pity others when he could not seriously pity
himself. And this, I think, may be pleaded against the reproach that
he was selfish. Externally, in the ordinary action of life as
distinguished from the literary action proper to his genius, he was no
doubt sluggish and weak because of his giantism. He ended as an
unproductive drunkard and swindler; for the repeated sales of the
Daventry plot, in so far as they imposed on the buyers and were not
transparent excuses for begging, were undeniably swindles. For all
that, he does not appear in his writings a selfish or base-minded man.
He is at his worst and weakest in the suppressed[12] part of 'De
Profundis'; but in my opinion it had better be published, for several
reasons. It explains some of his personal weakness by the stifling
narrowness of his daily round, ruinous to a man whose proper place was
in a large public life. And its concealment is mischievous because,
first, it leads people to imagine all sorts of horrors in a document
which contains nothing worse than any record of the squabbles of two
touchy idlers; and, second, it is clearly a monstrous thing that
Douglas should have a torpedo launched at him and timed to explode
after his death. The torpedo is a very harmless squib; for there is
nothing in it that cannot be guessed from Douglas's own book; but the
public does not know that. By the way, it is rather a humorous stroke
of Fate's irony that the son of the Marquis of Queensberry should be
forced to expiate his sins by suffering a succession of blows beneath
the belt.

[Footnote 11: Superb criticism.]

[Footnote 12: I have said this in my way.]

"Now that you have written the best life of Oscar Wilde, let us have
the best life of Frank Harris. Otherwise the man behind your works
will go down to post