_De Profundis_ arouses pity and fear, and one would gladly acquit the man who was perhaps the victim of his delusion; a worldly tribunal would not have judged him if he had not himself appealed to it, and that indeed for a wrong done him. It was what our renaissance-critic called a "piece of stupidity" when he made Wilde out to be a martyr of "hypocrisy," as he called justice. Wilde however seems to have taken another view of the matter to his impartial defender: "A day in prison on which one does not weep is a day on which one's heart is hard, not a day on which one's heart is happy. Once I had put into motion the forces of society, society turned on me and said: 'Have you been living all this time in defiance of my laws, and do you now appeal to those laws for protection? You shall have those laws exercised to the full.' A man's very highest moment, I have no doubt at all, is when he kneels in the dust and beats his breast and tells us all the sins of his life." The "joy of life" whose perfume he had inhaled at Oxford through Pater's _Renaissance_ now began to grow sour. "Clergymen and people who use phrases without wisdom sometimes talk of suffering as a mystery. It is really a revelation. "Behind joy and laughter there may be a temperament coarse, hard, and callous. Pain, unlike pleasure, wears no mask. There are times when sorrow seems to me to be the only truth. The secret of life is suffering." Let us add that Wilde derived his most dangerous doctrine from Baudelaire and Shakespeare's sonnets. And let us close with the new view of the Renaissance which he attained to in prison: "To me one of the things in history the most to be regretted is that the Christ's own renaissance which has produced the Cathedral at Chartres, the Arthurian cycle of legends, the life of St. Francis of Assisi, the art of Giotto, and Dante's _Divine Comedy_, was not allowed to develop on its own lines, but was interrupted and spoiled by the dreary classical Renaissance." [Footnote 1: Danish theologian.] =Consequences of Learning.=--As soon as a man buries himself in books he gets black nails and dirty cuffs, forgets to wash, to comb his hair, and to shave. He neglects his duties towards life, society, and men; loses spiritual capacities, becomes absent-minded, short-sighted, wears glasses, and takes snuff in order to keep himself awake. He cannot follow a conversation with attention, cannot interest himself in other people's affairs, does not see the face of the earth by day nor the stars by night. Behind his desire to investigate lies the insidious ambition to master his material, to become an authority, to tyrannise, to make a career for himself, and to receive distinctions.