ers will observe with different feelings, according to their
temperament, that he never followed up the particular trend of thought
developed in the essay. It is indeed more the work of the Berkeley Gold
Medallist at Dublin, or the brilliant young Magdalen Demy than of the
dramatist who was to write Salome. The composition belongs to his Oxford
days when he was the unsuccessful competitor for the Chancellor's English
Essay Prize. Perhaps Magdalen, which has never forgiven herself for
nurturing the author of Ravenna, may be felicitated on having escaped the
further intolerable honour that she might have suffered by seeing crowned
again with paltry academic parsley the most highly gifted of all her
children in the last century. Compared with the crude criticism on The
Grosvenor Gallery (one of the earliest of Wilde's published prose
writings), Historical Criticism is singularly advanced and mature. Apart
from his mere scholarship Wilde developed his literary and dramatic
talent slowly. He told me that he was never regarded as a particularly
precocious or clever youth. Indeed many old family friends and
contemporary journalists maintain sturdily that the talent of his elder
brother William was much more remarkable. In this opinion they are
fortified, appropriately enough, by the late Clement Scott. I record
this interesting view because it symbolises the familiar phenomenon that
those nearest the mountain cannot appreciate its height.

The exiguous fragment of La Sainte Courtisane is the next unpublished
work of importance. At the time of Wilde's trial the nearly completed
drama was entrusted to Mrs. Leverson, who in 1897 went to Paris on
purpose to restore it to the author. Wilde immediately left the
manuscript in a cab. A few days later he laughingly informed me of the
loss, and added that a cab was a very proper place for it. I have
explained elsewhere that he looked on his plays with disdain in his last
years, though he was always full of schemes for writing others. All my
attempts to recover the lost work failed. The passages here reprinted
are from some odd leaves of a first draft. The play is of course not
unlike Salome, though it was written in English. It expanded Wilde's
favourite theory that when you convert some one to an idea, you lose your
faith in it; the same motive runs through Mr. W. H. Honorius the hermit,
so far as I recollect the story, falls in love with the courtesan who has
come to