Trying to see the personages as they saw themselves he would balance the
doctor's excessive sensuality and lack of self-control by dwelling on the fact
that his energy and perseverance and intimate adaptation to his surroundings
had brought him in middle age to the chief place in his profession, and if
Lady Wilde was 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.




CHAPTER II--OSCAR WILDE AS A SCHOOLBOY



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 engaging
or handsome as his brother, Willie. Both boys had the benefit of the best
schooling of the time. They were sent as boarders to the Portora School at
Enniskillen, one of the four Royal schools of Ireland. Oscar went to Portora in
1864 at the age of nine, a couple of years after his brother. He remained at