he was found to be cultivating the acquaintance of youths of low class and doubtful character.  Although this development occurred comparatively late in life, we must hesitate to describe Wilde’s homosexuality as acquired.  If we consider his constitution and his history, it is not difficult to suppose that homosexual germs were present in a latent form from the first, and it may quite well be that Wilde’s inversion was of that kind which is now described as retarded, though still congenital.

As is usual in England, no active efforts were made to implicate Wilde in any criminal charge.  It was his own action, as even he himself seems to have vaguely realized beforehand, which brought the storm about his head.  He was arrested, tried, condemned, and at once there arose a general howl of execration, joined in even by the judge, whose attitude compared unfavorably with the more impartial attitude of the eighteenth century judges in similar cases.  Wilde came out of prison ambitious to retrieve his reputation by the quality of his literary work.  But he left Reading gaol merely to enter a larger and colder prison.  He soon realized that his spirit was broken even more than his health.  He drifted at last to Paris, where he shortly after died, shunned by all but a few of his friends.[92]

In a writer of the first order, Edward Fitzgerald, to whom we owe the immortal and highly individualized version of Omar Khayyam, it is easy to trace an element of homosexuality, though it appears never to have reached full and conscious development.  Fitzgerald was an eccentric person who, though rich and on friendly terms with some of the most distinguished men of his time, was always out of harmony with his environment.  He felt himself called on to marry, very unhappily, a woman whom he had never been in love with and with whom he had nothing in common.  All his affections were for his male friends.  In early life he was devoted to his friend W.K.  Browne, whom he glorified in Euphranor.  “To him Browne was at once Jonathan, Gamaliel, Apollo,—­the friend, the master, the God,—­there was scarcely a limit to his devotion and admiration."[93] On Browne’s premature death Fitzgerald’s heart was empty.  In 1859 at Lowestoft, Fitzgerald, as he wrote to Mrs. Browne, “used to wander about the shore at night longing for some fellow to accost me who might give some promise of filling up a very vacant place in my heart.”  It was then that he met “Posh” (Joseph Fletcher), a fisherman, 6 feet tall, said to be of the best Suffolk type, both in body and character.  Posh reminded Fitzgerald of his dead friend Browne; he made him captain of his lugger, and was thereafter devoted to him.  Posh was, said Fitzgerald, “a man of the finest Saxon type, with a complexion vif, male et flamboyant, blue eyes, a nose less than Roman, more than Greek, and strictly auburn hair that any woman might envy.  Further he was a man of simplicity; of soul, justice