Gilbert, in 'The Critic as Artist,' complains that "we are overrun by a set of people who, when poet or painter passes away, arrive at the house along with the undertaker, and forget that their one duty is to behave as mutes. But we won't talk about them," he continues. "They are the mere body-snatchers of literature. The dust is given to one and the ashes to another, but the soul is out of their reach." That is not a warning lightly to be disregarded. No stirring up of dust and ashes is excusable, and none but brutish minds delight in mud-pies mixed with blood. I had no body-snatching ambition. Impatient of such criticism of Wilde as saw a law-court in _The House of Pomegranates_, and heard the clink of handcuffs in the flowing music of _Intentions_, I wished, at first, to write a book on Wilde's work in which no mention of the man or his tragedy should have a place. I remembered that he thought Wainewright, the poisoner and essayist, too lately dead[1] to be treated in "that fine spirit of disinterested curiosity to which we owe so many charming studies of the great criminals of the Italian Renaissance." To-day it is Wilde who is too near us to be seen without a blurring of perspectives. Some day it will be possible to write of him with the ecstatic acquiescence that Nietzsche calls _Amor Fati_, as we write of Caesar Borgia sinning in purple, Cleopatra sinning in gold, and Roberto Greene hastening his end by drab iniquity and grey repentance. But not yet. He only died a dozen years ago. I planned an artificial ignorance that should throw him to a distance where his books alone would represent him.