The dialogue throughout the tale sparkles with brilliant epigrams, and this is all the more notable when we remember that the story was written in a hurry, when the author was hard pressed for money, is more or less a piece of hack work, and that whole pages were written in at the behest of the publisher, who, like a customer at the baker's demanding the make-weight which the law allows him, was clamouring for more "copy." Nothing could be more felicitous than "young people imagine that money is everything ... and when they grow older they know it"; and, "to be good is to be in harmony with oneself." And characteristic of that Epicurean pose that the author delighted in is the paradoxical dictum that "a cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied." Likewise essentially characteristic of the man and his extraordinary, topsy-turvy views of life is, "There is a fatality about good resolutions--that they are always made too late," or "Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. They are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they have no account." Some of the epigrams are as biting as a _Saturday Review_ article, in the old days, as for instance, this description of a certain frail dame--"She is still _decolletée_, and when she is in a very smart gown she looks like an _edition de luxe_ of a bad French novel." Could anything be more pithy or more brilliantly sarcastic? It is of this same lady that the remark is made, "When her third husband died, her hair turned quite golden from grief." But one could go on for ever, and I have quoted enough to illustrate the wittiness of the dialogue, and, as the author himself lays down, "Enough is as good as a meal." And there, by the way, we have an illustration of how cleverly Wilde could transform the commonest saws by the alteration or the transposition of a word, even sometimes by the inversion of a sentence into what, at the first flush, appeared to be highly original and brilliant sayings. By the substitution of the word "meal" for "feast" we fail to recognise the old homely saying, and are ready, until we consider it more closely, to receive it as a new and witty idea neatly embodied. It is a _truc de métier_, but one that requires a clever workman to use properly, as anyone can make sure of by glancing through the bungling work of the majority of his imitators. In "Dorian Gray," Wilde gives free play to his ever-present longing to utter the _dernier cri_, to avoid all that was _vieux jeu_, and to fill with horror and amazement the souls of the stodgy _bourgeoisie_. That he succeeded in doing so merely proves that the _bourgeoisie_ are stodgy, not that the author has erred from the canons of art and good taste.