remember Wilde patting the boy and saying: "Don't call me that, it sounds so respectable."

In Tite street I had the privilege of meeting Mrs. Oscar, who asked me to write something in an album. I have always hated albumenous poetry and, as I turned the pages in search of possible inspiration, I happened on this: From a poet to a poem. Robert Browning.

Poets exaggerate and why should they not? They have been found, too, with their hands in other people's paragraphs. Wilde helped himself to that line which he put in a sonnet to this lady, who had blue eyes, fair hair, chapped lips, and a look of constant bewilderment.

As for that, Oscar was sufficiently bewildering. He talked infinitely better than he wrote, and on no topic, no matter what, could he talk as other mortals must. Once only I heard of him uttering a platitude and from any one else that platitude would have been a paradox. He exuded wit and waded in it with a serenity that was disconcerting.

It was on this abnormal serenity and on his equally abnormal brilliance that he relied to defeat the prosecution. "I have all the criminal classes with me," he announced, and that was his one platitude, a banality that contrived to be tragic. Then headlong down the stair of life he fell.

Hell he had long since summarised as the union of souls without bodies to bodies without souls. There are worse definitions than this which years later I recalled when, through a curious forethought of fate, he was taken, en route to the cemetery, through the Porte de l'Enfer.

But in Tite street, at this time, and in Regent street where he occasionally dined, he was gentle, wholesome, and joyous; a man who paid compliments because, as he put it, he could pay nothing else. He had been caricatured: the caricatures had ceased. People had turned to look: they looked no longer. He was forgiven and, what is worse, forgotten. Yet that tiger, his destiny, was but sharpening its claws.

At an inn where Gautier dined, the epigrams were so demoralising that a waiter became insane. Similarly in the Regent street restaurant it was reported, perhaps falsely, that a waiter had also lost his reason. But Wilde, though a three decanter man, always preserved his own. He preserved, too, his courtesy which was invariable. The most venomous thing that he ever said of anyone was that he was a tedious person, and the only time he ever rebuked anybody was at the conclusion of one of those after-dinner stories which some host or other interrupted by rising and saying: "Shall we continue the conversation in the drawing-room?"

But I am in error. That was not his only rebuke. On one occasion I drove with him to Tite street. An hour previous he had executed a variation on the "Si j'étais roi." "If I were king," he had sung, "I would sit in a great hall and paint on green ivory and when my ministers came and told me that the people were starving, I would continue to paint on green ivory and say: 'Let them starve.'"

The aria was rendered in the rooms of Francis Hope, a young man who later married and divorced May Yohe, but who at the time showed an absurd interest in stocks. Someone else entered and Hope asked what was new in the City. "Money is very tight," came the reply. "Ah, yes," Wilde cut in. "And of a tightness that has been felt even in Tite street. Believe me, I passed the forenoon at the British Museum looking at a gold-piece in a case."

Afterward we drove to Chelsea. It was a vile night, bleak and bitter. On alighting, a man came up to me. He wore a short jacket which he opened. From neck to waist he was bare. I gave him a shilling. Then came the rebuke. With entire simplicity Wilde took off his overcoat and put it about the man.

But the simplicity seemed to me too Hugoesque and I said: "Why didn't you ask him in to dinner?"

Wilde gestured. "Dinner is not a feast, it is a ceremony."

Subsequently that ceremony must have been contemplated, for Mrs. Wilde was kind enough to invite me. The invitation reached me