wide range of his knowledge and interests is more apparent than in some
of his finished work.

What I believed to be only the fragment of an essay on Historical
Criticism was already in the press, when accidentally I came across the
remaining portions, in Wilde's own handwriting; it is now complete though
unhappily divided in this edition. {0a} Any doubt as to its
authenticity, quite apart from the calligraphy, would vanish on reading
such a characteristic passage as the following:--' . . . For, it was in
vain that the middle ages strove to guard the buried spirit of progress.
When the dawn of the Greek spirit arose, the sepulchre was empty, the
grave clothes laid aside. Humanity had risen from the dead.' It was
only Wilde who could contrive a literary conceit of that description; but
readers will observe with different feelings, according to their
temperament, that he never followed up the particular trend of thought
developed in the essay. It is indeed more the work of the Berkeley Gold
Medallist at Dublin, or the brilliant young Magdalen Demy than of the
dramatist who was to write Salome. The composition belongs to his Oxford
days when he was the unsuccessful competitor for the Chancellor's English
Essay Prize. Perhaps Magdalen, which has never forgiven herself for
nurturing the author of Ravenna, may be felicitated on having escaped the
further intolerable honour that she might have suffered by seeing crowned
again with paltry academic parsley the most highly gifted of all her
children in the last century. Compared with the crude criticism on The
Grosvenor Gallery (one of the earliest of Wilde's published prose
writings), Historical Criticism is singularly advanced and mature. Apart
from his mere scholarship Wilde developed his literary and dramatic
talent slowly. He told me that he was never regarded as a particularly
precocious or clever youth. Indeed many old family friends and
contemporary journalists maintain sturdily that the talent of his elder