Oscar Wilde now began to take a definite place in the English social world. His wit, his brilliance of conversation, his singular charm of manner all combined to render him a welcome guest, and in many cases a valued friend, in circles where distinction of intellect and charm of personality are the only passports. He began to make money and to indulge a natural taste for profusion and splendour. Yet, let it be said here, and said with emphasis, that greatly as he desired, and acquired, the elegances of life, increasing fortune found him as kind and generous as before. It is a known fact that he gave away large sums of money to those less fortunate in the effort to make an income by artistic pursuits. His purse was always open to the struggling and the unhappy and his influence constantly exerted on their behalf. Suddenly all London was captured by the brilliant modern comedies he began to write. Success of the completest kind had arrived, the poet's name was in everyone's mouth. Curiously enough it is the French students of Wilde's career who have paid the most attention to Wilde in this second period. The man of society, the witty talker, the maker of epigrams--Wilde at his apogee just before his fall--this is the picture on which the Latin psychologists have liked to dwell. "In our days, the master of repartee and the after-dinner speaker is foredoomed to forgetfulness, for he always stands alone, and to gain applause has to talk down to and flatter lower-class audiences. No writer of blood-curdling melodramas, no weaver of newspaper novels is obliged to lower his talent so much as the professional wit. If the genius of Mallarmé was obscured by the flatterers that surrounded him, how much more was Wilde's talent overclouded by the would-be-witty, shoddy-elegant, and cheaply-poetical society hangers-on, who covered him with incense. We are told that the first attempts of the sparkling talker were by no means successful in the Parisian salons. "In the house of Victor Hugo, seeing he must wait to let the veteran sleep out his nap whilst others among the guests slumbered also, he made up his mind to astonish them. He succeeded, but at what a cost! Although he was a verse writer, most sincerely devoted to poetry and art, and one of the most emotional and sensitive and tender-hearted amongst modern wielders of the pen, he succeeded in gaining only a reputation for artificiality. "We all know his studied paradoxes, his five or six continually repeated tales, but we are tempted to forget the charming dreamer who was full of tenderness for everything in nature."