Burns saw this when he wrote:

"Wha does the utmost that he can Will whyles do mair."

And the obverse is true: whoever yields to a weakness habitually, some day
goes further than he ever intended, and comes to worse grief than he deserved.
The old prayer: "Lead us not into temptation", is perhaps a half-conscious
recognition of this fact. But we moderns are inclined to walk heedlessly, no
longer believing in pitfalls or in the danger of gratified desires. And Oscar
Wilde was not only an unbeliever; but he had all the heedless confidence of the
artist who has won world-wide popularity and has the halo of fame on his brow.
With high heart and smiling eyes he went to his fate unsuspecting.

It was in the autumn of 1891 that he first met Lord Alfred Douglas. He was
thirty-six and Lord Alfred Douglas a handsome, slim youth of twenty-one, with
large blue eyes and golden-fair hair. His mother, the Dowager Lady Queensberry,
preserves a photograph of him taken a few years before, when he was still at
Winchester, a boy of sixteen with an expression which might well be called
angelic.

When I met him, he was still girlishly pretty, with the beauty of youth,
coloring and fair skin; though his features were merely ordinary. It was
Lionel Johnson, the writer, a friend and intimate of Douglas at Winchester, who
brought him to tea at Oscar's house in Tite Street. Their mutual attraction had
countless hooks. Oscar was drawn by the lad's personal beauty, and enormously
affected besides by Lord Alfred Douglas' name and position: he was a snob as
only an English artist can be a snob; he loved titular distinctions, and Douglas
is one of the few great names in British history with the gilding of romance
about it. No doubt Oscar talked better than his best because he was talking to
Lord Alfred Douglas. To the last the mere name rolled on his tongue gave him