and was besides notorious for his gallantries. Oscar's small portion, a little
money and a small house with some land, came to him in the nick of time: he used
the cash partly to pay some debts at Oxford, partly to defray the expenses of a
trip to Greece. It was natural that Oscar Wilde, with his eager sponge-like
receptivity, should receive the best academic education of his time, and should
better that by travel. We all get something like the education we desire, and
Oscar Wilde, it always seemed to me, was over-educated, had learned, that is,
too much from books and not enough from life and had thought too little for
himself; but my readers will be able to judge of this for themselves.

In 1877 he accompanied Professor Mahaffy on a long tour through Greece. The
pleasure and profit Oscar got from the trip were so great that he failed to
return to Oxford on the date fixed. The Dons fined him forty-five pounds for
the breach of discipline; but they returned the money to him in the following
year when he won First Honours in "Greats" and the Newdigate prize.

This visit to Greece when he was twenty-three confirmed the view of life which
he had already formed and I have indicated sufficiently perhaps in that talk
with Pater already recorded. But no one will understand Oscar Wilde who for
a moment loses sight of the fact that he was a pagan born: as Gautier says,
"One for whom the visible world alone exists," endowed with all the Greek
sensuousness and love of plastic beauty; a pagan, like Nietzsche and Gautier,
wholly out of sympathy with Christianity, one of "the Confraternity of
the faithless who "cannot" believe," (His own words in "De Profundis.")
to whom a sense of sin and repentance are symptoms of weakness and disease.

Oscar used often to say that the chief pleasure he had in visiting Rome was
to find the Greek gods and the heroes and heroines of Greek story throned in
the Vatican. He preferred Niobe to the Mater Dolorosa and Helen to both; the
worship of sorrow must give place, he declared, to the worship of the beautiful.