"The Athenaeum" gave the book the place of honour in its number for the 23rd of
July. The review was severe; but not unjust. "Mr. Wilde's volume of poems," it
says, "may be regarded as the evangel of a new creed. From other gospels it
differs in coming after, instead of before, the cult it seeks to establish.
. . . . We fail to see, however, that the apostle of the new worship has any
distinct message."

The critic then took pains to prove that "nearly all the book is imitative"
. . . . and concluded: "Work of this nature has no element of endurance."

"The Saturday Review "dismissed the book at the end of an article on "Recent
Poetry" as "neither good nor bad." The reviewer objected in the English fashion
to the sensual tone of the poems; but summed up fairly enough: "This book is not
without traces of cleverness, but it is marred everywhere by imitation,
insincerity, and bad taste."

At the same time the notices in "Punch" were extravagantly bitter, while of
course the notices in "The World", mainly written by Oscar's brother, were
extravagantly eulogistic. "Punch" declared that "Mr. Wilde may be aesthetic,
but he is not original . . . . a volume of echoes. . . . . Swinburne and water."

Now what did "The Athenaeum" mean by taking a new book of imitative verse so
seriously and talking of it as the "evangel of a new creed," besides suggesting
that "it comes after the cult," and so forth?

It seems probable that "The Athenaeum" mistook Oscar Wilde for a continuator
of the Pre-Raphaelite movement with the sub-conscious and peculiarly English
suggestion that whatever is "aesthetic" or "artistic" is necessarily weak and
worthless, if not worse.