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 contemporary,
who has since made for himself a high name as a scholar at Trinity, which, while
confirming the general traits sketched by Sir Edward Sullivan, takes somewhat
more notice of certain mental qualities which came later to the fruiting.
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