, of course. I thought it was
hopeless and made no effort of any kind. On Saturday afternoon at five
o'clock H--- and I went to have tea at the Hotel de l'Europe. Suddenly,
as I was eating buttered toast, a man--or what seemed to be one--dressed
like a hotel porter entered and asked me would I like to see the Pope on
Easter Day. I bowed my head humbly and said "Non sum dignus," or words
to that effect. He at once produced a ticket!

When I tell you that his countenance was of supernatural ugliness, and
that the price of the ticket was thirty pieces of silver, I need say no
more.

An equally curious thing is that whenever I pass the hotel, which I do
constantly, I see the same man. Scientists call that phenomenon an
obsession of the visual nerve. You and I know better.

On the afternoon of Easter Day I heard Vespers at the Lateran: music
quite lovely. At the close, a Bishop in red, and with red gloves--such
as Pater talks of in _Gaston de Latour_--came out on the balcony and
showed us the Relics. He was swarthy, and wore a yellow mitre. A
sinister mediaeval man, but superbly Gothic, just like the bishops carved
on stalls or on portals: and when one thinks that once people mocked at
stained-glass attitudes! they are the only attitudes for the clothes. The
sight of the Bishop, whom I watched with fascination, filled me with the
great sense of the realism of Gothic art. Neither in Greek art nor in
Gothic art is there any pose. Posing was invented by bad
portrait-painters; and the first person who posed was a stock-broker, and
he has gone on posing ever since.

I send you a photograph I took on Palm Sunday at Palermo. Do send me
some of yours, and love me always, and try to read this letter.

Kindest regards to your dear mother.

Always,

OSCAR.

--_Letter to Robert Ross_.

FOOTNOTES

{1} "The Influence of Pater and Matthew Arnold in the Prose-Writings of
Oscar Wilde," by Ernst Bendz. London: H. Grevel & Co., 1914.

{2} "The Eighteen Nineties: A Review of Art and Idea at the Close of the
Nineteenth Century," by Holbrook Jackson. London: Grant Richards Ltd.,
1913.

{3} Mortimer Menpes.

{4} M. Constant Trop-Hardy, died at Berneval, March 2, 1898.

{5} Hartwell de la Garde Grissell, a Papal Chamberlain.

***END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SELECTED PROSE OF OSCAR WILDE***

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