It was generally felt that the verdict did substantial justice; though the
jury, led away by patriotic sympathy with Lady Wilde, the true "Speranza,"
had been a little hard on Miss Travers. No one doubted that Sir William Wilde
had seduced his patient. He had, it appeared, an unholy reputation, and the
girl's admission that he had accused her of being "unnaturally passionless"
was accepted as the true key of the enigma. This was why he had drawn away from
the girl, after seducing her. And it was not unnatural under the circumstances
that she should become vindictive and revengeful.

Such inferences as these, I drew from the comments of the Irish papers at the
time; but naturally I wished if possible to hear some trustworthy contemporary
on the matter. Fortunately such testimony was forthcoming.

A Fellow of Trinity, who was then a young man, embodied the best opinion of
the time in an excellent pithy letter. He wrote to me that the trial simply
established, what every one believed, that "Sir William Wilde was a pithecoid
person of extraordinary sensuality and cowardice (funking the witness-box left
him without a defender!) and that his wife was a highfalutin' pretentious
creature whose pride was as extravagant as her reputation founded on second-rate
verse-making. . . . . Even when a young woman she used to keep her rooms in
Merrion Square in semi-darkness; she laid the paint on too thick for any
ordinary light, and she gave herself besides all manner of airs."

This incisive judgment of an able and fairly impartial contemporary (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.) corroborates, I think, the inferences which one
would naturally draw from the newspaper accounts of the trial. It seems to me
that both combine to give a realistic photograph, so to speak, of Sir William
and Lady Wilde. An artist, however, would lean to a more kindly picture.