LATE LONDON SCANDAL.

Taranaki Herald, Volume XLIV, Issue 10327, 7 June 1895, Page 2

LATE LONDON SCANDAL.

MRS WILDE'S POSITION. Mrs Wir.DE is a good deal to be pitied, although she can hardly havo been entirely blind to what waa going on. She is a charming woman— a bit affected, perhaps, and not very bright. Whatever happens she will have her own income, £600 a year, left to her by her father, Horace Lloyd, a Couuty Court judge. That miserable young scapegrace, Lord Alfred Douglas, inherits dubious moral proclivities. His mother, who divorced the Marquis of Queensberry, was the daughter of Alfred Montgomeiy, a famous beau and hon vivant, illegitimate son of the Marquis Wellosley. Most of the persons concerned in the great action have odd ancestors. Nothing finer than Mr Edw.ird Carson's cross-examination of Oscar has been seen in the courts since Coleridge's handling of the Tichborne claimant. The rapid rise and marvellous success of Carson at the Bar is like what one reads in a novel with a barrister for hero. He got a splendid advertisement as Crown Prosecutor under the late Government in tho coercion era, his name becoming very familiar to the public, while the work he had to do was the best possible legal training. Tho almost simultaneous retirement from practice of Frank Lockwood, Lord Russell, and Sir "Bob"' Reid was most fortunate for Carson also ; he indeod has virtually steppod into Lockwood'3 and Russell's position already, and at fortythree years of age bids fair to be leader of tho English Bar before long. His first great brief was iv a sense a political or anti-Radical one, on behalf of tho Evening News and Post, sued for libel by a lowclass demagogue— Havelock Wilson, M.P. Carson's masterly expoiure of Wilson and his Seamen and Firemen's Union made his reputation. lam told that there are a dozen barristers at the Irish Bar quite as capable as Mr Carson, and earning on an average £150 a year. It has been so for centuries. Oscar Wildo'3 eolipso and disappearance, although deserved, will be a loss to the amusable world, in which he had undoubtedly mado a name. A distinct blotch of genius — truo genius — was dis- \ cerniblo in him. There is the authentic story of his looking at hia wife, nursing their eldest boy in her arms, and saying, " Now for the first time I can understand how the figure of tho Madonna and the Child has kept the fiction of Christianity alive for two thousand years." His epigrams were a trick, but often bright enough. — Argus correspondent.