brother William was much more remarkable. In this opinion they are
fortified, appropriately enough, by the late Clement Scott. I record
this interesting view because it symbolises the familiar phenomenon that
those nearest the mountain cannot appreciate its height.

The exiguous fragment of La Sainte Courtisane is the next unpublished
work of importance. At the time of Wilde's trial the nearly completed
drama was entrusted to Mrs. Leverson, who in 1897 went to Paris on
purpose to restore it to the author. Wilde immediately left the
manuscript in a cab. A few days later he laughingly informed me of the
loss, and added that a cab was a very proper place for it. I have
explained elsewhere that he looked on his plays with disdain in his last
years, though he was always full of schemes for writing others. All my
attempts to recover the lost work failed. The passages here reprinted
are from some odd leaves of a first draft. The play is of course not
unlike Salome, though it was written in English. It expanded Wilde's
favourite theory that when you convert some one to an idea, you lose your
faith in it; the same motive runs through Mr. W. H. Honorius the hermit,
so far as I recollect the story, falls in love with the courtesan who has
come to tempt him, and he reveals to her the secret of the Love of God.
She immediately becomes a Christian, and is murdered by robbers; Honorius
the hermit goes back to Alexandria to pursue a life of pleasure. Two
other similar plays Wilde invented in prison, Ahab and Isabel and
Pharaoh; he would never write them down, though often importuned to do
so. Pharaoh was intensely dramatic and perhaps more original than any of
the group. None of these works must be confused with the manuscripts
stolen from 16 Tite Street in 1895--namely the enlarged version of Mr. W.
H., the completed form of A Florentine Tragedy, and The Duchess of Padua
(which existing in a prompt copy was of less importance than the others);
nor with The Cardinal of Arragon, the manuscript of which I never saw. I