Wilde's prose was moulded entirely upon an appreciation of these facts, and the ear must always be the critic of the excellence of his prose rather than the intelligence, in the first instance, as reached by the eye. If we read aloud passages of "De Profundis" the full splendour of them strikes us far more poignantly than in any other way. It is true that Wilde's prose makes an appeal _ad clerum_, and it is not necessary for the connoisseur, the initiate, to apply the test of the spoken word. But those who are not actually conversant with the more technical niceties of style will do well to read Wilde's prose aloud. They will discover in it new and unsuspected beauties. Wilde, at one period of his career, published a series of short paragraph stories which he called "Poems in Prose." With him there were many points of contact between prose and poetry. The two things could overlap and intermingle, though in his hands neither lost its own individuality in the process. There has been too much said in the past about the old principle of sharp division between poetry and prose. This was a classical tradition and was one which well applied to the Greek and Latin languages. It was maintained, until a late era in our own English literature, by the Gibbons and Macaulays who moulded themselves upon Cicero and Livy. But during the last century the force of the old tradition weakened very much. A newer and more flexible style of writing became permissible. Coleridge, De Quincey, Swift, Lamb, to mention a few names at random, showed that, at anyrate, prose need no longer be written as a stately cataract of ordered words with due balance and antithesis, and with certain rigid movements which were thought indispensable to correct writing. Dr Boswell said, apropos of style--"Some think Swift's the best; others prefer a fuller and grander way of writing." To whom Dr Johnson replied--"Sir, you must first define what you mean by style, before you can judge who has good taste in style and who has bad. The two classes of persons whom you have mentioned don't differ as to good and bad. They both agree that Swift has a good neat style, but one loves a neat style, another a style of more splendour. In the like manner one loves a plain coat, another loves a laced coat; but neither will deny that each is good in its kind." Although Johnson and his contemporaries certainly had a great sense of rhythm and harmony in prose they were the last defenders of the old axiom that poetry and prose were two entirely separate things. It was Walter Pater who, in our own times, finally demolished the old tradition, and opened the way for a writer, such as Oscar Wilde, to bring the new discovery to its fullest perfection. Walter Pater showed that it was not true that poetry differs only from prose by the presence of metrical restraint.