own in their mind's eye--for copyright considerations would interfere
with the materialisation of their dream.

A stray observation in an esteemed weekly periodical determined the plan
of this anthology and the choice of particular passages. The writer,
whose name has escaped me, opined that the reason the works of Pater and
Wilde were no longer read was owing to both authors having treated
English as a dead language. By a singular coincidence I had purchased
simultaneously with the newspaper a shilling copy of Pater's
"Renaissance," published by Messrs. Macmillan; and a few days afterwards
Messrs. Methuen issued at a shilling the twenty-eighth edition of "De
Profundis." Obviously either Messrs. Macmillan and Messrs. Methuen or
the authority on dead languages must have been suffering from
hallucinations. It occurred to me that a selection of Wilde's prose
might at least rehabilitate the notorious reputation for common sense
enjoyed by all publishers, who rarely issue shilling editions of deceased
authors for mere aesthetic considerations. And I confess to a hope that
this volume may reach the eye or ear of those who have not read Wilde's
books, or of those, such as Mr. Sydney Grundy, who are irritated by the
revival of his plays and the praise accorded to his works throughout the
Continent.

Wilde's prose is distinguished by its extraordinary ease and clarity, and
by the absence--very singular in his case--of the preciosity which he
admired too much in other writers, and advocated with over-emphasis.
Perhaps that is why many of his stories and essays and plays are used as
English text-books in Russian and Scandinavian and Hungarian schools.
Artifice and affectation, often assumed to be recurrent defects in his
writings by those unacquainted with them, are comparatively rare. Wilde
once boasted in an interview that only Flaubert, Pater, Keats, and