abnormally vain, a verse-maker and not a poet, she was still a
talented woman of considerable reading and manifold artistic
sympathies.

Such were the father and mother of Oscar Wilde.


FOOTNOTES:

[2] As he has died since this was written, there is no longer any
reason for concealing his name: R.Y. Tyrrell, for many years before
his death Regius Professor of Greek in Trinity College, Dublin.




CHAPTER II


The Wildes had three children, two sons and a daughter. The first son
was born in 1852, a year after the marriage, and was christened after
his father William Charles Kingsbury Wills. The second son was born
two years later, in 1854 and the names given to him seem to reveal the
Nationalist sympathies and pride of his mother. He was christened
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde; but he appears to have suffered
from the pompous string only in extreme youth. At school he concealed
the "Fingal," as a young man he found it advisable to omit the
"O'Flahertie."

In childhood and early boyhood Oscar was not considered as quick or