Oscar used often to say that the chief pleasure he had in visiting Rome was to find the Greek gods and the heroes and heroines of Greek story throned in the Vatican.  He preferred Niobe to the Mater Dolorosa and Helen to both; the worship of sorrow must give place, he declared, to the worship of the beautiful.

Another dominant characteristic of the young man may here find its place.

While still at Oxford his tastes—­the bent of his mind, and his temperament—­were beginning to outline his future.  He spent his vacations in Dublin and always called upon his old school friend Edward Sullivan in his rooms at Trinity.  Sullivan relates that when they met Oscar used to be full of his occasional visits to London and could talk of nothing but the impression made upon him by plays and players.  From youth on the theatre drew him irresistibly; he had not only all the vanity of the actor; but what might be called the born dramatist’s love for the varied life of the stage—­its paintings, costumings, rhetoric—­and above all the touch of emphasis natural to it which gives such opportunity for humorous exaggeration.

“I remember him telling me,” Sullivan writes, “about Irving’s ‘Macbeth,’ which made a great impression on him; he was fascinated by it.  He feared, however, that the public might be similarly affected—­a thing which, he declared, would destroy his enjoyment of an extraordinary performance.”  He admired Miss Ellen Terry, too, extravagantly, as he admired Marion Terry, Mrs. Langtry, and Mary Anderson later.

The death of Sir William Wilde put an end to the family life in Dublin, and set the survivors free.  Lady Wilde had lost her husband and her only daughter in Merrion Square:  the house was full of sad memories to her, she was eager to leave it all and settle in London.

The Requiescat in Oscar’s first book of poems was written in memory of this sister who died in her teens, whom he likened to “a ray of sunshine dancing about the house.”  He took his vocation seriously even in youth:  he felt that he should sing his sorrow, give record of whatever happened to him in life.  But he found no new word for his bereavement.

Willie Wilde came over to London and got employment as a journalist and was soon given almost a free hand by the editor of the society paper The World.  With rare unselfishness, or, if you will, with Celtic clannishness, he did a good deal to make Oscar’s name known.  Every clever thing that Oscar said or that could be attributed to him, Willie reported in The World.  This puffing and Oscar’s own uncommon power as a talker; but chiefly perhaps a whispered reputation for strange sins, had thus early begun to form a sort of myth around him.  He was already on the way to becoming a personage; there was a certain curiosity about him, a flutter of interest in whatever he did.  He had published poems in the Trinity College magazine, Kottabos, and elsewhere.  People were beginning to take him at his own valuation as a poet and a wit; and the more readily as that ambition did not clash in any way with their more material strivings.