On his back a coat he beareth, Such as Sir John Bennet weareth, Made of velvet--strange array! Legs Apollo might have sighed for, Or great Hercules have died for, His knee breeches now display. Waving sunflower and lily, He calls all the houses “illy Decorated and designed.” For of taste they’ve not a tittle; They may chew and they may whittle; But they’re all born colour-blind! 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. Paumanokides:-- Who may this be? This young man clad unusually with loose locks, languorous, glidingly toward me advancing, Toward the ceiling of my chamber his orbic and expressive eyeballs uprolling, and so on, to which Narcissus replies, O clarion, from whose brazen throat, Strange sounds across the seas are blown, Where England, girt as with a moat, A strong sea-lion sits alone! 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 interview described in a local paper a few days later. He was dressed in a velvet jacket with an ordinary linen collar and neck tie and he wore trousers. “Mr. Wilde,” the interviewer states, “was communicative and genial; he said he found Canada pleasant, but in answer to a question as to whether European or American women were the more beautiful, he dexterously evaded his querist.” As regards poetry he expressed his opinion that Poe was the greatest American poet, and that Walt Whitman, if not a poet, was a man who sounded a strong note, perhaps neither prose nor poetry, but something of his own that was “grand, original and unique.”