Youth and vanity helped to blind him to the rather humiliating reason of his lecturing. He wanted the money, but was able to persuade himself that he had really been chosen to represent the aesthetic movement to the American people on account of his book of poems, and that, in any case, he wanted to go to America to have _Vera_, a worthless melodrama he had just written, put upon the stage. With his happy power of dramatizing his position, a power he shared with Beau Brummel and picturesque adventurers of lesser genius, he saw himself, almost immediately, as a sort of combination of William Morris and John Ruskin, gifted more than they with wit, beauty, and youth. He spoke of himself visiting the South Kensington Museum on Saturday nights, "to see the handicraftsman, the wood-worker, the glass-blower, and the worker in metals." He inspected art-schools, and carried away, to show his audiences, brass dishes beaten by little boys, and wooden bowls painted by little girls. He began to take himself more and more seriously--no doubt Punch's caricatures had helped him, and he was alone in America, far from the facts--and was able to tell his listeners "how it first came to me at all to create an artistic movement in England, a movement to show the rich what beautiful things they might enjoy and the poor what beautiful things they might create." By this time I have no doubt that he believed with perfect good faith that the aesthetic movement was the work and aim of his life. Only occasionally did he remember that he was living up to "Patience." "You have listened to 'Patience' for a hundred nights," he said, "and you have heard me for one only. It will make, no doubt, that satire more piquant by knowing something about the subject of it, but you must not judge of aestheticism by the satire of Mr. Gilbert." Once, indeed, he allowed himself to remind his audience of the extravagances at which that opera laughed, but then it was only to defend them with all the solemnity of an apostle. "You have heard, I think, a few of you, of two flowers connected with the aesthetic movement in England, and said (I assure you, erroneously) to be the food of some aesthetic young men. Well, let me tell you that the reason we love the lily and the sunflower, in spite of what Mr. Gilbert may tell you, is not for any vegetable fashion at all. It is because these two lovely flowers are in England the two most perfect models of design, the most naturally adapted for decorative art--the gaudy leonine beauty of the one and the precious loveliness of the other giving to the artist the most entire and perfect joy." This seems insufferable now, and probably was so then, but it is a proof of the perfection with which Wilde played the part his stage-manager had assigned him.