ce at the Grand Opera House,
Rochester, New York State, on February 7. It was first published in a
volume called Decorative Art in America, containing unauthorised reprints
of certain reviews and letters contributed by Wilde to English
newspapers. (New York: Brentano's, 1906.)

St. Louis, February 28, 1882.

MY DEAR JOAQUIN MILLER,--I thank you for your chivalrous and courteous
letter. Believe me, I would as lief judge of the strength and splendour
of sun and sea by the dust that dances in the beam and the bubble that
breaks on the wave, as take the petty and profitless vulgarity of one or
two insignificant towns as any test or standard of the real spirit of a
sane, strong and simple people, or allow it to affect my respect for the
many noble men or women whom it has been my privilege in this great
country to know.

For myself and the cause which I represent I have no fears as regards the
future. Slander and folly have their way for a season, but for a season
only; while, as touching the few provincial newspapers which have so
vainly assailed me, or that ignorant and itinerant libeller of New
England who goes lecturing from village to village in such open and
ostentatious isolation, be sure I have no time to waste on them. Youth
being so glorious, art so godlike, and the very world about us so full of
beautiful things, and things worthy of reverence, and things honourable,
how should one stop to listen to the lucubrations of a literary gamin, to
the brawling and mouthing of a man whose praise would be as insolent as
his slander is impotent, or to the irresponsible and irrepressible
chatter of the professionally unproductive?

It is a great advantage, I admit, to have done nothing, but one must not
abuse even that advantage.

Who, after all, that I should write of him, is this scribbling
anonymuncule in grand old Massachusetts who scrawls and screams so glibly
about what he cannot understand? This apostle of inhospitality, who
delights to defile, to desecrate, and to defame the gracious courtesies
he is unworthy to enjoy? Who are these scribes who, passing with
purposeless alacrity from the Police News to the Parthenon, and from
crime to criticism, sway with such serene incapacity the office which
they so lately swept? 'Narcissuses of imbecility,' what should they see
in the clear waters of Beauty and in the well undefiled of Truth but the
shifting and shadowy image of their own substantial stupidity? Secur