side in the great struggle: it seemed to me appalling. True, Wilde had
not been wounded in fighting for us; true, he had fallen out and come to
grief, as a drunkard might. But after all he had been fighting on the
right side: had been a quickening intellectual influence: it was
dreadful to pass him on the wayside and allow him callously to bleed to
death. It was revoltingly cruel! The foremost Englishman of his time
unable even to understand Christ's example, much less reach his height!

This refusal of Meredith's not only hurt me, but almost destroyed my
hope, though it did not alter my purpose. I wanted a figurehead for my
petition, and the figurehead I had chosen I could not get. I began to
wonder and doubt. I next approached a very different man, the late
Professor Churton Collins, a great friend of mine, who, in spite of an
almost pedantic rigour of mind and character, had in him at bottom a
curious spring of sympathy--a little pool of pure love for the poets and
writers whom he admired. I got him to dinner and asked him to sign the
petition; he refused, but on grounds other than those taken by Meredith.

"Of course Wilde ought to get out," he said, "the sentence was a savage
one and showed bitter prejudice; but I have children, and my own way to
make in the world, and if I did this I should be tarred with the Wilde
brush. I cannot afford to do it. If he were really a great man I hope I
should do it, but I don't agree with your estimate of him. I cannot
think I am called upon to bell the British cat in his defence: it has
many claws and all sharp."

As soon as he saw the position was unworthy of him, he shifted to new
ground.

"If you were justified in coming to me, I should do it; but I am no one;