"You are right. I believe I was the first to devote my subtle brain-chords to the worship of the Sunflower, and the apotheosis of the delicate Tea-pot. I have ever been jasmine-cradled from my youth. Eons ago, I might say centuries, in '78, when a student at Oxford, I had trampled the vintage of my babyhood, and trod the thorn-spread heights of Poesy. I had stood in the Arena and torn the bays from the expiring athletes, my competitors." * * * * * LECTURE PROSPECTS "Yes; I expect my Lecture will be a success. So does DOLLAR CARTE--I mean D'OYLEY CARTE. Too-Toothless Senility may jeer, and poor, positive Propriety may shake her rusty curls; but I am here in my creamy lustihood, to pipe of Passion's venturous Poesy, and reap the scorching harvest of Self-Love! I am not quite sure what I mean. The true Poet never is. In fact, true Poetry is nothing if it is intelligible. She is only to be compared to SALMACIS, who is not a boy or girl, but yet is both." And so forth, and so forth. About the conversation and superficial manner of Oscar Wilde there must have been something strangely according to formula. Among intimate friends, friends who were sympathetic to his real ideals, his talk was wonderful. That fact is vouched for in a hundred quarters, it is not to be denied. As I write I have dozens of undeniable testimonies to the fact, I myself can bear witness to it on at least one occasion. But when Wilde was not with people for whose opinion of him he cared much--really cared--his odd perversity of phrase, his persistent wish to astonish the fools, his extraordinary carelessness of average opinion often compelled him to talk the most frantic nonsense which was only redeemed from mere childish inversion of phrase by the air and manner with which it was said, and the merest tinsel pretence of wit. The wittiest talker of his generation, certainly the wittiest writer, gave the very worst of his wit to the pressmen who pestered him but who, and this was the thing he was unable to appreciate at its true value, represented him to the world during this "first period." The mock interviews in _Punch_ which have been quoted from are really no very wide departures from the real thing. A year or two after the Æsthetic movement was not so prominent in the public eye as was the success of Wilde as a writer of plays, an actual interview with him appeared in a well-known weekly paper in which he talked not much less extravagantly than he was caricatured as talking in _Punch_. A play of his had been produced and, while it was a complete and satisfying success, it had been assailed in that unfortunately hostile way by the critics to which he was accustomed. He was asked what he thought about the attitude of the critics towards his play.