feeling. Besides he took deliberately the artistic standpoint towards
everything, which was coming more and more to be my standpoint. He was a
delightful talker, too, a really great talker in a certain way--an artist in
vivid words and eloquent pauses. Tyrrell, too, was very kind to me--intensely
sympathetic and crammed with knowledge. If he had known less he would have
been a poet. Learning is a sad handicap, Frank, an appalling handicap," and
he laughed irresistibly.

"What were the students like in Dublin?" I asked. "Did you make friends with
any of them?"

"They were worse even than the boys at Portora," he replied; "they thought of
nothing but cricket and football, running and jumping; and they varied these
intellectual exercises with bouts of fighting and drinking. If they had any
souls they diverted them with coarse "amours" among barmaids and the women
of the streets; they were simply awful. Sexual vice is even coarser and more
loathsome in Ireland than it is in England:--

"'Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.'

"When I tried to talk they broke into my thought with stupid gibes and jokes.
Their highest idea of humour was an obscene story. No, no, Tyrrell and Mahaffy
represent to me whatever was good in Trinity."

In 1874 Oscar Wilde won the gold medal for Greek. The subject of the year was
"The Fragments of the Greek Comic Poets, as edited by Meineke." In this year,
too, he won a classical scholarship--a demyship of the annual value of L95,
which was tenable for five years, which enabled him to go to Oxford without
throwing an undue strain on his father's means.