t 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')."

I may now try and accentuate a trait or two of these photo