Opinion was also being quietly moulded from within by a band of literary and artistic people, some of them friends of the late author, others knowing him simply through his work. The public began to ask for Wilde's books and found it almost impossible to obtain them, for the "Ballad of Reading Gaol," published while its author was still alive, had not stimulated any general demand for other works. It was after Oscar Wilde's death that his friends and admirers were able to set to work at their endeavours to rehabilitate him as artist in the mind of general prejudice. Books and monographs were written about Wilde in English, French, and German. He was quoted in the leading Continental reviews. His play "Salomé" met with sudden and stupendous success all over Europe, a famous musician turned it into an opera. A well-known English man of letters, Mr Robert Harborough Sherard, published a final official "Life" of the dead author, and Wilde's own "De Profundis" appeared to startle, sadden, and thrill the whole reading world. His plays are being revived, and an authoritative and exhaustive edition of his writings is being issued by a leading publishing house. There is no doubt about it, the most prejudiced and hostile critics must admit it--in a literary sense, as a man of letters with extraordinary genius, Oscar Wilde has come into his own. The time is, therefore, ripe for a work of the present character which endeavours to "appreciate" one of the strangest, saddest, most artistic and powerful brains of modern times. Five years ago such a book as this would probably have been out of place. When Balzac died Sainte-Beuve prefaced a short critical article of fourteen pages, as follows:-- "A careful study of the famous novelist who has just been taken from us, and whose sudden loss has excited universal interest, would require a whole work, and the time for that, I think, has not yet come. Those sort of moral autopsies cannot be made over a freshly dug grave, especially when he who has been laid in it was full of strength and fertility, and seemed still full of future works and days. All that is possible and fitting in respect of a great contemporary renown at the moment death lays it low is to point out, by means of a few clear-cut lines, the merits, the varied skill, by which it charmed its epoch and acquired influence over it." When Oscar Wilde died, and before the publication of "De Profundis," various short essays did, as I have stated, make an appearance. A longer work seems called for, and it is that want which the present volume does its best to supply.