e Adey,
Robbie, Robert Sherard, Frank Harris, and Arthur Clifton have been to me
in giving me comfort, help, affection, sympathy and the like?...

I know that your mother, Lady Queensberry, puts the blame on me. I hear
of it, not from people who know you, but from people who do not know
you, and do not desire to know you. I hear of it often. She talks of the
influence of an elder over a younger man, for instance. It is one of her
favourite attitudes towards the question, as it is always a successful
appeal to popular prejudice and ignorance. I need not ask you what
influence I had over you. You know I had none.

It was one of your frequent boasts that I had none, the only one indeed,
that was well founded. What was there, as a mere matter of fact, in you
that I could influence? Your brain? It was undeveloped. Your
imagination? It was dead. Your heart? It was not yet born. Of all the
people who have ever crossed my life, you were the one, and the only
one, I was unable in any way to influence in any direction.

I waited month after month to hear from you. Even if I had not been
waiting but had shut the doors against you, you should have remembered
that no one can possibly shut the doors against love forever. The unjust
judge in the gospels rises up at length to give a just decision because
justice comes daily knocking at his door: and at night time the friend,
in whose heart there is no real friendship, yields at length to his
friend "because of his importunity." There is no prison in any world
into which love cannot force an entrance. If you did not understand
that, you did not understand anything about love at all....

Write to me with full frankness, about yourself: about your life: your
friends: your occupations: your books. Whatever you have to say for
yourself, say it without fear. Don't write what you don't mean: that is
all. If anything in your letter is false or counterfeit I shall detect
it by the ring at once. It is not for nothing, or to no purpose that in
my lifelong cult of literature, I have made myself,

"Miser of sound and syllable, no less
Than Midas of his coinage."

Remember also that I have yet to know you. Perhaps we have yet to know
each other. For myself, I have but this last thing to say. Do not be
afraid of the past. If people tell you that it is irrevocable, do not
believe them. The past, the present and the future are but one moment in
the sight of God, in whose sight we should t