lk.

"In five minutes," Grimthorpe declares, "all the papers were put down
and everyone had gathered round him to listen and laugh."

At the end of the meal one Yorkshireman after the other begged the
host to follow the lunch with a dinner and invite them to meet the
wonder again. When the party broke up in the small hours they all went
away delighted with Oscar, vowing that no man ever talked more
brilliantly. Grimthorpe cannot remember a single word Oscar said: "It
was all delightful," he declares, "a play of genial humour over every
topic that came up, like sunshine dancing on waves."

The extraordinary thing about Oscar's talent was that he did not
monopolise the conversation: he took the ball of talk wherever it
happened to be at the moment and played with it so humorously that
everyone was soon smiling delightedly. The famous talkers of the past,
Coleridge, Macaulay, Carlyle and the others, were all lecturers: talk
to them was a discourse on a favourite theme, and in ordinary life
they were generally regarded as bores. But at his best Oscar Wilde
never dropped the tone of good society: he could afford to give place
to others; he was equipped at all points: no subject came amiss to
him: he saw everything from a humorous angle, and dazzled one now with
word-wit, now with the very stuff of merriment.

Though he was the life and soul of every social gathering, and in
constant demand, he still read omnivorously, and his mind naturally
occupied itself with high themes.

For some years, the story of Jesus fascinated him and tinged all his
thought. We were talking about Renan's "Life" one day: a wonderful
book he called it, one of the three great biographies of the world,
Plato's dialogues with Socrates as hero and Boswell's "Life of
Johnson" being the other two. It was strange, he thought, that the
greatest man had written the worst biography; Plato made of Socrates a
mere phonograph, into which he talked his own theories: Renan did
better work, and Boswell, the humble loving friend, the least talented
of the three, did better still, though being English, he had to keep
to the surface of things and leave the depths to be divined. Oscar
evidently expected Plato and Renan to have surpassed comparison.

It seemed to me, however, that the illiterate Galilean fishermen had
proved themselves still more consummate painters than Boswell, though
they, too, left a great deal too much to the imagination. Love is the
best of