The gods are strange.  It is not our vices only they make instruments to scourge us.  They bring us to ruin through what in us is good, gentle, humane, loving.  But for my pity and affection for you and yours, I would not now be weeping in this terrible place.

Of course, I discern in all our relations, not destiny merely, but Doom—­Doom that walks always swiftly, because she goes to the shedding of blood.  Through your father you come of a race, marriage with whom is horrible, friendship fatal, and that lays violent hands either on its own life, or on the lives of others.

In every little circumstance in which the ways of our lives met, in every point of great or seemingly trivial import in which you came to me for pleasure or help, in the small chances, the slight accidents that look, in their relation to life, to be no more than the dust that dances in a beam, or the leaf that flutters from a tree, ruin followed like the echo of a bitter cry, or the shadow that hunts with the beast of prey.

Our friendship really begins with your begging me, in a most pathetic and charming letter, to assist you in a position appalling to anyone, doubly so to a young man at Oxford.  I do so, and ultimately, through your using my name as your friend with Sir George Lewis I begin to lose his esteem and friendship, a friendship of fifteen years’ standing.  When I was deprived of his advice and help and regard, I was deprived of the one great safeguard of my life.  You send me a very nice poem of the undergraduate school of verse for my approval.  I reply by a letter of fantastic literary conceits; I compare you to Hylas, or Hyacinth, Jonquil or Narcissus, or some one whom the Great God of Poetry favoured, and honoured with his love.  The letter is like a passage from one of Shakespeare’s sonnets transposed to a minor key.

It was, let me say frankly, the sort of letter I would, in a happy, if wilful moment, have written to any graceful young man of either university who had sent me a poem of his own making, certain that he would have sufficient wit, or culture, to interpret rightly its fantastic phrases.  Look at the history of that letter!  It passes from you into the hands of a loathsome companion[51], from him to a gang of blackmailers, copies of it are sent about London to my friends, and to the manager[52] of the theatre where my work is being performed, every construction but the right one is put on it, society is thrilled with the absurd rumours that I have had to pay a high sum of money for having written an infamous letter to you; this forms the basis of your father’s worst attack.

I produce the original letter myself in court to show what it really is; it is denounced by your father’s counsel as a revolting and insidious attempt to corrupt innocence; ultimately it forms part of a criminal charge; the crown takes it up; the judge sums up on it with little learning and much morality; I go to prison for it at last.  That is the result of writing you a charming letter.