“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 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.

This observer who does not wish his name given, writes: 

“Oscar had a pungent wit, and nearly all the nicknames in the school were given by him.  He was very good on the literary side of scholarship, with a special leaning to poetry....

“We noticed that he always liked to have editions of the classics that were of stately size with large print....  He was more careful in his dress than any other boy.

“He was a wide reader and read very fast indeed; how much he assimilated I never could make out.  He was poor at music.

“We thought him a fair scholar but nothing extraordinary.  However, he startled everyone the last year at school in the classical medal examination, by walking easily away from us all in the viva voce of the Greek play (’The Agamemnon’).”