=The Last Act (From the life of a leader of the "Renaissance").=--The final act is the most important one in a drama, and a dramatist generally begins his work at the end. We sit out a long evening at the theatre in order to see the last act or "how it will go." But in the significant lives of certain men people like to ignore the last act, because it is uncomfortable and might show how the godless fare at last. He who wrote the operetta _Boccaccio_ had to append the last act to it; the jovial Florentine became a priest and delivered lectures on Dante's _Hell_, though he only reached the seventeenth canto. Voltaire's last hours, when he took the sacrament, might furnish a subject for a tragedy like the second part of _Faust_. Heine announced his conversion, which took place in 1851, in the preface to the _Romancero_: "I have returned to God like the prodigal son, after I had fed swine with the Hegelians for a long time." This preface should be printed before every collection of Heine's poems. Hegel singing penitential psalms on his death-bed might form the subject of a fresco painting for the entrance-hall of Berlin University. But the most affecting final act is Oscar Wilde's description of his prison life in _De Profundis_. He was the so-called renaissance leader, who disinterred heathenism with its false worship of beauty, which contains the foulest of all. Kierkegaard[1] would have called him the æsthete, the Sybarite cold as cast iron, the egoist round whose petty "I" the whole world was to revolve in order to understand him alone. Many, led astray like him by the seducing spirits of his youth, remained fairly free from public punishment. Wilde seems to have been picked out to furnish a startling example, for his position, at any rate in his own country, was almost that of an idol. What he wrote lacks originality; it is whipped-up foam; glazing which, when washed off, leaves no texture; it is as restless as cross-lights, or like a mirror in a public restaurant, in a labyrinthine hall with deceptive lines and false perspectives; it runs out of the hand like albumen or frog-spawn; it is perverse as in _Dorian Gray_, the hero of which should have lost his youth by nightly excesses, while on the contrary it is only his portrait which changes. The last act was played, and that outdid all horror, was so horrible that Wilde himself could not describe its details, which, however, oral tradition has preserved in a Swedenborgian legend.