tempt him, and he reveals to her the secret of the Love of God.
She immediately becomes a Christian, and is murdered by robbers; Honorius
the hermit goes back to Alexandria to pursue a life of pleasure. Two
other similar plays Wilde invented in prison, Ahab and Isabel and
Pharaoh; he would never write them down, though often importuned to do
so. Pharaoh was intensely dramatic and perhaps more original than any of
the group. None of these works must be confused with the manuscripts
stolen from 16 Tite Street in 1895--namely the enlarged version of Mr. W.
H., the completed form of A Florentine Tragedy, and The Duchess of Padua
(which existing in a prompt copy was of less importance than the others);
nor with The Cardinal of Arragon, the manuscript of which I never saw. I
scarcely think it ever existed, though Wilde used to recite proposed
passages for it.

In regard to printing the lectures I have felt some diffidence: the
majority of them were delivered from notes, and the same lectures were
repeated in different towns in England and America. The reports of them
in the papers are never trustworthy; they are often grotesque travesties,
like the reports of after-dinner speeches in the London press of today. I
have included only those lectures of which I possess or could obtain
manuscript.

The aim of this edition has been completeness; and it is complete so far
as human effort can make it; but besides the lost manuscripts there must
be buried in the contemporary press many anonymous reviews which I have
failed to identify. The remaining contents of this book do not call for
further comment, other than a reminder that Wilde would hardly have
consented to their republication. But owing to the number of anonymous
works wrongly attributed to him, chiefly in America, and spurious works
published in his name, I found it necessary to violate the laws of
friendship by rejecting nothing I knew to be authentic. It will be seen
on reference to the letters on The Ethics of Journalism that Wilde's name
appearing at the end of poems and articles was not always a proof of
authenticity even in his lifetime.

Of the few letters Wilde wrote to the press, those addressed to Whistler
I have included with greater misgiving than anything else in this volume.
They do not seem to me more amusing than those to which they were the
intended rejoinders. But the dates are significant. Wilde was at one
time always accused of plagiarising h