To the serious student of poetry such a conclusion may deservedly rank in the region of the accepted commonplace, but some of the utterances of our later-day critics yield at least an excuse for its recall. Not long ago I encountered in a seriously written review the astounding announcement that Oscar Wilde was the author of some of the most remarkable verse of the nineteenth century, and this is hardly an isolated instance of an endeavour that seems at the moment widely spread to make the pitiable disaster of poor Wilde’s career the occasion of the most deplorably exaggerated appreciation of his gifts as a writer. I met Wilde very often in those earlier days, before he had begun to seek to win by personal eccentricity the attention which his literary talent had not secured, and I am bound to confess that, in the light of my later knowledge of the man and of his work, any attempt to set him in the front rank as a literary personality or a great literary influence seems to me in the highest degree ludicrous and grotesque. In view of the terrible fate that overtook him, no one could desire to deal harshly at this time with his qualities as a man. That he had a certain charm of manner is undoubted, and that he possessed a measure of wit, as often imitative as original, need not be denied. But there is always a tendency in certain literary circles that lean towards decadence, to exaggerate the genius of those who are morally condemned. A tragic fate such as his, even in one less gifted, naturally tends in such minds to exalt his claims to artistic consideration. It is, at least to my thinking, only on such an assumption that any serious student of poetry, having read the “Ballad of Reading Gaol,” could ever be induced to rank Wilde as a poetic genius, or to consider the body of his work as a man of letters, with whatever luxuries of habiliment it may be offered to the world, as constituting an enduring claim to rank him among the higher influences of his time.