"Whenever the last trumpet shall sound, I will present myself before the sovereign Judge with this book in my hand, and loudly proclaim, Thus have I acted; these were my thoughts; such was I. With equal freedom and veracity have I related what was laudable or wicked, I have concealed no crimes, added no virtues; and if I have sometimes introduced superfluous ornament, it was merely to occupy a void occasioned by defect of memory. I may have supposed that certain, which I only knew to be probable, but have never asserted as truth a conscious falsehood. Such as I was, I have declared myself; sometimes vile and despicable, at others, virtuous, generous, and sublime. Even as thou hast read my inmost soul, Power eternal! assemble round thy throne an innumerable throng of my fellow-mortals, let them listen to my confessions, let them blush at my depravity, let them tremble at my sufferings; let each in his turn expose with equal sincerity the failings, the wanderings of his heart, and, if he dare, aver, _I was better than that man_." These are the first words in that book which it was supposed would always stand as a type of real self-revelation and confession and which now is thought of by all the world as merely a brilliant piece of literature and an amazing tissue of misrepresentations. Jean Jacques Rousseau never gave his real self to the world despite the loud Gallic boast of the paragraphs above. Did De Quincey? Did St Augustine? Did anyone ever tell the truth about himself from the very beginnings of literature? Newman's "Apologia"; Bunyan's "Grace Abounding"; the Journals of Wesley; the Memoirs of Madame de Stael de Launay; the diary of Madame D'Arblay; the "Ausmeinem Leben" of Goethe, the "Lavengro" of Borrow--how much in all these and in the hundred other works of like nature which crowd to the mind, how much is self-deception, how much picturesque fiction? Who can say? There is only one way of determining the value of an autobiographical statement--by a comparison of internal evidence with external historic fact. In the case of people whose generation has passed away this task is beset with difficulties, though not impossible. In the case of one who has but recently died, whose friends and contemporaries are living still, about whom documentary and oral evidence abounds, the task is more easy, though still a hard and, possibly, a thankless one. In a consideration and criticism, however, of Oscar Wilde's greatest work, "De Profundis," such an attempt must undoubtedly be made. Yet, this question of sincerity or reality is not the only one to be determined, and it will be well, therefore, to treat of "De Profundis" with the assistance of a definite plan of criticism. Let us then divide this part of the book into several sections.