men interested in art and thought, men of cultivation;
nearly all of them have been exceedingly brilliant talkers; some of them
have been exceedingly brilliant writers.

What I did say--I believe in the pages of the Nineteenth Century
{158}--was that vulgarity is the distinguishing note of those
Anglo-Indians whom Mr. Rudyard Kipling loves to write about, and writes
about so cleverly. This is quite true, and there is no reason why Mr.
Rudyard Kipling should not select vulgarity as his subject-matter, or as
part of it. For a realistic artist, certainly, vulgarity is a most
admirable subject. How far Mr. Kipling's stories really mirror Anglo-
Indian society I have no idea at all, nor, indeed, am I ever much
interested in any correspondence between art and nature. It seems to me
a matter of entirely secondary importance. I do not wish, however, that
it should be supposed that I was passing a harsh and saugrenu judgment on
an important and in many ways distinguished class, when I was merely
pointing out the characteristic qualities of some puppets in a
prose-play.--I remain, Sir, your obedient servant,

OSCAR WILDE.
September 25.

A HOUSE OF POMEGRANATES

I.

(Speaker, December 5, 1891.)

SIR.--I have just purchased, at a price that for any other English
sixpenny paper I would have considered exorbitant, a copy of the Speaker
at one of the charming kiosks that decorate Paris; institutions, by the
way, that I think we should at once introduce into London. The kiosk is
a delightful object, and, when illuminated at night from within, as
lovely as a fantastic Chinese lantern, especially when the transparent
advertisements are from the clever pencil of M. Cheret. In London we
have merely the ill-clad newsvendor, whose voice, in spite of the
admirable efforts of the Royal College of Music to make England a really
musical nation, is always out of tune, and whose rags, badly designed and
badly worn, merely emphasise a painful note of uncomely misery, without
conveying that impression of picturesqueness which is the only thing that
makes the poverty of others at all bearable.

It is not, however, about the establishment of kiosks in London that I
wish to write to you, though I am of opinion that it is a thing that the
County Council should at once take in hand. The object of my letter is
to correct a statement made in a paragraph of your interesting paper.

The writer of the paragraph in question states