“Shortly before he started on his first trip to Italy, he came into my rooms in a very striking pair of trousers.  I made some chaffing remark on them, but he begged me in the most serious style of which he was so excellent a master not to jest about them.

“‘They are my Trasimene trousers, and I mean to wear them there.’”

Already his humour was beginning to strike all his acquaintances, and what Sir Edward Sullivan here calls his “puremindedness,” or what I should rather call his peculiar refinement of nature.  No one ever heard Oscar Wilde tell a suggestive story; indeed he always shrank from any gross or crude expression; even his mouth was vowed always to pure beauty.

The Trinity Don whom I have already quoted about Oscar’s school-days sends me a rather severe critical judgment of him as a student.  There is some truth in it, however, for in part at least it was borne out and corroborated by Oscar’s later achievement.  It must be borne in mind that the Don was one of his competitors at Trinity, and a successful one; Oscar’s mind could not limit itself to college tasks and prescribed books.

“When Oscar came to college he did excellently during the first year; he was top of his class in classics; but he did not do so well in the long examinations for a classical scholarship in his second year.  He was placed fifth, which was considered very good, but he was plainly not, the man for the [Greek:  dolichos] (or long struggle), though first-rate for a short examination.”

Oscar himself only completed these spirit-photographs by what he told me of his life at Trinity.

“It was the fascination of Greek letters, and the delight I took in Greek life and thought,” he said to me once, “which made me a scholar.  I got my love of the Greek ideal and my intimate knowledge of the language at Trinity from Mahaffy and Tyrrell; they were Trinity to me; Mahaffy was especially valuable to me at that time.  Though not so good a scholar as Tyrrell, he had been in Greece, had lived there and saturated himself with Greek thought and Greek feeling.  Besides he took deliberately the artistic standpoint towards everything, which was coming more and more to be my standpoint.  He was a delightful talker, too, a really great talker in a certain way—­an artist in vivid words and eloquent pauses.  Tyrrell, too, was very kind to me—­intensely sympathetic and crammed with knowledge.  If he had known less he would have been a poet.  Learning is a sad handicap, Frank, an appalling handicap,” and he laughed irresistibly.

“What were the students like in Dublin?” I asked.  “Did you make friends with any of them?”

“They were worse even than the boys at Portora,” he replied; “they thought of nothing but cricket and football, running and jumping; and they varied these intellectual exercises with bouts of fighting and drinking.  If they had any souls they diverted them with coarse amours among barmaids and the women of the streets; they were simply awful.  Sexual vice is even coarser and more loathsome in Ireland than it is in England:—­