for a week by Queen Victoria's
death, in January, and was, I think, the only play that survived that
ordeal. Mrs. Patrick Campbell was good enough to allow me to rewrite the
first act for the fiftieth performance, and it ran, if I remember
rightly, some 130 nights. About the twentieth representation I paid
Smithers.

For the first weeks of the run I was bombarded with letters from Oscar,
begging money and demanding money in every tone. He made nothing of the
fact that I had already paid him three times the price agreed upon, and
paid Smithers to boot, and lost through his previous sales of the
scenario whatever little repute the success of the piece might have
brought me. Nine people out of ten believed that Oscar had written the
play and that I had merely lent my name to the production in order to
enable him, as a bankrupt, to receive the money from it. Even men of
letters deceived themselves in this way. George Moore told Bernard Shaw
that he recognised Oscar's hand in the writing again and again, though
Shaw himself was far too keen-witted to be so misled. As a matter of
fact Oscar did not write a word of the play and the characters he
sketched for Smithers and Roberts were altogether different from mine
and were not known to me when I wrote my story.

I have set forth the bare facts of the affair here because Oscar managed
to half-persuade Ross and Turner and other friends that I owed him money
which I would not pay; though Ross had discounted most of his
complaints, even before hearing my side.

Oscar got me over to Paris in September under the pretext that he was
ill; but I found him as well as could be, and anxious merely to get more
money out of me by any means. I put it all down to his poverty. I did
not then know that Ross was giving him L150 a year; that indeed all his
friends had helped him and were helping him with singular generosity,
and I recalled the fact that when he had had money he never showed any
meanness, or any desire to over-reach. Want is a dreadful teacher, and I
did not hold Oscar altogether responsible for his weird attitude to me
personally.

OSCAR'S LAST DAYS!

LETTER FROM ROBERT ROSS TO ----

Dec. 14th, 1900.

On Tuesday, October 9th, I wrote to Oscar, from whom I had not heard for
some time, that I would be in Paris on Thursday, October the 18th, for a
few days, when I hoped to see him. On Thursday, October 11th, I got a
telegram from him as follows:--"Operated on yesterday--c