Once a welcome guest in many of our Bohemian haunts, he lives now a
life of quiet retirement in his little house in Tite Street with his
wife and his two sons, his prop and mainstay, solacing himself with
many a reminiscence of the friends of his youth, whilst he leaves
his better-known brother, William, to perpetuate the social name of
the family. Always noted for his tenacious memory, it is one of the
old gentleman’s keenest pleasures to regale a visitor from the outer
world with stories of the late Mr. Frank Niles, Mr. Godwin, the
architect, Mr. Robert Browning or the Earl of Lytton, who was not the
only member of the upper ten thousand to honour Mr. Wilde with his
personal friendship. “All, all are gone, the old familiar faces” and
with the quiet resignation of one who knows that he is the survivor of
a bygone day, Mr. Wilde tends more and more to exist in its memory or
to solace himself with the old classics of which he was ever so earnest
a student, with his Keats and his Shakespeare, his Joseph Miller and
the literal translations of the Greek Dramatists. Not that he is a mere
_laudator temporis acti_, a bibliophile and nothing more. He still
keeps up his writing, is still the glutton for work that he always
was. He has not yet abandoned his old intention of dramatising Salome
and the amount of journalistic matter that he quietly produces and
contributes anonymously to various periodicals is surprising. Only last
year an undergraduate journal called the _Spirit Lamp_ accepted a poem
of his in which there were evidences that he has lost little of his old
talent for versification.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account