the school for seven years and left it on winning an Exhibition for Trinity
College, Dublin, when he was just seventeen.

The facts hitherto collected and published about Oscar as a schoolboy are sadly
meagre and insignificant. Fortunately for my readers I have received from Sir
Edward Sullivan, who was a contemporary of Oscar both at school and college,
an exceedingly vivid and interesting pen-picture of the lad, one of those
astounding masterpieces of portraiture only to be produced by the plastic
sympathies of boyhood and the intimate intercourse of years lived in common.
It is love alone which in later life can achieve such a miracle of
representment. I am very glad to be allowed to publish this realistic
miniature, in the very words of the author.

"I first met Oscar Wilde in the early part of 1868 at Portora Royal School.
He was thirteen or fourteen years of age. His long straight fair hair was a
striking feature of his appearance. He was then, as he remained for some years
after, extremely boyish in nature, very mobile, almost restless when out of
the schoolroom. Yet he took no part in the school games at any time. Now and
then he would be seen in one of the school boats on Loch Erne: yet he was a
poor hand at an oar.

"Even as a schoolboy he was an excellent talker: his descriptive power
being far above the average, and his humorous exaggerations of school
occurrences always highly amusing.

"A favourite place for the boys to sit and gossip in the late afternoon
in winter time was round a stove which stood in 'The Stone Hall.' Here Oscar
was at his best; although his brother Willie was perhaps in those days even
better than he was at telling a story.