Whatever Wilde's motive was for staying to "face the music," we cannot deny that it was fine. Either he felt that he must endure the punishment society was to give him because he had outraged the law of society, or else he was unwilling to ruin the disinterested and noble-minded man--a gentleman who had only the slightest acquaintance with him--who had furnished the amount of his bail. Let these facts be written to his credit and considered when the readers of this memoir pass their judgment upon his character. At the beginning of this third period public opinion which, but a short time ago, had simply meant a chorus of public adulation, except for a minority of people who either envied his successes or honestly reprobated his attitude towards art and life, was now terribly bitter, venomous, and full of spleen and hatred. Society, however much society was disposed to deny the fact, had set up an idol in their midst. It was partly owing to the senseless and indiscriminate adulation of its idol that its foundations were undermined and that it fell with so resonant a crash. When it was down society assailed it with every ingenuity of reprobation and hatred that it knew how to voice and use. Nothing was too bad to be said about the erstwhile favourite who, let it be remembered, was not yet adjudged guilty but who, if ever a man was, was denied the application of the prime principle of English criminal law, which says that every man accused is to be deemed innocent until guilt has been proved against him. People gloated over the downfall. When Wilde was first arrested and placed in Holloway, and before he was admitted to bail, the more scurrilous portion of the press was full of sickening pictures, both in line and words, of the fallen creature's agony. Contrasts were drawn by little pens dipped in venom, and the writer of this memoir has in his possession a curious and saddening collection of the screeds of those days, a collection which shows how innate the principle of cruelty is still in the human mind despite centuries of civilisation and the influence of the Cross, which forbids gladiators to slay each other in the arena but allows a more subtle and terrible form of savage sport than anything that Nero or Caligula ever saw or promulgated. It is unnecessary to quote largely from the productions which disgraced the English press at this time. One single article will serve to prove the point. Let those who read it learn tolerance from this mock sympathy and cruel dwelling upon the tortures of one so recently high in public popularity and esteem, still presumably innocent by English law, and yet placed under the vulgar microscope of the morbid-minded and the lovers of sensation at any cost.