OSCAR WILDE.

Evening Post, Volume XCI, Issue 107, 6 May 1916, Page 11

OSCAR WILDE.

At a time when it required courage to do so, Canon Adderley befriended Oscar Wilde in.his tragic hours, and was with him the day before his release from Reading gaol. Wilde .was often charged with plagiarism, but Canon Adderley is-con-vinced that he must have spent a great deal of time in polishing up the famous paradoxes and epigrams wnich he scattered_ about the salons of the West during his amazing prime. And he rebukes an unnamed person who went about saying he was a "Lion in a den of Daniels," forgetting that Oscar Wilde had said this twenty years before him. The quickest repartee Wilde ever made Canon Adderley believes to have been the result of his boast that there was no subject on which he could not speak at once; someone suggested "The Queen!" "She's not a subject," said Wilde. Wilde was always brilliant even in prison, and was naturally very much excited on the eve of his release, and chattered away with Canon Adderley in exquisite poetry' about . God's beautiful earth and sea in which he was once more going to revel. "But think," _he said, "that I have now got to live for a year on what I used to spend in one week!" He declared that he.had learnt a wonderful thing, called "humility," during his time ;n prison, and then sampled it by speaking of his prose as "the finest prose in tlie English language with the exception of Pater's."-

The Canon believes the treatment of Oscar Wilde to have been wrong-headed. Fancy, he says, treating him in this way at all if we really wanted to use his gifts'for the nation! And he adds, "but, of course, we did not."