THE WILDE SCANDAL.
Mrs Wilde is a good deal to be pitied, although she can hardly have been entirely blind to what was 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 County 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 Montgomery, a famous old beau and bon vivant, illegitimate son of the Marquis Wellesley. Most of the persons concerned in the great action have odd ancestors. Nothing finer than Mr Edward 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 the coercion era, his name becoming very familiar to the public, while the work he had to do was the best possible legal training. The almost simultaneous retirement from practice of Frank Lockwood, Lord Russell, and Sir "Bob" Reid was most fortunate for Carson also ; he indeed has virtually stepped into Lockwood's and Russell's position already, and at forty-three years of age bids fair to be leader of the English Bar before long. His first great brief was in a sense a political or antiRadical one, on behalf of the 'Evening News ' and ' Post,' sued for libel by a lowclass demagogue — Havelock Wilson, M.P. Carson's mas'erly exposure of Wilson and his Seanien 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 Wilde's eclipse and disappearance, although deserved, will be a loss to the amusable world, in which he had undoubtedly made a name. A distinct blotch of genuis — true genius— was discernible in him. There is the authentic story of his looking at his wife, nursing their eldest boy in her arms, and saying : "Now for the first time I can understand how the figure of the 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.
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Bibliographic details
Tuapeka Times, Volume XXVII, Issue 4210, 5 June 1895, Page 5
Word Count
413THE WILDE SCANDAL. Tuapeka Times, Volume XXVII, Issue 4210, 5 June 1895, Page 5
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