Omaha, where, under the auspices of the Social Art Club, Wilde delivered a lecture on “Decorative Art,” he described his impressions of many American houses as being “illy designed, decorated shabbily, and in bad taste, filled with furniture that was not honestly made,  

and was out of character.” This statement gave rise to the following verses:—

  His lectures dealt almost exclusively with the subjects of Art and Dress Reform. In the course of one lecture he remarked that the most impressive room he had yet entered in America was the one in Camden Town where he met Walt Whitman. It contained plenty of fresh air and sunlight. On the table was a simple cruse of water. This led to a parody, in the style of Whitman, describing an imaginary interview between the two poets, which appeared in “The Century” a few months later. Wilde is called Narcissus and Whitman Paumanokides.

  and so on, to which Narcissus replies,

Of the lectures which he delivered in America only one has been preserved, namely that on the English Renaissance. This was his first lecture, and it was delivered in New York on January 9th, 1882. According to a contemporary account in the “New York Herald” a distinguished and crowded audience assembled in Chickering Hall that evening to listen to one who “was well worth seeing, his short breeches and silk stockings showing to even better advantage upon the stage than in the gilded drawing-rooms, where the young  

Apostle has heretofore been seen in New York.”[2]

On leaving the States in the “fall” of the year Wilde proceeded to Canada and thence to Nova Scotia, arriving in Halifax in the second week of October. Of his visit there we have no record except an amusing