Of late years I have often explained Wilde to myself by his family history. His father, was a friend or acquaintany fathers father and among my family traditions there is an old Dublin riddle: Why are Sir William Wildes nails so black? Answer, Because he has scratched himself. And there is an old story still current in Dublin of Lady Wilde saying to a servant. Why do you put the plates on the coal?scuttle? What are the chairs meant for? They were famous people and there are many like stories, and even a horrible folk story, the iion of some aught peasant, that tells how Sir William Wilde took out the eyes of some men, who had e to sult him as an oculist, and laid them upon a plate, intending to replace them in a moment, and how the eyes were eaten by a cat. As a certain friend of mine, who has made a proloudy of the nature of cats, said when he first heard the tale, Catslove eyes. The Wilde family was clearly of the sort that fed the imagination of Charles Lever, dirty, untidy, daring, and what Charles Lever, who loved more normal activities, might not have valued so highly, very imaginative and learned. Lady Wilde, who when I knew her received her friends with blinds drawn and shutters closed that none might see her withered face, longed alerhaps, though certainly amid much self mockery, for some impossible splendour of character and circumstance. She lived near her son in level Chelsea, but I have heard her say, I want to live on somehigh place, Primrose Hill hgate, because I was an eagle in my youth. I think her son lived with no self mockery at all an imaginary life; perpetually performed a play which was in all things the opposite of all that he had known in childhood and early youth; never put off pletely his wo opening his eyes every m on his owiful house, and in remembering that he had dined yesterday with a duchess and that he delighted in Flaubert and Pater, read Homer in the inal and not as a saster reads him for the grammar. I think, too, that because of all that half?civilized blood in his veins, he could not ehe sedentary toil of creative art and so remained a man of a, exaggerating, for the sake of immediate effect, every trick learned from his masters, turning their easel painting into painted ses. He arvenu, but a parvenu whose whole bearing proved that if he did dedicate every story in The House of Pomegrao a lady of title, it was but to show that he was Jad the social ladder his pantomime beanstalk. "Did you ever hear him say Marquess of Dimmesdale?" a friend of his once asked me. "He does not say the Duke of York
with any pleasure."
He told me ohat he had been offered a safe seat in Parliament and, had he accepted, he might have had a career like that of Beasfield, whose early style resembles his, bei for crowds, for excitement, for hurried decisions, for immediate triumphs. Such meheir siy, if at all, from the tact of events; the diable was Wildes event and made him the greatest talker of his time, and his plays and dialogues have what merit they possess from being now an imitation, now a record, of his talk. Even in those days I would often defend him by saying that his very admiration for his predecessors iry, for Browning, for Swinburne and Rossetti, in their first vogue while he was a very young man, made any success seem impossible that could satisfy his immense ambition: never but once before had the artist seemed so great, never had the work of art seemed so difficult. I would then pare him wi