hold together less than any other class and, by himself, none of them
wished to help a wounded member of the flock. I had to tell Sir Ruggles
Brise that I had failed.

I have been informed since that if I had begun by asking Thomas Hardy, I
might have succeeded. I knew Hardy; but never cared greatly for his
talent. I daresay if I had had nothing else to do I might have succeeded
in some half degree. But all these two years I was extremely busy and
anxious; the storm clouds in South Africa were growing steadily darker
and my attitude to South African affairs was exceedingly unpopular in
London. It seemed to me vitally important to prevent England from making
war on the Boers. I had to abandon the attempt to get Oscar's sentence
shortened, and comfort myself with Sir Ruggles Brise's assurance that he
would be treated with the greatest possible consideration.

Still, my advocacy had had a good effect.

Oscar himself has told us what the kindness shown to him in the last
six months of his prison life really did for him. He writes in _De
Profundis_ that for the first part of his sentence he could only wring
his hands in impotent despair and cry, "What an ending, what an
appalling ending!" But when the new spirit of kindness came to him, he
could say with sincerity: "What a beginning, what a wonderful
beginning!" He sums it all up in these words:

"Had I been released after eighteen months, as I hoped to be, I would
have left my prison loathing it and every official in it with a
bitterness of hatred that would have poisoned my life. I have had six
months more of imprisonment, but humanity has been in the prison with us
all the time, and now when I go out I shall always remember great