as friendly with him all through as anybody, though his junior in
class by a year....
"Willie Wilde was never very familiar with him, treating him always,
in those days, as a younger brother....
"When in the head class together, we with two other boys were in the
town of Enniskillen one afternoon, and formed part of an audience who
were listening to a street orator. One of us, for the fun of the
thing, got near the speaker and with a stick knocked his hat off and
then ran for home followed by the other three. Several of the
listeners, resenting the impertinence, gave chase, and Oscar in his
hurry collided with an aged cripple and threw him down--a fact which
was duly reported to the boys when we got safely back. Oscar was
afterwards heard telling how he found his way barred by an angry giant
with whom he fought through many rounds and whom he eventually left
for dead in the road after accomplishing prodigies of valour on his
redoubtable opponent. Romantic imagination was strong in him even in
those schoolboy days; but there was always something in his telling of
such a tale to suggest that he felt his hearers were not really being
taken in; it was merely the romancing indulged in so humorously by the
two principal male characters in 'The Importance of Being Earnest.'...
"He never took any interest in mathematics either at school or
college. He laughed at science and never had a good word for a
mathematical or science master, but there was nothing spiteful or
malignant in anything he said against them; or indeed against anybody.
"The romances that impressed him most when at school were Disraeli's
novels. He spoke slightingly of Dickens as a novelist....
"The classics absorbed almost his whole attention in his later school
days, and the flowing beauty of his oral translations in class,
whether of Thucydides, Plato or Virgil, was a thing not easily to be
forgotten."
This photograph, so to speak, of Oscar as a schoolboy is astonishingly
clear and lifelike; but I have another portrait of him from another
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