found no new word for his bereavement.

Willie Wilde came over to London and got employment as a journalist and was
soon given almost a free hand by the editor of the society paper "The World".
With rare unselfishness, or, if you will, with Celtic clannishness, he did a
good deal to make Oscar's name known. Every clever thing that Oscar said or
that could be attributed to him, Willie reported in "The World". This puffing
and Oscar's own uncommon power as a talker; but chiefly perhaps a whispered
reputation for strange sins, had thus early begun to form a sort of myth around
him. He was already on the way to becoming a personage; there was a certain
curiosity about him, a flutter of interest in whatever he did. He had published
poems in the Trinity College magazine, "Kottabos", and elsewhere. People were
beginning to take him at his own valuation as a poet and a wit; and the more
readily as that ambition did not clash in any way with their more material
strivings.

The time had now come for Oscar to conquer London as he had conquered Oxford.
He had finished the first class in the great World-School and was eager to try
the next, where his mistakes would be his only tutors and his desires his
taskmasters. His University successes flattered him with the belief that he
would go from triumph to triumph and be the exception proving the rule that
the victor in the academic lists seldom repeats his victories on the battlefield
of life.

It is not sufficiently understood that the learning of Latin and Greek and
the forming of expensive habits at others' cost are a positive disability and
handicap in the rough-and-tumble tussle of the great city, where greed and
unscrupulous resolution rule, and where there are few prizes for feats of memory
or taste in words. When the graduate wins in life he wins as a rule in spite of
his so-called education and not because of it.