When I tell you that his countenance was of supernatural ugliness, and that the price of the ticket was thirty pieces of silver, I need say no more. An equally curious thing is that whenever I pass the hotel, which I do constantly, I see the same man. Scientists call that phenomenon an obsession of the visual nerve. You and I know better. On the afternoon of Easter Day I heard Vespers at the Lateran: music quite lovely. At the close, a Bishop in red, and with red gloves--such as Pater talks of in _Gaston de Latour_--came out on the balcony and showed us the Relics. He was swarthy, and wore a yellow mitre. A sinister mediaeval man, but superbly Gothic, just like the bishops carved on stalls or on portals: and when one thinks that once people mocked at stained-glass attitudes! they are the only attitudes for the clothes. The sight of the Bishop, whom I watched with fascination, filled me with the great sense of the realism of Gothic art. Neither in Greek art nor in Gothic art is there any pose. Posing was invented by bad portrait-painters; and the first person who posed was a stock-broker, and he has gone on posing ever since. I send you a photograph I took on Palm Sunday at Palermo. Do send me some of yours, and love me always, and try to read this letter. Kindest regards to your dear mother. Always, OSCAR. --_Letter to Robert Ross_. FOOTNOTES {1} "The Influence of Pater and Matthew Arnold in the Prose-Writings of Oscar Wilde," by Ernst Bendz. London: H. Grevel & Co., 1914. {2} "The Eighteen Nineties: A Review of Art and Idea at the Close of the Nineteenth Century," by Holbrook Jackson. London: Grant Richards Ltd., 1913. {3} Mortimer Menpes. {4} M. Constant Trop-Hardy, died at Berneval, March 2, 1898. {5} Hartwell de la Garde Grissell, a Papal Chamberlain.