Page 2 Advertisements Column 3

Auckland Star, Volume XXVIII, Issue 210, 10 September 1897, Page 2

Oscar Wilde is living at Dieppe under the name of Sebastian Melmotte and writing plays. He gained a stone in weight whilst in prison, and seems ia excellent health and spirits. Some of his old set met him at the prison gates and escorted him to the Continent. They were not, however, particularly civilly treated ; in fact, the story goes, Wilde jibed first at one and then at another till they fled. Lord Alfred Douglas wrote " Dear Oscar " a letter, and the recipient tore it up. Amongst Wilde's present friends are one or two good and true men bent on affording him every help. One of these writers in a private letter: " I am not breaking a confidence when I say that Oscar Wilde's hard experience has had this good effect—that ithas strengthened his mind and fixed him in the determination to be truer : to his artistic self in the future. With his abilities he ought to do great and lasting work, and what seemed at first an unnecessarily harsh sentence has probably won back "to literature an intelligence which was wasting itself in indolent luxuriousness. Art will now be all the richer in that this artist has regained possession not merely of his liberty but of himself.'* Smith and Caughey have received 800 bamboo verandah blinds (all sizes) and 50 pieces of China and Japanese mattings Ihese goods are direct from the manufacturers, .and marked at our wall-known low cash prices.—{Advt.)