That is a specimen very favourable to the play, which contains yet duller jokes. It is hard to believe that the same man who wrote them was also the author of _Intentions_ and the inventor of Bunbury. But there is no need to linger over _The Duchess of Padua_, which, though it has moments of obscure power, Wilde did not, in later years, consider worthy of himself. There is some doubt as to the date of composition of _The Sphinx_. A line and a half in it-- "I have hardly seen Some twenty summers cast their green for Autumn's gaudy liveries"-- not only suggest extreme youth in the writer, but occur in _Ravenna_. Mr. Stuart Mason, in his admirable "Bibliography to the Poems of Oscar Wilde," says that "altogether some dozen passages of _Ravenna_ are taken more or less verbatim from poems published before 1878, while no instance is found of lines in the Newdigate Prize Poem being repeated in poems admittedly of later date, and this," he thinks, "seems fairly strong proof that the lines in _The Sphinx_ (if not the whole poem) antedate _Ravenna_." Mr. Ross says that Wilde told him the poem was written at the Hotel Voltaire during an earlier visit in 1874. This statement, he thinks, was an example of the poetic license in which Wilde, like Shelley and other men of genius, was willing to indulge. Mr. Sherard says positively that Wilde wrote _The Sphinx_ in 1883 at the Hotel Voltaire. There seems to be no real reason why Wilde should not have borrowed from _Ravenna_ on this, even if he did so on no other occasion. He was always ready to seem younger than he was, and always ready to use again a phrase that had pleased him, no matter where he had used it before. In _The Duchess of Padua_, about whose date there is no question, he even went so far as to use two lines from a sonnet that he had previously addressed to Ellen Terry, and published in _Poems_:-- "O hair of gold, O crimson lips, O face Made for the luring and the love of man!" There is much in the poem itself that inclines me to trust Mr. Sherard's memory of its date. It is work more personal to Wilde than anything in _Poems_. The firm mastery of its technique would, indeed, be overwhelming proof that it was written after _The Duchess of Padua_ if it were not known that Wilde spent some time in revising it in 1889. But revision cannot alter the whole texture of a poem, and _The Sphinx_ is full of those decorative effects that are rare in his very early work and give to much of his matured writing its most noticeable quality. No one has suggested that it was written later than 1883, so that we must explain the extraordinary advance that it shows on _The Duchess of Padua_ as one of those curious phenomena known to most artists: it often happens that, in turning from one kind of work to another, as from dramatic writing to poetry, men come quite suddenly on what seem to be revised and better editions of themselves.