them with all the solemnity of an apostle. "You have heard, I think, a few of you, of two flowers connected with the æsthetic movement in England, and said (I assure you, erroneously) to be the food of some æsthetic young men. Well, let me tell you that the reason we love the lily and the sunflower, in spite of what Mr. Gilbert may tell you, is not for any vegetable fashion at all. It is because these two lovely flowers are in England the two most perfect models of design, the most naturally adapted for decorative art-the gaudy leonine beauty of the one and the precious loveliness of the other giving to the artist the most entire and perfect joy." This seems insufferable now, and probably was so then, but it is a proof of the perfection with which Wilde played the part his stagemanager had assigned him.

There is much that is charming in the lectures, together with much that is ridiculous, and some of the charm is in the folly. It is a very young knight who fights with a lily on his helmet and a sunflower tied to his spear-point. He has not perceived that the battle is at all difficult. He does not try with slow argument to undermine the enemy's position, but only says, quite cheerfully, that he would like to win. "When I was at Leadville and reflected that all the shining silver that I saw coming from the mines would be made into ugly dollars, it made me sad. It should be made into something more permanent. The golden gates at Florence are as beautiful to-day as when Michael Angelo saw them." He does not ever come to blows, but only says how ready he is for battle. "I have no respect," he quotes from Keats, "for the public, nor for anything in existence but the Eternal Being, the memory of great men and the principle of Beauty." And he shows that the great men are on his side. In one lecture alone he appeals to Goethe, Rousseau, Scott, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Blake, Homer, Dante, Morris, Keats, Chaucer, Hunt, Millais, Rossetti, Burne-Jones, Ruskin, Swinburne, Tennyson, Plato, Aristotle, Leonardo da Vinci, Edgar Allan Poe, Phidias, Michael Angelo, Sophocles, Milton, Fra Angelico, Rubens, Leopardi, Titian, Giorgione, Hugo, Balzac, Shakespeare, Mazzini, Petrarch, Baudelaire, Theocritus, and Gautier.

Indeed, his relation to the æsthetic movement of 1880 is not unlike that of Gautier to the Romantic movement of 1830.

Gautier, like / Ne

Wilde, was born into an army already on the march, and became its most violent champion and exemplar. Gautier's crimson waistcoat balances Wilde's knee-breeches. It would be possible to carry the comparison further, and to

find in Dorian Gray a parallel to "Mademoiselle de Maupin." An identical spirit presided over the writing of both these books. And it would be easy to find in Wilde, at any rate before his release from prison, an aloofness from ordinary life not at all unlike that of the man who exclaimed, "Je suis un homme des temps homériques;-le monde où je vis n'est pas le mien, et je ne comprends rien à la société qui m'entoure." I can imagine Gautier lecturing Americans in just such a manner as Wilde's, and forgetting, but for his loyalty to Hugo, that he had not invented Romanticism.

Wilde's lectures must have amused if they did not edify America. He urged the miners to retain their high boots, their blouses, their sombreros, when, with wealth in their pockets, they should return to the abomination of civilization. Surprised audiences in the towns heard him speak seriously of the stolid ugliness of the horse-hair sofa, and still more seriously of stoves decorated with funeral urns in cast iron. He begged them to realize the importance of a definite scheme of colour in their rooms, and to use other kinds of jugs than one. In his independence of the quarrels of his elders, he talked to them as Ruskin might have talked, of the craftsman and his place in life, and, at the same time, praised the Peacock Room and the room in blue and yellow designed by that American whom Ruskin had accused of throwing a pot of paint in the public's face. On one or two occasions Americans were rude to him. But he spoke with such courtesy and such obvious benevolence that more often they were content to pay their dollars, listen to him attentively, stare at him curiously, and then go to see "Patience."

Wilde took their dollars, left the propagation of beautiful furniture behind him, and went to Paris. He was tired of prophecy and ready to take a new part in a new play. He had

"... touched the tender stops of various quills,
With eager thought warbling his Doric lay,"

and now, seeking the fresh woods of the Bois, and the new pastures of the Champs Élysées, he "twitched his mantle” and threw it away, and with it sunflower, lily, and knee-breeches, preferring a change of costume with his change of part. He dressed now as a man of fashion, a dandy, but not an æsthete. He even cut his hair. But the reputation he had made swelled before him. He came to Paris, after his lecturing, in 1883, but, as late as 1891, for those who had not seen him, Wilde "n'était encore que celui qui fumait des cigarettes à bout d'or et qui se promenait dans les rues une fleur de tournesol à la main." He may even have encouraged this reputation. Stuart Merrill, writing in La Plume, said: "Certains cochers de hansom affirment même l'avoir vu se promener, vers l'heure des chats et des poètes, avec un lys enorme à la main. Oscar Wilde récuse comme à regret leur témoignage en répondant que la légende est souvent plus vraie que la réalité." But in 1883 Wilde had had a surfeit of lilies and sunflowers, and came to Paris as a poet, fashionably dressed, with a number of white vellum volumes of verse to distribute among those whose acquaintance he wished to

secure.

He took rooms at the Hôtel Voltaire, and saw most of the better known people of the day. But, as always, he was not content to leave a part half played. He was in Paris as a poet, and, if he was ready to receive the poet's reward of admiration and homage, he was determined also to earn it, to write poetry, and not to rest on what he had already written. He was, at this time, impressed as much by Balzac's power of work as by his genius, and his biographer tells us that, with a view to imitating it, he wore, while working, a white robe with a hood, like the dressing-gown in which Balzac sat up at night, drinking coffee and creating his fiery world. He also walked